First of all, a lot of good points, and I think Swiss Stake’s contributions are immeasurable and should continue to be funded, including in this grant. I do want to take a moment to consider Uniswap Fnd + Uniswap Lab’s business model though and compare and contrast here, because I think it would be useful.
Uniswap as it stands imo is pivoting to a dual equity world, where Uniswap v4 is a a protocol designed to service boutique Market Makers, letting them build their own unique version of the protocol to trade on, then through UniswapX these pools can be aggregated into one system, and served to customers via the wallet and UI, both of which Uniswap Labs will take a cut on. In this sense the Uniswap Protocol (v4 and hooks specifically) is way for MMs to sell their liquidity, and UniswapX matches this with the distribution of Uniswap Labs who simply just take a cut for providing orderflow.
What direction do you see Curve taking for monetization? Do you see a world where CRV fee share is a sustainable source of funding, or do you eventually think dual equity / monetization schemes will be necessary like Uniswap? And at current supply and holdings of CRV, do you think it will ever be reasonable given APRs for Stake Swiss to be fully funded by CRV staking rewards or similar?
I think, the first step could be to stake CRV at one or several wrappers (like cvxCRV) to earn fees. We need to make crvUSD autoscale (now it doesn’t) by having staked crvUSD, for example, and sharing the sweet borrow rate with people who want to earn it. That’d make the system scale and make crvUSD producing much more fees.
Would be nice to take it to the level where fees earned would be enough to operate forever. Not UI fees, but some of protocol fees which can get accessed by those same CRV.
Without seeing a clear enough roadmap and detailed fund expenditure, I will use 30 million+ CRV to vote against it.
22 million CRV is needed per year, which is a huge amount of money. With 25 employees, the average annual salary of one employee is about 300,000 US dollars, which is unimaginable.
Curve is currently a stable protocol. If there is no new roadmap, I think 2 million CRV expenditure/year is good.
I will not be voting for this proposal, as currently written.
I believe that the core team makes valuable contributions to Curve, and that funding of further development is a valid use of the community fund; however, there needs to be control and accountability on how these funds are spent.
As written, this proposal hands over 21mil CRV (vested over one year) to an ambiguous individual or group of people, with no control on how it is spent - just an obligation to produce summarized bi-annual reports after the fact. This is unacceptable, and disrespectful to veCRV holders.
I will vote “yes” to a modified proposal that clearly defines the roadmap for the spending of these community fund tokens, and a progressive release of the tokens upon completion of goals.
Being honest, as written, this proposal really disappoints me. No suprise how it’s currently being recieved by the community.
As much as I wanted to write it as a plan, laywers gave a big pushback on describing any future plans in the proposal. That being said, I would ask them if this can formulated differently so that the proposal includes what the funds could go for.
As for accountability, DAO does have a control over whether to pause the vesting or not, if the vote is created pausable.
Reviewing the AAVE proposal cited in an earlier comment, they don’t seem to have the same convenient “lawyers said we can’t do it” excuse for the appropriate level of transparent in their funding proposal.
Read the first comment in that AAVE proposal:
“This is what treasury management is about. This ARFC is transparent with all costs, holdings and actions need to be done to pay for everything and still be solvent and have a great runway for the DAO.”
That encapsulates everything that this proposal is lacking.
I will definitely try to convince lawyers to make it possible to say more than what is in the description. Because to me personally it doesn’t make sense to not write in a grant proposal what it is going for
Happy to hear you say that. Would have been better to see this diligence take place before the proposal was released. As written, i consider this to be a “bad look” to the rest of the market.
Thanks for your replies, and this is all i will comment on the proposal as currently written.
Dear @michwill
Thanks for your work and your commitment for Curve, you have done such great job !!
Without your work, Curve won’t be a such sucessfull project.
However if you want to establish Curve as a DAO, you should
1 propose a roadmap, milestones and cost associated with it
2 propose a Curve DAO governance process
1 Curve is evolving because you ask for funding.
Dev must be paid, however a clear vision of the cost and of the usage of funds should be provided.
2 I think that the startup DAO should evolve in a more decentralized DAO.
For Governance process, I think that Curve should insprire from Aave
Actually there is a dev roadmap, which is unknown from the DAO member.
There are several improvement proposal, that are not studied or answered.
Moreover some decision from the team might affect the DAO, and this decisions should be submited to the DAO (if people want that strategic decision taken by the DAO and voted)
e.g. friendly fork such has
which fork CurvecrvUSD on L2
Bitodrome on Bitcoin L2, prevent the launch of Curve on Bitcoin L2
This "friendly " fork remove fees from Curve DAO, with no business or token distrubition to veCRV holder.
Please don’t take it to personnally but as a proposal to improve the DAO, if you want full support from your community, you liquidity provider, your users.
It is hard to accept that millions of dollars are needed for code audits. Can’t you control costs in this area? With a team of more than 20 people and millions of dollars in code audits per year, it is necessary to tell the community what new features Curve will have and how much revenue and expectations it can bring.
I don’t accept this either. I will be voting NO. We need a clear roadmap, we need to know how much it goes where and why. Also, I strongly disagree with staking on other protocols. It’ll just take rewards away from the people who stake.
Another point is the community found itself. Is Swiss Stake going to pay with it’s own founds and aid users if there’s going to be another hack? Those founds are there with a reason. To aid the community! That’s why it’s called Community Found and not Development Found.
Last but not least, like @Cryptoinvest mentioned, I don’t understand the crvUSD fork on L2. That should be generating fees for veCRV holders not for a different project. I also disliked fraxlend as collateral from the start without a vote (To this day I believe that’s what ruined crvUSD opening). I know that “deals” like these probably provided founds for the developers (on the background) and we must know if this grant will stop that in the future.
Also, I haven’t seen development like it was promised and that’s also going to be an issues. No UI to create new markets on Lammalend, no LP tokens as collateral to mint new crvUSD, etc.
Audits do cost millions of dollars, yes! I personally paid for some audits for Vyper, too, so in total it does come to those numbers (e.g. few hundred K per audit, multiple audits per year). And they are critically needed with anything new
Deployments of new projects are not something which DAO does. They are given to the DAO, and after that DAO does whatever it wants with it.
DAO controls only what is on-chain. This includes CRV funds.
However, I think that maybe not roadmap, but at least things which grant goes on do make sense. Trying to convince lawyers: it’s ridiculous when grant proposal cannot list those
Thank you for the considerable contribution to DeFi. The protocol is a core pillar of the ecosystem, and needless to say, we are big fans.
I’m one of the members of the CVX5 team, and we’ve donated time to helping protocols onboard (like PYUSD), as well help generate a light onboarding manual to navigate the complexities of Curve. In short, we are committed to the success of Curve and its ecosystem.
Summary:
1 year funding for Swiss Stake AG, company building Curve
Request: 21,000,000 CRV [at market rate today of $.30, this $6,300,000 annual burn]
Metrics: (Token Terminal)
Annualized Revenue: ~$40M
Trading Fees
crvUSD Fees
Burn / Revenue = 15.75%
An avg SaaS company’s operating expense may be about 60% of revenue
Funding for:
Support ongoing development and operational costs associated with building and maintaining the Curve platform.
Software development, infrastructure costs, and other operational expenses necessary for the platform’s growth and maintenance.
Audits
Arguments against the proposal:
Lack of Specificity
Undefined Use of Funds
Missing Performance Metrics
Duration is Unclear
As this is a proposal, it would be beneficial to provide guidance and clarity on what’s missing
*Detailed Financial Breakdown: A comprehensive financial breakdown of the requested funds, including exact amounts in both CRV tokens and USD, would provide clarity and help assess the proposal’s feasibility.
*Specific Allocation of Funds: Detailed information on how the funds will be allocated across different operational areas would improve transparency and accountability.
*Clear Performance Metrics: Establishing specific performance metrics or milestones would allow investors to track progress and evaluate the success of the funded initiatives. Ie; what are growth opportunities and initiatives? How does Curve generate more fees? How does it get there?
*Defined Timeline: A clear timeline for the use of funds and expected outcomes would help investors understand the proposal’s long-term viability and impact.
Sustainability
The request for funding requests roughly ~50% of the community fund. This is an extreme concern around sustainability for the ecosystem and growth initiatives overall.
There isn’t a clear answer on what targets for fee generation for crvUSD, what growth metrics are and a path for sustainability.
Conclusion
Curve Finance is a core pillar of the ecosystem, and the market has finally concluded significant chapter in FUD. Without operational clarity on many of the items listed above, kicking the can down the road doesn’t seem plausible.
I hope the Curve team, specifically the Operational Leads, iterates on the funding request. One beneficial change would be the following:
Break the request into quarterly vs annual, and attach deliverables
Price in crvUSD (stable) vs. CRV (volatile asset) - as market conditions improve, the funding would be for less CRV which may positively impact the community fund level overall. Obviously, the opposite is true in negative conditions.
Bonus: If it’s useful, we would love to contribute and help with clarity on drafting the funding request.
We, too, pay for a lot of audits and can second that audits do indeed cost quite a bit. Can easily be in millions for amount of code Swiss Stake AG is getting audited regularly.
I think, the first step could be to stake CRV at one or several wrappers (like cvxCRV) to earn fees
personally don’t think this makes the most sense here.
I recognize the usefulness of a wrapper in order to perform second order operations, but ~14.5% of CRV incentives are being used to support the price of Liquid Ve Tokens, and not sure if increasing those costs as a second order effect is helpful.
Perhaps directly selling CRV into these Bribes could be useful.
This would enable a period where other pools are able to capture more incentives, though “inflation” hits market the grant funds are already exposed to hitting market.
The captured bribes could be rolled into price support pools such as TriCRV at first, but maybe with the CRV component replaced by a pool of “restaked” Liquid veCRV wrappers that can capture staked revenue to empower the pool while adding CRV price support and generating revenue.
It also enables Swiss Stake AG to be less dependent on CRV price to support operations going forward.
If this was all locked as veCRV or an autocompounding liquid locker what sort of fees or APY would be needed to sustainably fund development into the future?
The list of innovations and novel mechanisms from the Swiss Stake cohort quite literally shaped defi as we know it.
It is necessary to support such important work.
Although, during this time, there have also been many spectacular failures of business decisions, an inability to work with large shareholders, and capital and reputational destruction from the liquidation event inflicted on every team and protocol that calls Curve home.
Many of these moments were wholly avoidable and self-inflicted.
When a version of this proposal passes, we hope that a more well-rounded entity is formed that is able to give Mich and his team the space to focus, innovate and iterate and continue to push defi forward (out of the tidal pool and into the ocean) — while, at the same time, letting a cohort of business-minded people grow the protocol, the talent pool, onboard new users and use-cases, and collaborate with major stakeholders.