Proposal #35
Adjustment to Vault Reward Schedule on Interlay
Democracy
3 Comments
Tabled

The relevant discussion: https://interlay.subsquare.io/post/12

Tl;dr.

  • INTR Vault block rewards are currently too high, considering market conditions and in comparison to competitors / projects with similar risk profile.

  • This proposal suggests to adjust Vault block rewards to a more sustainable level, updating the DOT collateral requirements to competitive and more capital-efficient rates, and introducing regular review cycles to assess ROI for protocol and Vault operators.

  • The saved funding will remain with the network treasury, to be used as governance decides, e.g.. to bootstrap iBTC growth as market conditions improve and help build liquidity in the native AMM and lending protocols set to launch on Kintsugi and Interlay in early 2023 (more details in upcoming Interlay 2.0 whitepaper - read 2.0 roadmap announcement).

Goal

The goal of this proposal is to adjust Vault block reward rates to be more sustainable while keeping incentives for operators high enough - and more reliable.

Solution

1) Reduce collateral thresholds.
The latest collateral risk models [1] suggest the following collateral thresholds for DOT (on Interlay):

  • liquidation: 125%
  • premium-redeem: 140%
  • secure (min. when minting): 155%

This change reduces the capital requirements of Vaults by ~40%.

For more information on the meaning of individual thresholds, see [2]

2) Adjust Vault block rewards to competition.
The proposal is to adjust the Vault rewards such that:

APR on Interlay is ~25% assuming the amount of collateral locked at the time of this proposal. This proposal updates the block reward from 45.6621004566 INTR to 9.866085649312430 INTR.

3) Regular Review & Adjustment of Vault Economics.
Rather than having a static model, we propose that Vault economics be reviewed on a regular basis, allowing to react and adjust for external/macroeconomic events.

The community, including Vault operators, can make recommendations/requests to adjust the Vault rewards schedule via the Governance portal (guides provided).

The process to adjust rewards will be greatly simplified over the next months with upcoming improvements to governance (more details are in the Interlay 2.0 whitepaper).

Expected Result

The optimization of collateral thresholds combined with the adjusted reward schedule is expected to reduce emissions as follows:

  • INTR emission by ~79%

Why should community vote in favor of this proposal?

This proposal makes a big step to improving the economic stability and outlook of Interlay.

The current emission schedule was conceived during a growing crypto market, in anticipation of reaching significant iBTC targets by EOY 2022. However, due to recent macro-economic events in crypto (Luna, 3AC, Celsius and now FTX), as well as the two hacks (Nomad impacting Moonbeam and aUSD on Acala) affecting Polkadot, the growth of DeFi on Dotsama has not been as fast as hoped. As a result, kBTC and iBTC utilization rates are low, with most BTC sitting on Kintsugi/Interlay.

The high initial emission was also a measure to reward early technical risk and to cover the high collateral requirements imposed at launch (260% over-collateralization for KSM/DOT Vaults). The technical risk of the bridge can be considered significantly reduced by now. The bridge has been operating successfully since March 2022 on Kintsugi and since August 2022 on Interlay, withstanding the recent market turbulences. The removal of the aggressive BTC theft reporting [4] has also greatly reduced the risk of wrongfully slashing Vaults. The proposed reduction of collateral thresholds to competitive rates also constitutes a big step towards Vault capital efficiency.

References

[1] Interlay Vault collateral risk modelling framework. https://github.com/interlay/collateralization-analysis

[2] Vault collateral thresholds. https://docs.interlay.io/#/vault/overview?id=collateral

[3] APR comparison to similar projects. https://api.ipfsbrowser.com/ipfs/get.php?hash=QmPhP8utFLhharELDeN6Njbc2234DGxnc4A73wxf2JHwPJ

[4] Kintsugi proposal discussing removing theft-reporting. https://kintsugi.subsquare.io/democracy/referendum/52

Edited
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Metadata
hash
0xb51e9a6cc54ceb06bd43a7fe49f07f86e7ebdd6c669004d68a75f71053266797
deposit
0 INTR
proposer
Call
Table
Json
callIndex0x0005
sectionsystem
methodsetStorage
args
items
00x3c20031a1af83128241fb740caa6b146eb816a34663a266db87ec8fa747c29bb
10xad32a5f8160000000000000000000000
TimelineLatest activity undefined
2022-11-24 10:11:36
Proposed
Index
#35
2022-11-28 11:10:36
Tabled
Referenda Index
#33
Deposit
250 vINTR
2022-11-28 11:10:36
Started
referendumIndex
33
voteThreshold
SuperMajorityAgainst
2022-12-06 08:36:42
Passed
referendumIndex
33
2022-12-07 11:39:24
Executed
result
ok
Comments

Hi,

Contrarily to what is described in the description, the only thing this proposal does is divide vault block reward by ~4.5, thus directly decreasing vault APR from 65% to ~14% (and not 25%)
The planned proposal of applying the new capacity-based reward formula - which I am in favor of - will further reduce by 10% to ~13%, all other things being equal.
Changing secure threshold level as described in the description (but not in the proposal) has ultimately no impact on APR - elaborated here (https://interlay.subsquare.io/post/12)

As is, this will be a NO for me.

I would recommend:

  • Pass first the proposal on new capacity-based reward formula
  • Recalculate the emissions required to reach a 25% APR based on current state and with the new capacity-based reward formula
    Without detailed calculations it seems to me that this means a vault block reward of ~20
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In our opinion, more efforts should be put on increasing the demand for INTR/KINT.

As for the price, no matter whether the block reward is reduced or not, as long as there is no demand for INTR/KINT, it will keep falling.

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Agree with the sentiments above. This is a rushed proposal that does not give anything close to adequate consideration to the many issues raised in the discussion.

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