Enable BALN Stakers the Ability to Delegate Votes

Proposal Discussion WIP: BIP
#1

Fellow BalancedDAO users! Should we propose $BALN stakers the ability to delegate a weighted vote to select p-reps of our choice? Similar to $OMM stakers?

With $BALN inflation lower alongside the price, APY’s have fallen.

This would provide further benefits to staking!

The APY fluctuates, but let’s say it’s currently ~10%.

With how much $ICX that is collateralized, ~40,000,000, and approximately ~10,000,000 BALN staked, that means for every 1 BALN staked would = 4 ICX voting power!

Voting for _GangstaBet would net you $GG tokens

Voting for infiniteloopinf would net you $ICX

Voting for MyICON_IAM would net you $IAM

Depending on who you delegate your votes to, BALN staking rewards could jump considerably from 10% to 12-15%!

This allows the majority of votes to still be delegated to the BALN team while providing extra benefits to individual users who so choose.

The default votes could remain as-is, similar to OMM votes defaulting to its contributors.

It could also attract new users to the platform. Many Gangstabet owners are prioritizing delegating their votes for GG tokens that will soon be listed on BalancedDAO.

But when OMM announced such delegation support, it bounced ~15%, as it provided further utility to the OMM token and the Gangstabet users.

I could use your help! I do not have enough BALN to submit an official proposal, but Scott was optimistic about this when asked, so if the community is interested, we could make this official!

Thanks, everyone.

  • SirRobin
5 Likes
#2

Hey @SirRobin thanks for putting this together! I’ll share my thoughts below.

1.) Core competencies of Balanced

One thing to be careful of is trying to do everything. If you look at successful Dapps in other ecosystems, they’re quite focused on one thing.

  • Uniswap is just a DEX, it has no transaction history, no wallet management, nothing but their core focus
  • Compound is just a lending market. It has not transaction history, no wallet management, nothing but their core focus

The list goes on.

My issue with this proposal is that it adds additional, non-core features to the already quite full Balanced UI. It essentially turns Balanced into a full ICON wallet as well, which is certainly not the core focus. Balanced already has a hard time staying focused imo because it’s both a stablecoin issuance platform and a DEX. Being a wallet also makes it even tougher.

2.) BALN Staking Yield

I’m not quite sure we’re on the same page, but staking yield actually goes up as price goes down. I’ll show you the math:

BALN Staking Yield = $$ value of annualized fees / $$ value of staked BALN

Now with some numbers

BALN Staking Yield = $1,000,000 of fees / $10,000,000 worth of staked BALN = 10% yield

Now let’s say BALN price goes down 50% and fees remain the same, because exchange fees are not related to BALN price.

BALN Staking Yield = $1,000,000 of fees / $5,000,000 worth of staked BALN = 20% yield

As you can see, BALN staking yield goes up when price goes down.

Having said all that, Balanced is fully-open sourced.

If a community member would like to submit a pull request on the Python contracts in order to support this functionality, then build a frontend outside of app.balanced.network (maybe something like app.balanced.community) to interact with this feature, I’d certainly support it. My concern is more about the additional interface work on app.balanced.network and the additional smart contract work from the current smart contract devs when there are other very pressing features in the pipeline that add to the core competencies of Balanced.

Just to be perfectly clear, I support the idea.

4 Likes
#3

I appreciate the words of wisdom! And do not disagree with anything you said either.

I’m not a software engineer, so I’m not sure how many hours of work it’d take. With OMM providing the feature, I didn’t know if it was maybe 10 hours of work or 100.

I’ll let the core community decide whether it’s worth entertaining, but felt I’d give my thoughts and potential benefits for BALN holders and stakers!

Cheers,

2 Likes
#4

Fully support this as I have experienced both OMM and Gangstabet.

I want to add my point of view on the adoption side.

ICONs P-Reps are becoming quite powerful. I believe in order to be a complete and strong ecosystem… they all need to work together.

I have seen MANY new people move their ICX to the OMM platform. I dont think people truly care to understand DeFi until they stumble upon something they are passionate about (Gangsta NFTs). People LOVE their OMM rewards now… and LOVE staking OMM in order to vote for the Gangstabet P-rep. (and earn GG)

BALN could add instant utility if you were about to vote with it. People will stake it in order to support their P-rep. In turn this will add even more adoption to the Balanced platform.

I only assume as ICON grows we will see more and more P-reps that people will want to vote for. We should want BALN to take advantage of this utility.

I didnt get technical, but I hope this angle helps the discussion too!!

1 Like
#5

I fully support allowing staked BALN to control votes for ICX stored on the platform and I think it should be a priority after bBALN.

I also think this should be a core feature included in the main app interface similar to OMM, not something put out there with hopes that a community member will design it and host a front-end on their own.

We can already see how p-reps are starting to take notice and work towards accommodating OMM Stakers to capture their ICX votes.

I understand not wanting to try to do everything, but I think voting for p-reps is an important part of the icon ecosystem that we should try to accommodate. Plus we can already see the positive effects it is having for OMM Stakers.

Personally, I think this would be a great thing to tie into the bBALN system. More bBALN = more votes to delegate. This would provide another incentive to lock BALN for long periods of time.

If we had an official vote for this (and it passed), would that ensure it gets developed (similar to how we had a vote to implement the bBALN system)?

2 Likes
#6

I think the perspective that delegation of sICX voting power is not a central Balanced product is right. However I feel its a core sICX product.

This is compounded in recent times where there has been a lot of discussions around exactly the delegation of votes to P-reps. sICX on Balanced fundamentally stripping delegation rights from ICX I think is harmful to ICX in the long term. With sICX more of a public good, I think it falls on the products utilising it to uphold its role in the ecosystem.

I don’t want to talk about price or BALN value because I don’t think thats the point, but I believe the delegation of votes to be a central pillar of dPoS.
If that means the DAO Fund needs to put up a bounty for that work, or something of that nature, I think it would be well worth it.

2 Likes
#7

I’d say it’s more of a core ICX product, no? What about exchanges like Binance and the like? This is less of a problem/issue of Balanced or sICX, and more of an inherent problem with DPoS imho. Balanced and the DAO Fund are not here to solve the problems of DPoS and the effects of products where users give up custody of the delegation asset.

#8

We’re 100% in support of this, and it won’t be difficult for us to design at all. In fact, our original prototype for Balanced included P-Rep voting, and that’s why it was included in Omm in the first place. While we couldn’t get it into the product at launch due to time pressures, we (PARROT9) planned to add it as soon as other pressing features (governance, boosted BALN, custom liquidity, etc) had been completed, as we knew that if 1 BALN could provide more voting power than 1 ICX, it would increase the buying pressure for the tokens (as we’ve since seen with Omm).

As we want to provide a consistent experience between products, all we need to do is take the UI from Omm and apply the Balanced styles to it. Although a second product would increase the decentralisation of Balanced, it isn’t necessary for this feature, which we’ve always viewed as part of the core product offering.

Although it will cause us to lose votes, we’ve always wanted people to have a choice about who to delegate the ICX to, and keep the promise we made to the community by including it as a feature in our prototype at all.

Yes, this will give Balanced another function of an ICON wallet, but it’s another way to increase the value/utility of the platform and Balance Tokens, so is this really a bad thing?

That said, there have been some extensive upgrades to the smart contracts recently, with continuous rewards and boosted BALN still to come, so as Scott said, we may need a community developer to work on the smart contract changes for this (which they should be able to reference from Omm fairly easily). It may also be prudent to hold off until boosted BALN has been implemented and is stable before we add even more variables to the governance contract.

9 Likes
#9

This is could become a very long term target ,right now balanced need more polishing and feature development implementation like continues rewards,bBaln and custom collateral types, after this implementations done we have to add btp tokens , so there is lot of things the team have to do and also from what I understand exchange listing require lot of money ,
So let’s first stabilise the platform and then we can add new features

2 Likes
#10

I like that the core contributors automatically get the votes for sICX. For me, that’s an investment in the future of our platform.

1 Like
#11

I feel even if its not high priority it should be on the cards as per:

Governance

The governance powers of Balance Token holders include, but are not limited to:

  • Delegation of the sICX held in Balanced
5 Likes
#12

It’s definitely in the cards

4 Likes
#13

I like that the vote delegation feature would give another function to BALN on top of governance rights and platform fees.

What do you guys think about linking voting rights to a certain ‘tier’ of bBALN.
With tier I mean as from a specific lock up time. This would then also serve as an additional incentive to choose a longer term lock-up, which of course results in BALN scarcity.

Not sure if this would create any technical issues though, given the daily decline of the lock up time, which could make you drop out of the required minimum tier.

#14

I guess it is a nice feature, if it can be developed with not so much effort why not. Definitely a secondary one for Balanced though, the focus should stay on the DEX and collateralized stable coins

1 Like