I would like to open a dialog regarding an alternative option to locking CRV. Many investors have no interest in our governance protocol, and participating in the future of Curve.fi, they are simply here to make money. While this doesn’t necessarily help us in the short term, how could it benefit us in the long term?
Many users have asked where they can earn rewards for “staking” their CRV. While a great option is locking it to boost pool rewards, vote, and earn fees, what if we created one more option that could potentially increase not only liquidity, but facilitate in reducing the amount of selling pressure put on CRV?
I believe one option, would be to allow users to take their LP tokens, from depositing liquidity into any one or several of available pools (USDNcrv, 3CRV, etc) and stake it with CRV in an additional “profit sharing” pool. The rewards would be much lower (3-15%), but would be an alternative to vote locking CRV for those that will most likely will never do so. It could create interest in not only providing liquidity to Curve.fi, but also could lead to market buying of CRV to stake in this pool.
By presenting an alternative option for users to hold and stake CRV, we could see increased traffic on the platform by encouraging LP’s to hold CRV for additional reduced rewards.
This is a great idea, and very worthy of discussion.
Let me support the premise that, “Many investors have no interest in our governance protocol, and participating in the future of Curve.fi, they are simply here to make money.”
I see 2911 users who have locked their CRV and 661 who have more than the 2500 veCRV required to submit a proposal.
My observations are that paid on-chain votes do have lower turnouts. But even the unpaid signal/polls have pretty low turnouts considered against the number of veCRV holders.
So yes, I agree that there are a lot of veCRV holders that don’t much care about governance.
Regarding the idea of a CRV pool, I agree that it’s important and necessary. And I agree that creating additional reasons for people to hold CRV will help to boost its price over time.
One question that I have is what the pool would be. It could be a borrowing/lending operation along the lines of Aave/Compound/Cream OR it could be an exchange/staking pool similar to Uniswap/Sushiswap.
For context, in the borrowing/lending category, we see 50-60% as the deposit yield on Cream, with no locking.
In terms of staking, we’re seeing much higher yields than that on the usecrv page as incentive for locking. It was around 80% before the Harvest event. But that 80% is on a declining balance of veCRV, so it would be more like half that on locked CRV, which makes the Cream yield look attractive.
In their own tokens, Pickle and Harvest say that the yields on their own tokens are north of 100%. I wonder how similar what you’re suggesting is to their farms.
I would hope we could figure out ways to target yields higher than 3-15%.
