Whitelist Pickle for locking up CRV for boosted rewards and voting.
Abstract:
Pickle’s Curve Strategy for their vaults have been audited by MixBytes. The Curve team has taken a preliminary look at this audit report and the Pickle Curve Strategy smart contract and deemed it ready for whitelisting to be voted on.
Motivation:
The Pickle protocol already facilitates the staking of tens of millions of dollars worth of tokens supplied to the Curve Finance protocol. The CRV rewards currently earned by these gauge deposits is immediately sold.
Specs (as per the Pickle team):
buying and vote-locking approximately 550,000 CRV
diverting 25% of CRV rewards to be locked with the end goal of obtaining the maximum 2.5x boost within 20 weeks
For:
By approving whitelisting, the Pickle protocol can lock up a portion of the rewarded CRV to participate in governance.
Against:
By approving whitelisting, the Pickle protocol can get boosted returns on CRV and this will give more CRV to Pickle LPs.
I mentioned this in telegram, but there is no reason for the curve community to vote for this.
All these platforms do is dump crv to reward their own users and boost the value of their protocol not curve’s.
Yes they will lock up a portion, but after they obtain the full 2.5x boost they will stop. This does not benefit curve and actually harms it by causing more sell pressure on CRV in turn lowering the price of the token and the incentives of people to pool on curve.
This is a clear “no” vote for me. Open to hearing reasons why you are voting yes.
Don’t let fear of “dumping” drive your decision. there would be a lockup % and governance participation which is a positive. Bringing the pickle community into curve creates opportunity. For one, we are more interested in curve as a whole. short-term profit is tempered with longer term interest in growth of the curve platform. We will be participating in governance and the longer term vision of both curve and pickle. The goal is a mutually beneficial outcome for both platforms. I say this as a pickle community member and I look forward to working with you here at curve as well. I invite all of you to join the pickle discord and get to know us as well.
There is already interest in curve from pickle due to their pjars and the scrv pjar. The lock up % only applies for the first 20 weeks until they reach 2.5x boost (as it mentions in the proposal) so they have more rewards to dump on the market and boost the value of their own protocol by potentially hurting the curve protocol. They also benefit further by charging users withdrawal fees on this, which again benefits pickle and not curve.
The only reason you stated that is a positive is “participating in governance.”
I don’t see how this is mutually beneficial. It mainly serves to boost the value of pickle at the expense of curve. I’m open minded and willing to here how curve benefits, but the reasons you stated are very wishy-washy and not a strong reason to support it.
If you could lay out the benefits, I am willingly to change my mind.
Edit: I guess the “benefit” is they will do this anyway so we might as well whitelist them, but I think my criticisms of pickle are justified.
I’ve been an LP with Curve for a while, but this is my first time actively participating in governance, so please bear with me if I am a bit longwinded…
As an investor in both Curve and Pickle, here’s why I think whitelisting Pickle makes sense:
Pickle is proposing to make a substantial upfront investment, constituting the bulk of their current Treasury funds. To do this as a fledgling project is the truest indication of the potential they see in a Curve-Pickle partnership.
With the proposed 25% lockup of future CRV earned, current APYs will only increase marginally for Pickle users until max boost is achieved after 20 weeks. The amount of CRV being sold by Pickle in their auto-compounding Jars will not increase drastically. Furthermore, 20 weeks is a lifetime in crypto.
Pickle’s goal is to use the whitelisting and consequent boost as a launchpad for new products and strategies that will drive fresh TVL to Curve. If successful, this in turn will lead to more CRV being locked with us and more ‘skin in the game’ for Pickle stakeholders.
Pickle intends to actively participate in Curve governance, and there is already a proposal in the works to create a working group specifically tasked with discussing and deciding on how to vote on different Curve proposals. The working group will comprise at least one member of the multi-sig key holders who will be tasked with casting the vote on Curve proposals on behalf of Pickle Finance.
Overall, I see this partnership opportunity as a WIN-WIN. Voted in favor.
The only reason for voting “no” so far has been the fear of “dumping”. Here’s what should be considered when thinking about pickle specifically. The community and the core team. For those in the curve community who are also part of pickle, I have no doubt your vote will be in favor. You know pickle is about growth and long-term investment VS exclusively focusing on short term gains. I would argue what is truly special about DeFi are the communities and in pickle you will find a very strong community which focuses on long-term vision. So while there are always shorter-term farming opps, those in the curve community who truly care about the platform and what the future holds, you will find like-minded community members at pickle.
Having us actively involved in curve governance will be a big win for curve and for pickle. What we would build together in turn will have an impact on the DeFi space as whole. Anyway, just my two pickles. Regardless of outcome, thank you for the consideration and the opportunity to work with you all.
Signal voting does not work for me for some unknown reason but I am in favor and will vote for it once it comes time to do so on ledger.
Adding
We need partnerships with solid projects like Pickle to get the growth we need to be successful. We should not have such “fear” of dumping since it is already happening that we should not take any opportunity to work with others to change that pattern. A project is only as strong as its community and the outside partners (allies) it works with especially when they are willing to invest in Curve at their own risk/expense. We need growth and should not turn away this opportunity.
I would vote Yes. The whole point of the boost system is to lock up Curve. The more whales, pools and vaults compete for the boosties, the more efficient that mechanism becomes. The top “no”-voter seems to be a dumping LP whale. Probably doesn’t want to have to lock up more CRV for boosting.
I’d just like to add that the Curve team and community has done a fantastic job of creating the dominant player in the stablecoin arena. It’s really not possible to trade large size anywhere else without massive slippage.
However, if Curve wants to remain the backbone of the stablecoin space, we as a community must embrace strategic partnerships and seek to foster innovation in DeFi, not stifle it
The whole concept of whitelisting should be to safeguard the SAFETY of the Curve ecosystem by insisting on audited code etc. It should not be a blunt instrument used to build moats or favor one platform over another, as that goes against the very essence of DeFi.
I highly recommend that Curve members do their own due diligence, and you will quickly come to realize that Pickle isn’t your regular Farm o’ the Week.
I’ve been interacting a bit with the pickle community, and it’s def one of the better ones in this sort of environment.
That being said my biggest fear is that by having a layer between CRV and the dao this will lead to less activity in governance, which then lead to less energy spent contributing to keeping Curve great. Most of what I’ve learned about Curve has been playing around with the UI, following the telegram and the discussions here. So I definitely miss some discussion on how Pickle want to be a contributor outside of LPing.
With all this being said, I’m mostly positive on the proposal and def agree with yyctrader above, but please Pickle guys, please come discuss some governance.
Edit: Just wanna add that Harvest is close (if not finished) to being audited to, they will obv want to be whitelisted. They have more than 500mill TVL and would be a significant voter, so the sooner we get this discussion going the better.
#4 Pickle intends to actively participate in Curve governance, and there is already a proposal in the works to create a working group specifically tasked with discussing and deciding on how to vote on different Curve proposals. The working group will comprise at least one member of the multi-sig key holders who will be tasked with casting the vote on Curve proposals on behalf of Pickle Finance.
Also as the relationship builds between pickle and curve, members such as myself are brought into the curve discussion (I recently joined the curve telegram chat). Granted I have been interacting with curve and its UI for some time.
That was fast :). Good to hear and sorry for being sloppy and missing this. Still probably room for more discusssion here, although I obviously understand not every detail is set in stone quite yet :).
I would just like to clarify. My position is not based purely on “dumping.” Feels a bit disingenious to suggest that.
I am also a previous pickle holder, and actually participate in that community here and there also.
My position is that this doesn’t really benefit curve and mainly benefits pickle. Pickle and the community believe that pjar strategy is where the value of pickle truly lies and as such will implement more pjars as time goes on.
Once the curve Apy reduces and more pjars are added there will be limited interest in curve from the pickle community.
Additionally, by giving users a platform to extract the maximum apy from curve without locking up their own tokens it does a disservice to the curve platform and may hinder future interactions with curve governance. Furthermore, with pjars having a withdrawal fee, pickle extracts value from the curve protocol that benefits pickle and not curve.
And in terms of the “dumping,” yes the more that use pickle the more sell pressure there will be on the crv token and will subsequently reduce the incentives of future and current curve LPs.
That being said, I agree with some comments here and think the pickle community is great.
I COMPLETELY agree with this. There seems to be a misconception that this type of vote is meant to act on how we “feel” about the app requesting a whitelist, when the only thing that matters is that the contract cannot do something malicious. Unless anyone has a technical reason for how the pickle contract can lead to abuse, please bring that to the discussion! Otherwise for the sake of DeFi, it’s obviously a yes vote.
Ok so I can can see why you would come to the conclusion that this is good for pickle and bad for Curve. After all, they will get a bigger piece of the CRV inflation out of this deal and they will definitely use it to dump and give their LPs a better APY.
Long term, things look a bit different. As more farming operations like Pickle are competing to give their LPs prime APY, it becomes more difficult to achieve full boost. We haven’t seen this play out yet, and I think it’s more a matter of time and Curve’s continued ability to draw liquidity and volume to its platform. The best thing for Curve is to encourage as many LP partners as possible to on board, like yearn, like pickle, because it’s good for their LPs and it’s good for us to saturate the CRV tokenomics with as much competition as possible.
At the end of the day, we don’t accrue fundamental value to CRV by putting up a wall and telling people we don’t want their business. We want more people locking because locked tokens are a stake in the future of Curve. It basically forces you to make an effort to help it succeed, unless you don’t mind your stake becoming worthless. Having something at stake is worth the cost of extra CRV inflation, which is why it was built into the tokenomics.
(Disclaimer: I use curve a lot and I’ve never used pickle)
It’s worth mentioning that we would potentially lock up and retain a lot more CRV once fee sharing is turned on. The Curve team has mentioned to us that this is likely to happen soon. The numbers proposed above don’t account for this.
In fact, if fee sharing is turned on, there is a potential CRV PickleJar that we have started doing some preliminary planning for.