Proposal #2: Treasury Seed Buy Back Policy

mzargham · 1 November 2020 16:55

This proposal is aimed at providing predictability in the price of Seeds, as well as to reward contributors with currency for their seeds where it is needed. Specifically, we desire
a) that community members who wish to sell their seeds can do so without feeling as though they are adversely affecting the community (by causing price slippage on the seed market).
b) the MetaGame treasury be used to help support a healthy collaborative community in MetaGame
c) the MetaGame DAO itself becomes a stakeholder in Seeds, through holding Seeds and/or providing liquidity to the seed Market.

The Following Structural Proposal is suggested:

The MetaGame DAO will buy Seeds from the Seed Market using the Treasury Funds in order to support a price of approximately Y USD per seed.

Furthermore, I propose that we initially set Y =6.

Additionally, I suggest that Seeds purchased in this manner are added to Liquidity (with Eth from the treasury) in order to Further Bolster the robustness of the seed market.

Note that:

This proposal formalizes the suggestion by @peth to have the DAO “buy back and make” the seed market.
This proposal as the indirect effect of allowing seed-holders to add their seeds to the Seed Market without adding Eth. The single asset liquidity add combines a swap with a multi token liquidity add; this would depress the seed price, but by buying back seeds we counteract this effect.
This proposal is necessarily to be administered on a discretionary basis; automating such a policy would create an obvious attack for draining the treasury. As such this policy is to be suspended immediately if foul play is suspected, and only executed if concern of manipulation are cleared.
For the reason above, this policy should be viewed as a bootstrapping policy rather than a long term “steady state” policy. That is to say it should work very well while the holdership of seeds is aligned with the projects long term goals, rather than simply extracting as much Eth as possible.
As the seed market grows in liquidity, slippage will be reduced, and ideally we will no longer need this policy as a crutch to support sale of seeds for those who wish to do so.

This proposal is intended to be considered according to a variation of:

peth · 1 November 2020 22:28

We actually planned on supporting the price of Seeds with the treasury funds regardless of whether it is because of people adding one-sided liquidity, or just people selling Seeds.
So if we proceed that way, then I guess there’s no risk of people draining the treasury as we’d only be buying back the ones sold under $6, not “anything sold by adding liquidity”.
I’d also bump this $6 to $6.5 and over time push it over $7 & above.
Nobody has been willing to sell their Seeds for under $6.50 for about a month now. We got a bunch more liquidity up now, will be adding more from old members as well as onboarding some capital from new members & will be minting more Seeds in the coming few days.

So, my counter-proposal would be to support the price as $6.50 or $6.66 for its memeability, see how the market reacts over the coming month or two, then think about bumping up the buy-back price 10 cents at a time over months.

So far, people haven’t really been willing to sell their Seeds. I don’t expect this to change soon mainly because things are probably about to seriously accelerate.
My plan was also to upgrade that Seed stats channel:

Every time the price drops below the buy-back price, we’d notify people “the price is currently below X, you have Y hours to buy it up before we buy it up ourselves”

peth · 6 November 2020 11:29

What if we went with something like a moving average @mzargham?
As the price stays above a certain price, we slowly adjust the buyback price higher and higher.

peth · 12 November 2020 23:25

Yeah… I don’t think anyone will be able to buy Seeds at $6.50 again
How do you think we should calculate the buyback price @mzargham?

TheBuddha_th · 15 November 2020 03:27

By calculating average market price of SEEDs for past period. Buybacks should happen in one hand with issuance of new SEEDs in the same time.

mzargham · 20 November 2020 15:57

The market is still very thin, so i think the best thing we could do is have an informal agreement among Players that one can sell “OTC” to the DAO at the current market price, less a small discount. By not using the AMM, you bypass the slippage caused by the sale.

Furthermore, it would behoove the DAO to immediately put the seeds purchased into the Liquidity pool (matched with wETH so as not to induce the slippage anyway). In this case the net effect is to add liquidity to reduce volatility and prevent a slow decline in the seed price due to member selling.

A few notes though, it makes sense to limit this by player and/or by time period. For example we could say that each player could take this deal for up to 50% of their new seed issuance, each seed issuance period. Or any other number of rules we might come up with to ensure that the we give people a fair chance to participate in the by back program without immediately creating a run on the treasury.

peth · 13 December 2020 19:00

I think its fine to have the slippage for the people who want to sell. If they are fine with selling it at lower prices, let them sell it. Better for treasury because it can buy back lower & back for LPs because they don’t miss out on OTC fees.

My thinking was that every time the price dumps after the minting, first I’d post in the #patrons channel something like “Hey, Seeds are on sale now! You have 12 hours to buy some before the treasury buys some!”, then buy some if nobody buys.

METADREAMER · 31 December 2020 02:28

Was typing this out on discord but it became long enough that it made sense to post it here for posterity:

In terms of managing our issuance schedule, there’s lot of variables at play. Main ones:

price of SEED
number of SEED minted each week
number of contributors

Scenario 1: Lets say we get 10x the contributors but the price of SEED also goes up 10x. Then, even if we kept the # of SEED minted the same, the dollar value distributed to the contributors would also stay the same.

Scenario 2: We 10x the contributors but also 10x the SEED issuance and the price of SEED doesn’t change. In this case, it would be less likely that SEED goes 10x in a short amount of time because of the dilution. However this isn’t necessarily bad since the only people getting truly diluted would be inactive players since active players would still be earning the new SEED. Also, even if you are inactive you still get a decaying SEED distribution, so its not complete dilution either. Even though the price isn’t growing, the market cap would be growing and players would be earning a relatively consistent income.

Scenario 3: # of contributors and issuance stays the same, but price goes 10x. In this scenario, the small number of contributors would be getting paid a lot, which would start incentivizing more people to start contributing, which would then evolve into Scenario 1 or 2.

There’s no right or wrong answers here and we don’t know exactly how we will respond in terms of balancing issuance, price, and # of contributors, we just have to adapt to the situation since there’s so many variables out of our control.

In general though, I don’t think Scenario 1 is ideal since it concentrates too much power to the earliest contributors even if they don’t continue contributing. 10x’ing the price of SEED sounds appealing, but too much price growth too quickly becomes a distraction and hurts projects more than it helps in the long run. Ideally we want slow steady upwards growth and not spiky pump and dumps.

I think a good balance might be that the # of SEED / active contributors grows logarithmically instead of linearly. i.e. 10 active contributors = 200 SEED/week, 50 active contributors = 400 SEED / week or something along those lines. Increases issuance as we scale without too much dilution and also mitigates too much power being concentrated to the earliest contributors.

mzargham · 31 December 2020 21:55

I know that there is some overhead to using models to evaluate these kinds of Policy ideas but @lkngtn and the #1hive community has been putting in work to flesh out models of issuance, by evaluating policies and parameters related to their communities issuance. While MetaGame will have slightly different parameters and goals, the core machinery of balancing issuance rates against some other goals is pretty much the same.

If anyone here is interested learning more, 1hive has weekly calls on modeling on Friday afternoons 4 pm eastern time in the 1hive discord. We also have a dedicated channel called #Luna. I think discussions of issuance are a great way to learn from each other, and eventually its something that every DAO that builds on the MetaSys will need to decide for themselves. It would be great if we could co-create tools for helping these communities make these decisions by dog-fooding those tools.

You can check out progress on 1hive’s version of this challenge in this repo:

github.com

lkngtn/honey-cad/blob/parameter-comparison/honey.ipynb

{
 "cells": [
  {
   "cell_type": "markdown",
   "metadata": {},
   "source": [
    "# Honey Supply Policy \n",
    "\n",
    "The current Honey supply policy depends on governance to adjust a per block issuance rate. This is not ideal because it requires administrative governance to modulate the issuance rate, making it difficult for participants who do not have a controlling interest in governance to have confidence that issuance will be handled responsibly and predictably over time. \n",
    "\n",
    "We would like to design and implement a dynamic issuance policy that minimizes the need for governance decisions over issuance while ensuring that the system is attractive to both more passive speculators that want to understand the upper bounds of issuance as well as active contributors who want to ensure that the system can provide adequate and consistent rewards for the value they produce.  \n",
    "    \n",
    "For the purpose of this model we differentiate the honey supply into two buckets, the common pool and the circulating supply. We model inflows to the system as parameter to show how the system would behave when inflows exceed outflows, and we treat conviction outflows as a fixed percent rate from the common pool over time. This abstraction of conviction outflows represents a **maximum possible rate for a given parameterization of conviction voting**, though in practice the real outflow rate would tend to be much lower due to the ability for participants to support signaling proposals (eg abstain), or for proposal to recieve some support but ultimately fail to reach sufficient support to execute. Never the less, this creates an outlfow boundary, and by modulating issuance based on inflows and outflows, we can also understand it as an issuance boundary. \n",
    "\n",
    "## State Variables\n",
    "\n",
    "We define three state variables, the common pool balance, the circulating supply. All of these variables are denominated in honey.  \n"
   ]
  },
  {

This file has been truncated. show original

METADREAMER · 3 January 2021 03:14

Awesome will def come to the next call!

peth · 4 January 2021 23:34

I’m mainly in favor of this one for the sake of simplicity.
I think the issuance per active player should increase, but the base should stay fixed to add at least a bit more predictability to the issuance.
Without clear usecases & membership, the prospect of buying Seeds isn’t exactly appealing as is, add to that huge dilution and who’s gonna be buying Seeds.
I think we should strive to build MetaGame as fast as possible because we’re late as it is, so I think having incentives for people to be among the first to contribute helps a lot.

Anyway, at the current state, the price has already 10x so we’re already getting paid a lot.
We could easily at least 2x the active player base without thinking increasing dilution.
We get more contributors, more contributors create more value, the price grows, we get more contributors…

Idk, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there I guess. Right now it doesn’t seem like there is a need to increase issuance as we’re all already getting paid pretty damn good & I’m even holding back from shilling because I don’t want the price to pump too much before we build more & get more contributors.
Overpaying people will only result in dumping & it doesn’t seem fair to the few patrons that we have so far.