Proposal #75

Adding Wormhole Assets to the Runtime

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While adding stablecoin assets and ETH sound okay, wBTC is just unacceptable. It's the competitor to iBTC and we cannot afford to make our coin dependent on the centralized option.
We'd basically make the same mistake as MakerDAO by allowing centralized versions of our wrap to make to control us. If wBTC fails, iBTC fails.

With the stablecoins and even ETH, we'd get plenty of assets for vault collateral and DEX, which can give us the push we need to wipe the centralized wBTC off the ecosystem for good.

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I believe a very similar proposal was voted on recently and lost. I am not sure good arguments were made for putting it in front of voters again.

If we want ETH on Interlay, why don't we have ETH vaults? I realise this would be more work for the developers, but if we crack that nut once, presumably we can crack it for all EVM based assets in one go.

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Guys, let's put our noble decentralized ideals aside for now, and take a long hard look on what's really happening recently.

As y'all know, the DeFi Hub has launched, incentivized by INTR emissions. And you know what happened — INTR's price action, is painful to see. Not really the best way to start the DeFi Hub.

Hopefully, the past weeks have brought home a point to you: attracting sufficient collateral to back iBTC is HARD. This is why despite our best efforts to incentivize collateral (and literally made INTR become a farm token), it is still lacking — we see iBTC issuance not really at the sustainable levels we're aiming for. Simple: no sustainable iBTC issuance = no adoption.

Take, DOT and USDT as an example. In this case, we're competing with Polkadot staking yields (>10%) and US Treasury yields (~5%), respectively. Unless incentivized by massive artificial yields, why would holders of these assets LP on Interlay when there are better (safer) alternatives offering more "real" yield? Why do you think MakerDAO pivoted to RWA now, when UST yields are ~5%? That's just market reality.

Alexei has written a long blog post (https://medium.com/interlay/collateralized-btc-bridges-5-years-later-4dbf05cf7b06) — we all know the end game is always for a 1-to-1 trustless BTC bridge with no collateral requirements (but this requires a Bitcoin fork). Until that happens, we settle for the second-best option: overcollateralization. At least with the introduction of highly correlated assets like tBTC and wBTC, we have a viable path towards sustainable iBTC issuance (doesn't need INTR to be a farm token). Interlay can be the aggregator of sorts for all these BTC derivatives, swallowing the market caps of each BTC derivative and funneling it to grow iBTC's own market cap (e.g., wBTC/iBTC stableswap, tBTC/iBTC stableswap, stableswap as vault collateral, wBTC or tBTC as vault collateral, etc.). Like this, although iBTC would still be subject to centralized risks, we're still the best solution out of what's available in the market (and will remain that way, until trustless 1-to-1 BTC bridge is live).

Think of it as a "bridge" for us to get to the end game: if Interlay can't even survive as a project until the "BTC end game" (1-to-1 trustless BTC bridge, post Bitcoin fork), then what's the point? I'd rather see us able to issue iBTC sustainably (albeit with semi-centralized tradeoffs), establish ourselves amongst the BTC populace, DeFi Hub achieves traction, then when the time comes for a true 1-to-1 trustless BTC bridge, we'd already have the distribution network and reach to successfully transition iBTC to a 1-to-1 peg while simultaneously having all of the collateral assets, centralized or not, as part of our money market and DEX TVL.

The proposal hasn't even suggested what to do with the asset — it merely registers it. The exact implementation of each asset will have to be voted in again (although I reckon it'll be some variations of the points I mentioned above).

Hence, for the sake of sustainable iBTC issuance (no more INTR as farm token) for DeFi Hub adoption, I will vote AYE.

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wdAs...2u2j

Is that true? There won't be more incentivized pools with "INTR"? This my concern that has not been answered yet:
I voted against the failed proposal because I don't see a clear plan for how all these assets will be traded without liquidity.
It seems, they would not just be registered to allow them to become collateral types for iBTC. But it seems also to be used in xyk pools for all of those assets.
I don't think the current INTR rewards are good/healthy for the project and INTR holders and I don't want INTR to become "just" a reward token for liquidity providers. At least that's not the reason I got into INTR in the first place.

I thought the first "product" of Interlay would be the best decentralized BTC bridge out there that would bring BTC to DeFi.

Moreover, as a Polkadot project, I would expect Interlay to cooperate with other Defi projects in the eco, especially with the most promising DEX out there (HydraDX), and not try to compete and be its own DEX. We only need to see the facts, HydraDx holders/DAO have bought Ibtc like no other DAO (at least 750K DAI DCA orders into Ibtc) indirectly helping the success of Ibtc and the Interlay team has not even let the discussion to add INTR to omnipool become a referendum.

Edited

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@wd8h...k6WD I think there are some misconceptions here:

  • This is a technical proposal that, if enacted, would allow anyone to transfer the added assets on the Interlay chain and for the Interlay chain to understand these tokens. Users can technically already send the tokens to Interlay; just the chain would interpret them as unknown assets.
  • There's no intention to list all of these assets in the DEX. There are ideas to add use cases like the on/off-ramp for BTC to wBTC via iBTC. But all of these use cases will need a new governance proposal that will be subject to a full governance vote. There's no plan to compete with HydraDX to become the major DEX of Polkadot. Interlay's DeFi hub should focus on iBTC and adding any asset to the DEX should serve a clear use case connected to iBTC.
  • This proposal does not include any INTR rewards for the bridge, lending or DEX protocols. There needs to be separate proposals to allocate funding from the treasury. However, allocating treasury funds should be focused on increasing the usage of iBTC and assets of the DeFi hub. Not becoming a generic DEX chain.
  • Adding these assets for the chain to understand them now, allows UI integrations to transfer these assets from Ethereum and other chains to Interlay and back. Unlocking use cases with these assets then only requires governance proposals on the Interlay side. This dramatically reduces the time to deliver new features since the integration of the transfer of these assets can be bundled into one work package.

Edited

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