Liquidity Mining Strategy

I think we are all coming to terms as to what Uniswap v3 means for users, LP’s and the coop. I certainly missed some of the implications when I posted the above.

Standard xy=K (Uniswap v2, Sushiswap, Bancor) pools are simple, you can model trades and liquidity using a simple spreadsheet. For one thing price slippage is directly proportional to the AUM. Double a pool size, and the trade size required to hit a % slippage is doubled.

v3 is a totally different beast. Say we have 3 LP’s each with $10 M in a ETH:DAI pool

  1. full spread: (v2) between 0.01 to infinite DAI to ETH.
  2. Tight limits 100% DAI above $2,500 and 100% ETH below $2,000
  3. Tight limits 100% DAI above $5,000 and 100% ETH below $4,000

At $2,250 You have focused liquidity from $10,000 #2 and standard (v2) liquidity from #1. So this is much better for trades than a standard (v2) pool containing $30,000,000

At $3,000 pools #2 and #3 are irreverent, they are either 100% ETH or 100% DAI. So the pool slippage is the same as $10 M in Uniswap v (Even thought we have $30,000,000 in the v3 pool).

So what does this mean for coop / and MVI:ETH pool?

I think there are a few thing required for v3 to work:

  1. Automated v3 LP contracts, so the liquidity can sit close to market price to capture the trade volume without constant gas / attention.
  2. Staking contracts based on #1 to let us pull liquidity into the range.
  3. Analysis / visualization tools so people can get a feel for v3 liquidity / behaviour / slippage.
  4. Education around the fact that v3 is different and £10M v3 pool MAY be better than $50 M (v2 or v3)
  5. Education around the best time to use exchange issuance

Most of this is a priority for DeFi in general, so tools will be built in the coming weeks. Some will become areas that the coop needs to spend some time on it.


However, I think that in a few weeks /months we should be at a position where the inherent capital efficiencies of v3, mean that a smaller pool ($2,000,000 for MVI ?) can provide trade size without slippage to bridge the gap to exchange issuance. A smaller pool, means that the fee income is larger, so there is a chance that it becomes self sustaining .

Then, the coop, can look at other ways to use capital (INDEX tokens) to grow AUM. (This could be Liquidity mining uni v3 / sushi / Balancer / L2, or none liquidity mining initiatives)

Note: one case where exchange issuance is not this answer could be collateral liquidations - maybe we need a bounty for a liquidation bot that utalises the redemption contracts.

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The point I am making is that there is no free ride in liquidity. Yes - v3 is far more efficient than v2 but that doesn’t mean we can stop worrying about liquidity. $700k a month to support liquidity is a huge amount, I couldn’t agree more. We spent that much because that was the only way to support liquidity on v2 due the in-efficiencies of that specific AMM model. Those in-efficiencies have been significantly improved so naturally we will have to spend far less to support liquidity.

While the market may be evolving away from 2020 style LM - some form of incentives will likely always be needed to build large amounts of liquidity around our products.

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That’s an open question because trading fees could generate high enough APY on V3. Assume we need a $10-15m V3 pool for DPI-ETH which at 5x efficiency will equal a $50-75m V2 pool in terms of execution parameters. Let’s assume the swap fee on the V3 pool is the same as V2, at 0.3%. The current 7-day average trading volume on V2 is $12m per day and since the beginning of the year I’d say we averaged about $7m. That equates to about 76% trading fee APY on a $10m pool (V3) and about 51% on a $15m. That doesn’t even include the ability to concentrate liquidity and capture the majority of these trading fees. So, I don’t see why we need to incentivise anything here.

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Curve Finance uses an AMM model very similar to Uniswap’s v3 ( using narrow bands of liquidity to support trading within specific ranges). Their AMM model enables high capital efficiency when trading between mean reverting pairs - stablecoins and other like to like assets.

Traditional AMMs do not function optimally when trading between like to like assets. Price slippage is extremely high when trading stablecoins using a constant sum function AMM. Traditional AMM stablecoin pools need extreme amounts of liquidity to support trading without high price slippage. For example a $10 dollar trade in an LP with $50 DAI and $50 USDC will reset that pool to $40 DAI and $60 USDC. Arbitrageurs will then trade into the pool to stabilize it. This impact is fine for volatile pairs where the price of the two assets is constantly diverging but not for pairs with the same price.

Curve (and Uniswap v3) solve this by using an amplification coefficient that operates sub-optimally the further the price moves away from equilibrium. This invariant allows for liquidity to be provided in very narrow bands. Uniswap v3 is a massive AMM step forward bc it allows for similar banded trading for non stable pairs such as MVI <> ETH. V3’s concentrated liquidity means that you need far less liquidity for the same level of trades.

Even with high capital efficiency Curve still aggressively pursues liquidity. The reason for this is scale. Increases in capital efficiency enables bigger trades and less slippage for less liquidity - it does not remove the need for deep liquidity. Even small slippage becomes a big deal when trading $10 and $100 of millions and limits trading to pairs with extremely deep liquidity. If you have even $5 million and wanted to deploy it in DeFi today you would be limited to around 50 assets.

@verto0912 I agree that we need to rethink our liquidity mining strategy. I agree that we are likely overspending and that we should spend less moving forward. Where I disagree is on the idea that liquidity is just something we do for our “customer experience”. Liquidity is the core driver of how market participants interact with assets - every incremental decrease in liquidity makes it more difficult to buy and sell our products.

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But that’s just not true. It’s true only if that decrease in liquidity leads to less depth and higher slippage. With V3, it doesn’t. It leads to more depth and lower slippage making it easier NOT more difficult to buy and sell our products.

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Yes we can support the same sized trades on v3 more efficiently than on v2 with smaller pools. 100% agree there. However - that does not remove the need for deep liquidity around our products. If we have a $5 million MVI pool, v3 will offer concentrated liquidity and far less slippage than v2. No one is debating that. But no amount of capital efficiency will enable for a $10 million dollar buy from a pool with $5 million in liquidity.

Our customers - especially large holders need high amounts of liquidity to comfortably move in and out of positions in our products without major price impact. The market will interact with our products at their level of liquidity.

For example our DPI pool on v3 currently has $2 million of liquidity. Even with the increased capital efficiency a $500k purchase of DPI on v3 will still incur 4.79% slippage resulting in a $20k loss for the buyer. This still makes it prohibitively expensive for any large fund to trade DPI on v3. While slippage doesn’t matter as much if you are making small trades it really does matter for these larger buys.

I’m open to ideas here - but I don’t see how we can get around providing some continued level of liquidity support for our products if we want them to be tradeable at a larger scale.

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Edit to replace the table, I had miss labelled the “Fees” as Volume

I can see where you are coming from, and I agree that many prospective large customers may be looking at the size of a pool.

However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make an effort to improve things.

A quick look at the 3 main pools:

Uni v3 is currently generating more income for LP’s with out any incentives.

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Sorry, I didn’t have chance to finish this earlier…

Some additional considerations

Trade size

DPI is currently #14 in pool size on Uniswap v2:

The largest pool v2 is FEI-ETH with $800 M, compared to $58 M for DPI:ETH. If we compare that to DPI, in terms of slippage, then I would say we can currently support a trades upto $200,000 with reasonable slippage / price impact (OA definition of ~1%).

Note that @george 's analysis for DPI liquidity mining included reviewing the trade sizes:. This found that 95% of the trades were less than $75,000.

So, if we wanted a $2 m trade with < 2% slippage we would need a $250 m uniswap pool. Which I suspect would require a x5 increase in liquidity mining rewards (possibly more as I would not expect trade volume to increase x5 with a larger pool so the fees get reduced for each $ of LP).

While $250 liquidity would be a nice thing to have (“Top 5 v2 pool”, “x times bigger than the next DeFi index”, “Minimal error compared to NAV” etc), and could be expected to give AUM a boost, I think there would be a number of people arguing that it’s not the best way to spend INDEX tokens.

Rather, I would argue that anyone doing a single $2 m on chain trade for Uniswap is uninformed in DeFi best practice.

So what can we do?
I think the key for people who want to do large trades is Education:

  1. How our products work in terms of issue and redemption from the underlying.
  2. How Uniswap v2 pools work.
  3. The benefits of buying in portions over time.
  4. Use of aggregators
  5. Use of Exchange issuance
  6. Availability of OTC trades.
  7. Availability of support for people new to on-chain purchases.

We can also:

  1. Monitor trade sizes and slippage occurred (excluding arbitrage as “Slippage” = “Profit” )
  2. Encourage aggregators to incorporate exchange issuance.
  3. Calculate the point at which exchange issuance becomes economic for DPI / MVI - and then publicise this value (for a given ETH price and gas cos…).

For me the positive thing about both of these lists is that it’s something that the coop can do using our growing (non developer / engineer) contributor base. And all of them will help level up our members / customers and build our reputation.

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BD Team is working with aggregators to include exchange issuance, mint, and redeem in their flows.

The blocker for that is engineering resources at this point.

I would argue that V3 will help reduce slippage as our liquidity will be more concentrated once we move over to that.

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On additional comment.

For me the point of the discussion about v3 and slippage / exchange issuance is saying that we have / will soon have the tools available to technically manage the slippage problem without the need for ever increasing Uni V3 liquidity mining.

That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t good reasons to maintain large liquidity pools.

I think it means that we can allocate the INDEX tokens in a different way (once we have established v3 pools and analytics - probably 2 months away ???).

Until now there has been a concern that any L2 pool liquidity mining would pull liquidity from the main L1 pool so was poor customer experience and wasteful of tokens.

If v3 does what I suspect it can (large focused liquidity without significant long term INDEX rewards being required), then this opens up much more space for BD / growth / Multichain initiatives that use INDEX tokens.

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A quick update on this,

There is a small work team looking at Uni v3 and the pro’s and cons for users / LP’s and the coop.

We have already got uni L3 pools for DPI and ETH2-FLI so we are starting to collect data on the volumes / fee APY and trade sizes.

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A further update:

V3 work team analysis can be found here:

and I did some number crunching on uni v2 and v3 liquidity pools for DPI:ETH


With the end of the 90 liquidity mining campaigns for both MVI and DPI, my attention is turning back to two things:

  1. What do we need to do to maintain liquidity through July?
  2. What is the best solution for the new products (BED and SMI)?
  3. How do we better manage liquidity moving forward?

And let us not forget that liquidity mining is expensive (we currently spend 20,296 INDEX over 30 days) = $300 k @ $15 INDEX, or $1.2 M @ $60.

There are lots of moving parts/interdependencies on this (which I think is why I find it so fascinating) and we are still learning:

  • Sector products (DPI & MVI) are very different to the FLI products.
  • Uni v3 allows more depth with less liquidity (but need more active management)
  • We are in a Bear market - volume / fees and APY’s have dropped so old framework assumptions don’t hold.
  • L2 trade volumes have taken off and having L2 liquidity will reduce costs for smaller traders.
  • Others are providing liquidity mining incentives on L2 (Sushi, Matic, Quick)
  • L2 adds friction/delays to Arbitrage between pools.
  • INDEXcoop.com and Tokensets.com buy flows use Uniswap v2 liquidity (until exchange issuance becomes cost-effective).
  • Issuance and redemption arbitrage for DPI happens via uniswap v2.
  • With the diversification of the coop treasury, we can consider direct liquidity provision of some smaller products to produce the desired trade depth.

Over the next couple of days I’m going to do some digging and will be sharing my thoughts on a number of areas around liquidity mining and our different products. The objective is as follows:

  • Attempt to share insights.
  • Provoke discussion and fill the gaps in my analysis (which there will be),
  • Build consensus on what the coop should be doing for Liquidity mining.
  • Draft some IIP’s for liquidity mining so we can maintain what Liquidity mining programmes we want to continue.

please get involved, share your thoughts and challenge me where you think I’m wrong.

Some observations on being a MVI:ETH LP

I’m going to try and split my post into chunks because I think it will be both easier to write and comprehend. I’m going to start with MVI, because I think it’s the simplest liquidity (sector product in one DEX).

Before I get to the coops considerations for LM, I thought I would capture some insights into being an LP on this pool.

On a standard xy=k AAM pool, (i.e. Uniswap v2) the LP provides equal $ values of each token to the pool and allows people to trade one for the other. As the price changes, the pool will accumulate more of the token that is dropping compared to the other. So, the LP is always at a disadvantage compared to holding the tokens in a cold wallet. This disadvantage (Divergence or impermanent loss) is countered by:

  1. Trading fees (0.3% of trade volume across the pool)
  2. Liquidity mining rewards from staking he LP token.

So, for a LP, they need to think in terms of the pair (MVI:ETH), the relative prices, trade volume in the pool and rewards.

note, all % are since launch on the 7th April, NOT annual

Since launch in April, staking the MVI:ETH pair had resulted in:

  1. a significant drop in the MVI:ETH price (0.051 to 0.0169),

This 67% price drop (divergence), results in a 13.5% loss compared to buy and hold. (See loss calculator on coin gecko).

croco.finance for this pool indicates that if you were an LP since launch, the fees collected comprise 12.8% of the current value. I.e. the fees have added ~ 14% to the value held.

The INDEXcoo.com staking contract has resulted in index tokens worth ~5% of the current pool value (calculated @ $15 INDEX - claiming and selling INDEX at higher prices would have crystalised more gains.

This can be summarised as:

MVI:ETH LP 07 April to 26 Jun 21 (80 days)
Divergence in price 67%
Divergence loss -13.5%
Fee income 14.7%
INDEX income (@$15 INDEX) 0.3%
Net income 1.5%
Annulised income 7.0%

However, looking at the trade chart, it’s clear that the majority of the trading volume was early in the product life.

Looking at croco finance for the last 30 days indicates a current fee income of ~ 2.4% per year. [Daily average fee * 365 / pool value]

Overall, being an LP has got less attractive over the last 80 days.


A quick edit to say that while researching this post I’ve discovered that there is a small Uni v3 pool for MVI.

I’ve decided to add to move some of my MVI ETH liquidity to the v3 pool as a personal experiment.

Note, I think the TLV locked in v3 is incorrect, I think it is only counting the value of ETH in the pool. There is currently 520 MVI worth a total of ~$15 k to add to the $8 of ETH.

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Looking at MVI liquidity from a product point of view.

TLDR:

  • Liquidity, as measured in $USD, has dropped in line with the price decline.
  • MVI:ETH liquidity in terms of LP tokens is much stickier than I previously suspected.
  • Maintaining uni v2 liquidity is recommended based on the Uniswap v3 review.
  • I’m recommending a further 30 days liquidity mining campaign with unchanged rewards ( 3,286 INDEX over 30 days) but I want to hear others thoughts.

OK, MVI is 80 days old, and we launched with a 90 day campaign of liquidity mining rewards.

So, it’s time to look back at what we did, what happened, and look forward to whats next:

What have we done, the Liquidity mining campaign:

Days Target MVI:ETH AUM Actual AUM at end ($ M) INDEX rewards over 30 days Change in # INDEX TWAP price at start cost at starting price
1 to 30 $ 5 M 6.4 3810 n/a 36.68 $139,751
31 – 60 $ 5 M 4.1 2743 -28% 37.81 $103,713
61 – 80 $ 5 M 2.6 3286 20% 35.8 $117,639

What happened:
Looking at JD’s MVI dashboard. we can see the value of MVI available as liquidity (note total liquidity will be twice this value) and that this has dropped significantly since the start of May.

At the moment, we have ~$2.5 M liquidity ($1.26 M x 2). Which is significantly less than we have been targeting since MVI was launched.

Looking at the change in LM rewards (above), there could be a decrease in liquidity (in USD terms) associated with the cut in Rewards in early May, but little sign of an increase in liquidity when INDEX tokens were increased in Mid June.

However, when we look at the number of LP tokens, which represent people actually adding or removing liquidity from the pool. LP’s appear largely insensitive to the changes in the number of tokens issued:

i.e. neither cutting # INDEX by 28% nor increasing by 20% resulted in significant addition or removal of liquidity (~10 May and ~10 June). In addition, the wide range in INDEX price between ~$60 in mid-May to ~$15 currently seen appears to have minimal impact on the number of LP tokens.

My thoughts on this is:

  1. MVI LP’s are much stickier than I had thought.
  2. Yields have dropped across the board, so many farmers are accepting lower yields from the pools they are in.

Based on this, I think that the moderate changes in INDEX rewards (+/- 30%) are unlikely to change the number of LP tokens we have for MVI:ETH.


How much Liquidity do we need:

In the past we have looked at $ value required to get a certain price impact on the pool.

Impact Trade size Trade size (ETH) Trade size MVI (@$30)
0.8% $6,190 3.55 206
1.0% $8,780 5 293
2.0% $21,000 12.2 700

So our 2% depth is ~ 50% of what we had at the end of May.

Trade volume was massive in April, but has been much lower for the past 60 days:

The last 30 days look like this, with the average day being maybe $100 k of total volume:

Looking at the pool data from etherscan since the 27th of April, we have 2022 transactions and I’ve done a very rough manual analysis.

Of the 2,022, I’ve noted 5 trades over 700 MVI (with the largest at 2,114 MVI). and a further 15 between 500 and 700 MVI.

Personally, I would describe this fraction of trades that could have large price impacts as acceptable


Overall,

  1. I see the MVI:ETH LP’s as being pretty sticky in both ways. So unless we make significant changes in the rewards in either direction, I don’t expect major changes to the number of LP tokens (AUM will track the ETH and MVI price)
  2. I think that the available pool is pretty well sized for the individual trades and overall trade volume.

As a result, I don’t see a strong reason for increasing or decreasing the number of INDEX tokens allocated for the next 30 days (i.e. 3,286 over 30 days starting ~ 10 June 2021).

However, I’m looking forward to hearing other people opinions on this matter.

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Looking at ETH2-FLI liquidity from a product point of view.

TLDR

  • EHT2-FLI has continual unit supply growth
  • Liquidity in $ AUM grew during the Bull market but has shrunk during the current Bear.
  • Liquidity in terms of the number of ETH2-FLI available to purchase has continued to increase.
  • From a product point of view, I’m not seeing a need to start liquidity mining ETH2-FLI liquidity on L1.

Ok, the FLI products are very different to DPI and MVI, they are designed to be traded and only held for short periods.

As they have fewer components, the issue gas costs are much lower (~540 k for ETH2 vs ~1,800 k for DPI ) (although FLI has an added issue/redeem fees).

ETH2-FLI was launched with a cap on units which was rapidly reached and the cap raised. This rapid growth of AUM and liquidity mean that the planned liquidity mining for ETH2-FLI was put on hold.

ETH2-FLI AUM and supply
An initial observation is that while the AUM shows a pretty wild ride with AUM peaking over $120 M:

The number of circulating tokens continues to increase.

[personally, I’m a little surprised by this as I would expect redemption of ETH2-FLI in a bull market to avoid volatility decay which affects leveraged contracts/funds]

DEX liquidity
There is currently significant liquidity and trade volume on both Uniswap v2 and v3. Note, I’m not familiar with Uni v3 analytics, so I’ll compare the data from Uniswap, and look and v2 using Dune

27jun21 Unit Uni v2 Uni v3
AUM Million $ 4.62 6.15
14 day average trade Million $ 1.96 4.26
14 day average fee $ 5,867 12,765
Annualised average fee income % 46% 76%
ETH2-FLI in pool # ETH2-FLI 43,375 97,530
ETH in pool ETH 1,269 530
ETH2-FLI in pool $ M USD $2.4 $5.3
ETH in pool $ M USD $2.3 $1.0
Sell ETH for 1% price impact ETH 9.0 20.0
Buy ETH for 1% price impact ETH 9.0 24.5
Sell ETH for 2% price impact ETH 22.2 54.0
Buy ETH for 2% price impact ETH 22.2 51.0

One key consideration is that, unlike v2, v3 liquidity is not symmetrical, so price impact can not be easily calculated. For example, at the moment, the v3 pool has much more ETH2-FLI locked ($5.2 ) than ETH ($1.0 M)

Even so, it’s clear that traders get better prices on v3, and LPs are (on average) getting better income from v3.

Using the flipside v3 calculator it’s possible to identify liquidity bounds that will produce returns higher than the 76$ average (but need more active management to stay in range).

Historical Uniswap v2 liquidity
While the majority of liquidity and trade volume is on v3, the v2 pool has run for the entire product life and is easier to analyse.

This shows the number of v2 LP tokens increasing until early May when it declined rapidly (when the v3 pool was launched), since late May there has been little movement in the number of LP tokens (although the number of ETH2-FLI in the pool will have increased as the price relative to ETH dropped).


Do we need to provide liquidity mining for ETH2-FLI?
The market is currently producing liquidity pools which allow ~30 ETH (~$55,000) trades at 1% price impact. and ~75 ETH trades at 2%.

While I’ve not done a detailed review of trades on Etherscan, it’s clear that there are a number of swaps happening in this range (e.g. 50 ETH on v2 and v3 via paraswap)

However, given that LP’s are currently enjoying rewards of ~50%, and we already have $11 M of liquidity, I would expect any campaign designed to result in a significant increase in Liquidity would be expensive in terms of INDEX tokens (+10$ M of v2 liquidity @ 50% APY for 30 days could be $410 K ~ 24,000 INDEX).

As such, I do not see Liquidity mining ETH2-FLI (on L1) as being the best use of the coops INDEX resources at this time.

However, I’m happy to hear others opinions (or read a review of the ETH2-FLI trade sizes…).

Looking at BTC2-FLI liquidity from a product point of view.

TLDR

  • BTC2-FLI enjoys liquidity mining incentives from Sushiswap
  • This has resulted in a single pool of ~$5.6 M which includes ~50% of the tokens issued.
  • From a product point of view, I don’t see a need for INDEXcoop to start liquidity mining BTC2-FLI liquidity on L1.

OK, BTC2-FLI is next. This launched almost at the peak of the bull market with liquidity on sushiswap (which behaves just like uni v2).

Unit supply climbed rapidly on launch and has been largely flat since then:

AUM shows a similar trend with the drop in prices resulting in AUM being lower than it was 2 weeks ago.


BTC2-FLI liquidity

Looking at the sushiswap pool, we see the following:

27jun21 Unit Sushiswap
Liquidity AUM Million $ 5.66
14 day average trade Million $ 0.90
14 day average fee $ 2,689
Annualised average fee income % 17%
Annualised Sushi rewards % 24%
Total rewards for LP’s % 41%
BTC2-FLI in pool # BTC2-FLI 115,800
wBTC in pool wBTC 90
BTC2-FLI in pool $ M USD $2.8
BTC in pool $ M USD $2.8
Sell BTC for 1% price impact $ $31,300
Buy BTC for 1% price impact $ $31,300
Sell BTC for 2% price impact $ $62,900
Buy BTC for 2% price impact $ $62,900

Overall, ~50% of the total supply is in the liquidity pool available to trade:

Comparing the BTC2-FLI with the ETH2 liquidity a few things stand out:

  • We haven’t seen any liquidity being placed in uniswap v3
  • A higher proportion of the BTC2 is in the liquidity pool.
  • BTC2 LP’s are receiving ~41% which is close to that seen for ETH2 LP’s.

I think that these are all related to the provision of $SUSHI rewards for the pool. This also leads me to think that:

  • The market for x2 FLI products liquidity is currently ~40% (While DPI and MVI is probably closer to 25%).

An interesting question is whether a Uni v3 pool would result in more trading as arbitrage could open between the pools)

The Sushiswap Onsen programme is currently allocating 572.3 SUSHI per day to this pool ($3,800 or equivalent to 6,800 INDEX over a 30 day cycle).


Comparison with ETH2-FLI

27jun21 Unit ETH2-FLI BTC2-FLI
Market cap $ M USD 29 5.5
DEX liquidity (pair) $ M USD 11 5.6
trade volume $ M USD 4.7 0.5
Volume / liquidity % 43% 9%

While ETH2 is ~6 times larger than BTC2 in total AUM, it enjoys ~x10 more trade volume.

The smaller pool for BTC2 means that price impact becomes a consideration much sooner. The current range of $31 to $62 k for 1 to 2% impact is probably sufficient. However, if the pool shrinks further (e.g. due to ONSEN rewards stopping), then improving the depth (liquidity minining or encouraging uniswap v3) will need to be considered.

(note, I’ve not done a full review of trade sizes on Etherscan so I don’t know if large high price impact trades are happening)


Do we need to do liquidity mining on BTC2-FLI?

With the continued support from sushiswap, I see no immediate need for INDEXcoop to provide rewards for this product on L1.

Looking at DPI liquidity from a product point of view.

TLDR

  • DPI liquidity is spread across multiple pools including uniswap v3.
  • The is an opportunity to encourage the main liquidity to move to uni v3 which should allow a significant reduction in INDEX rewards.
  • We need to agree on the preferred route/speed of change as the current liquidity mining campaign finished in 2 week.

OK, I’ve been saving the best for last. $DPI is our largest product, with the most liquidity and has enjoyed significant liquidity mining incentives since launch. As such, it’s one of the coops largest costs with 567 INDEX being given to LPs every day ($8,505 per day = $3,100,000 per year @ $15 INDEX).

However, with the availability of uni v3, and the existence of a v3 pool there are more options available to ensure our users have access to liquidity while reducing cost to the coop.

The uni v3 research team has already recommended some options for DPI on-chain liquidity

Current on-chain liquidity

27jun21 Unit Sushi Uni v2 Uni v3
AUM Million $ 2.89 29.9 2.07
14 day average trade Million $ 0.17 1.61 0.20
14 day average fee $ 432 4,828 594
Annualised average fee income % 5.5% 5.9% 10.5%
LM incentives (current) % 12.9% 12.1% 0%
LP rewards % 18.4% 18.0% 10.5%
DPI in pool # DPI 6651 69,204 7,620
ETH in pool ETH 793 8,221 232
DPI in pool $ M USD $1.4 $14.8 $1.6
ETH in pool $ M USD $1.4 $15.0 $0.4
Sell ETH for 1% price impact ETH 8 58.5 9.6
Buy ETH for 1% price impact ETH 8 58.0 11.8
Sell ETH for 2% price impact ETH 16.3 143.0 25.8
Buy ETH for 2% price impact ETH 15.9 140.0 24.0

Note, that the uni V2 liquidity pool is significantly lower than the $55 M we have been targeting for the last 90 days. This is primarily due to the drop in both ETH and DPI prices. Looking at the number of LP tokens we see a steady reduction by about 30% since early April (28,405 LP tokens on the 4th April compared to 20,269 today)

Recent trading volumes have been lower than we have typically seen. Even so, the uni v3 LP’s are getting higher fee income than the v2 or Sushi pool, however, the average fees on v3 are not sufficient to exceed the effect of INDEX or SUSHI rewards.

In part, this is due to the liquidity being spread very wide, and a significant amount in ranges that do not cover the current price:

The flipside uni v3 calculator calculates a fee-only yield of ~60% for liquidity +/- 8% of the spot price.


Previously the focus for liquidity mining has been on the price impact of large trades. With the goal being to have a large pool that can allow large trades to be carried out with minimal price impact, and efficient arbitrage trades to keep the price close to the NAV.

However, when looking at recent trades, its clear that many large purchasers are making full use of aggregators who split the swaps over multiple pools. These aggregators also access stablecoin:DPI liquidity on 0x protocol to give the best prices.

If we look at 1inch, for large trades (100 ETH), many liquidity sources are used. In this case, less than 12% of the total volume was routed through the Uniswap v2 pool!

So, for educated whales, the size of the uni v2 liquidity pool is not of critical importance.

(Anything less than 24 ETH was routed through Uni v2, v3 and sushiswap)


Secondary effects of migration to uni v3
As discussed in the uni v3 research, moving DPI liquidity to uni v3 is expected to increase the depth of the market close to the spot price and the increased earnings for focused LP’s should allow INDEX rewards to be discontinued.

However, there are a number of secondary effects to be considered:

  1. Having a massive AUM of on-chain liquidity raised the profile of DPI and gives comfort to holders that they can exit whenever they wish.
  2. v3 is still new and people are still building tools to analyse each pool/build understanding of the behaviour of the pool.
  3. The iNDEXcoop and Tokens sets buy process uses the v2pool (and exchange issuance for larger purchases), so that pool shrinking will produce more price impact for our users (until we get the UI updated).
  4. Issue/redemption arbitrage currently happens via the v2 pool, so bot maintainer will need to update their bots. (I think the other pools are arb’ed against the v2 pool)
  5. Automated v3 liquidity services are in development, but it’s still early days.
  6. Staking contracts for v3 are under development, but have not been released.

Personally, I think that moving DPI liquidity to v3 will be good for the coop, and token holders. There will be more work for LP’s but those that do the work will continue to receive income from providing liquidity.

The main question is how quickly we want to move, and a key consideration is the fact that the current liquidity mining for DPI:ETH on v2 ends in about 2 weeks and an IIP will required to release INDEX funds into the staking contract.

I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

2 Likes

OK, As DPI has the most options, I think some polls would be good to judge everyone’s thoughts and hopefully provoke some discussion.

So, some multiple option polls (please tick all options you would be happy with).

Univswap v2 liquidity starting ~10 July

i.e. a continuation of the current 30 staking contract.

Uniswap V2 liquidity mining for DPI:ETH from ~10 July 2021
  • Increased INDEX rewards to target $55 M uni v2 liquidity- i.e 36% increase from 567 to 771 INDEX per day
  • Unchanged INDEX rewards at 567 per day (which implies we are happy with the current ~$30 M liquidity)
  • A 25% reduction in index rewards to 425 per day
  • A 50% reduction to 283 INDEX per day
  • A 75% reduction to 142 INDEX per day
  • A total stop to INDEX rewards on uniswap v2

0 voters

Uniswap v3 incentives in July

In addition to (/ to replace ) the uniswap v2 liquidity mining, we can look to help/encourage liquidity to move to uniswap v2.

Uniswap V3 Incentives for DPI:ETH in July 2021
  • No incentives for v3 liquidity
  • Air drop onto LP’s
  • Deploy Uniswap v3 staking contract when available.
  • Partner with Harvest finance to automate liquidity (with INDEX rewards)
  • Partner with other 3rd party for automated liquidity (with INDEX rewards)

0 voters

Thanks

OA


Poll closed 06 Jul 2021 @ 15:15 UTC

1 Like

Thanks for all this work @overanalyser ! I just wanted to quickly highlight a couple thoughts while they are fresh - might return to add more later if it looks helpful.

Your finding that only ~12% of 1inch volume on large trades was routed through v2 is enlightening. I have been a big proponent of the move to v3, but that just solidifies it. We need to stop incentivizing v2. It is not serving us. Even if that 12% starts moving to v3, the fees there will pick up and attract more active LPs.

The LPs that serve us on v3 will likely be very different than those on v2. And that is ok. v3 is a different game, but it is one that can serve us so much better than v2.

I think the v3 work team (myself included) needs to re-group and spec out more fully the migration so that we can get a better sense of all the ENG effort and other effort required and then we need to commit.

4 Likes

During one of the coop calls today the topic of the overlap of INDEX holders and liquidity providers was raised and that they could have a conflict of interest.

For the sake of absolute transparency, I would like to disclose that I have been farming the following coop tokens:

  • DPI:ETH on Uni v2 for INDEX (Since October 2020):
  • INDEX:ETH on Sushiswap for $SUSHI (Since Dec 2020)
  • MVI:ETH on Uni v2 for INDEX (Since April 2021)

I’m also LPing (unincentivised):

  • INDEX ETH on Uni v2 (Since 2020)
  • MVI:ETH Uni v3 (Since June 2021)

In the past (but no longer) I have also LP’ed:

  • ETH2-FLI:ETH on Uniswap v2 .

I plan to continue to provide liquidity with coop tokens where I see an opportunity to make money.

However, I will endeavour to contribute to the coop (PWG/ work on liquidity etc) with a focus on the coops long term growth.

6 Likes