You make the important point that marketing is the key. This means those with marketing clout will likely benefit the most from this. If you consider higher-order effects beyond the simple ones envisioned in the proposal, it’s not so clear to me the endgame is beneficial to Curve.
Why couldn’t an entity with a huge raise to gain marketing clout, issue their own token, say “CLOUT”, and add it as rewards to their pools? Any pool with creator fees can then be copied with slightly less creator fees + CLOUT tokens. Since marketing is the key to driving liquidity, their pools would be the dominant ones.
Ironically, since their pools would be receiving volume, they would probably not have an issue with getting CRV emissions, further reinforcing their dominance.
Now you might be wondering, why is this bad? If CLOUT drives liquidity + volume to their pools, isn’t this good?
I think the thing the OP forgot (and you may be) is that LPs are taking the biggest risks here, and sometimes they are considerable. Tail risks should not be underestimated. Anything that takes away from LP fees is skewing the risk-reward ratio unfavorably to those taking the real risks. It’s ok for the DAO to get fees (although arguably the system never envisioned the veCRV and LP separation that resulted from Convex etc) because the DAO aren’t rent-seekers but worker-owners of the protocol.
In my scenario, CLOUT is a pure rent-seeker. The market is only willing to pay X amount of fees, and CLOUT is siphoning that way from the ones with actual skin in the game. Someone could try to create a fairer pool but they wouldn’t be able to charge more fees. They’d have to charge at most the same fees, which results in:
- they gain the market share, which means there was no point to creator fees
- they lose market share, which means the rent-seekers win over LPs
This is actually the crux of the matter. What value does CLOUT add to the system?
Some people have suggested that CLOUT may employ R&D to optimize the pool. Ok sure, they can. But they won’t. Because that loses from a very simple game-theoretic argument.
Suppose another entity BRAIN decides to optimize pools for the creator fees. They also have a certain amount of marketing spend. Let’s say their total spend is X + Y, where X goes to R&D and Y goes to marketing. CLOUT counters with their own pool with copied parameters, where they spend 0 for R&D and X/2 + Y for their marketing spend. Since marketing determines the winner, they win with less total spend. BRAIN can’t win because every “innovation” they come up with is copied by CLOUT immediately.
The higher-order effect here is that in this system there is no point to innovating, only to marketing. This shouldn’t be that hard to believe for those that have been in crypto for a few years!
Is this what we want?