Making Index Coop more accessible by unlocking Binance Smart Chain (BSC)

Echoing concerns from @MrMadila and @0xModene on BSC. I personally believe that the future is multi-chain and we should be looking at opportunities to expand outside of the Ethereum L1/L2 ecosystem. I also appreciate the regional lens that the APACWG has brought to this post. However, I think the risks outweigh the benefits for BSC specifically.

If the group is looking for other L1s with an APAC presence, Terra might be worth a look – it’s got robust bridge support, a booming APAC community, and lots of cool projects! (That said it’s not EVM compatible so there may be technical limitations.)

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Thanks to all who worked to put this detailed post together. I love to see data-driven arguments for potential growth opportunities – keep them coming!

I voted against for reasons unrelated to BSC’s decentralization/security (valid points raised by other objectors). Index Coop products are available as ERC-20 tokens via TokenSets, and they can be bridged anywhere that ERC-20 tokens can go. I’m not sure what the call to action on this post is asking for.

Are we asking Set Protocol to consider deploying their contracts on BSC & create BEP-20 versions?
Are we asking our limited Index Coop engineering resources to build BEP-20 versions of our existing products?
If it were as simple as bridging our existing products over to BSC & running some awareness campaigns, I would be interested, but I don’t think it is.

Less than $1m AUM for any crypto index product on BSC shows that we’re not clearly leaving a big opportunity on the table here. No question that APAC growth should be a strategic priority, as should making our products accessible in lower fee environments that new folks can participate in without paying an arm & a leg on gas fees, but I think we are better off focusing our efforts on Polygon at this time.

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Following up with a personal affirmation to this, as I didn’t include that originally. The whole Binance ecosystem as I understand it is much larger in APAC areas, and I understand why BSC is a consideration because of that.

Perhaps we could see BSC fade a bit now that Binance (CEX) is allowing direct-to-Arbitrum payouts (and other options as well), but not being in APAC I have zero idea as to what the meta game is there, socially

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definitely appreciate the regional lens & appreciate the scale of BSC as well. Perhaps we could pursue growth by pulling folks out of the BSC ecosystem & into indexcoop products on Polygon, Ethereum & any other L2 or L1 chain that our products are available on, as they are all inherently global.

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Agreed. Could the original posters provide an explanation? I don’t understand what the suggested action is here.

@MrMadila @0xModene Could the Ethereum decentralization maxis in the thread please justify their support for going after exchange listings (including Binance) and Polygon support, but not supporting BSC? I honestly don’t understand the inconsistency. Why aren’t we seeking to meet users where they are? I’d be happy if users purchased DATA on Polygon (is Polygon really more “decentralized” than BSC? I don’t think so.), Solana, Terra, BSC, KuCoin, Coinbase, or anywhere else they would like.

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edited my post. Not sure why I thought you did!

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I voted FOR on this. I have no issue with bridging anywhere there is demand. That said:

I mentioned it on the Weekly call and and I’ll echo it here: I’m agnostic regarding integrations until we stand up a review board to either thumbs-up or -down potential integrations. Given that this stuff is generally permissionless, it’s not a matter of approving integrations, it’s a matter of dedicating resources to those integrations, and by-way-of, tacitly approving them.

I think a failure to bridge to BSC and support that integration is a mistake. BSC is not ideal, but it’s very real and there is a lot of demand there. DeFi is risky at every entry point and chain-specific safety concerns are best left to the users of that chain. If we don’t bridge DPI, a janky version will be spun up on BSC that will be worse for users. I say if there’s demand and a way, give the users what they want.

If BSC fails that’s a BSC failure not an IC failure. CREAM failed and that was not in any way seen as a Coop failure because we pursued an integration; I see this the same exact way - the products are ethereum-native and solid, and that’s the way they’re meant to be held; everything else is at the holder’s discretion - we’re just providing options.

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Comparing side chains to CEXs I would say is unfair, where a CEX is generally a KYC’d, custodial option and they don’t tend to advertise any decentralization theater. Custody (another important tent pole for me personally) is something I don’t love, but some people are not ready for full custody because it’s never something they’ve had to do with their finances.

If we’re on a scale of SQL database to full on Ethereum, is Polygon comparatively much further up the scale than BSC? Maybe a little? This is something I personally don’t like about the Polygon’s POS chain.
As for BSC specifically, there’s quite the plague of inability to maintain consensus and keep a node synced. That’s a problem for a lot of reasons, and I’d rather not be associated with BSC for that reason

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@Thomas_Hepner @TheYoungCrews
My understanding for the reason of this post is transparency - to provide community visibility into projects that APWG community members have been working on and sincerely believe could add value given we live in the APAC market.

If there’s a call to action it is simply for community feedback and input and to this purpose, I see the post has succeeded. Thanks everyone for sharing your feedback and concerns. This forum is a key communication mechanism for ensuring transparency, visibility and community oversight. I know I personally have gained significant insight around BSC thanks to this post and the authors efforts here @Louisaraj @sriram @pujimak_in

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Yes 100% to that. We wanted to get a sense of our community sentiments towards having Index products on BSC.

The low hanging fruits would be to bridge our existing products to BSC and get BSC DEXes to sponsor the rewards, there are existing bridges that we can leverage. There could be a few possibilities to explore regarding index products on BSC.

The competitor stats reflects the potential opportunities we have in BSC, as we currently do not have any strong competitors in the playing field. It is not meant to reflect that BSC users don’t demand for Index products, IMO demand for index products (in general) is not chain specific.

Thank you all for your feedback and perspective; agree that security risk should be considered seriously! Will definitely be discussing this in the APWG bi-weekly sync call happening in an hour. If you are interested to join in the discussion, feel free to pop by!

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Bit strong! :sweat_smile: I try my best not to be an anything Maxi!

Unfortunately, as I am not an engineer/dev I cannot verify for myself the quality of chain Y vs chain X so I can only go on anecdotal sentiment (as flawed as that is) and as is evident in other people comments here there seem to be valid concerns with BSC. I do get the slight “dissonance” being against BSC but pro-Binance CEX etc but I agree with @0xModene 's comments.

I was a soft no btw! I fully agree (and alluded to in my response as have others) that people should be free to trade where they wish. If they want to work on bridging stuff over to BSC there is nothing stopping them and I agree with LA. If a BSC DEX wanted to incentivise it etc great.

I was coming from a branding and reputation perspective. Whilst there is no shortage of never-ending chain war drama and controversy, BSC has an above-average negative reputation so it is my personal opinion we should not be seen to be actively pushing our products there.

I am more than happy to listen to others perspectives here though as I acknowledge my potential biases and wide knowledge gaps.

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Haha sorry, I must have been grumpy yesterday! My wording could have been less strong.

I think I understand your point. Just to clarify - you’re saying you don’t think IC should have a partnership with BSC, or be affiliated with them in any way, but we’re okay with them incentivizing our products on their chain??

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No worries!

A few of us ended up riffing about this topic after the AWG call today and it opened up some really interesting conversations. I think one thing that is very clear is that very few people have a full and deep understanding of the tech underpinning the various chains (polygon, BSC, other) and therefore (with the exception of the eng/devs here) a lot of the conversation here is largely driven by our own personal perspective’s which can be frustrating as they are subjective and facts are in short supply.

It also made us reflect on our approach and promotion of other chains, trading venues and integrations which you mentioned in your initial response. I think this is really important so I’m really glad this has been brought up and is now being discussed. We are in danger of being unobjective and bias by promoting some things and not others without careful thought and objective analysis.

(Only speaking for myself) Essentially yes, some people have raised that this is in contrast with our recent polygon promotions and therefore potentially hypocritical which is something I think is interesting and worthy of further conversation even if the end results are the same.

From a growth and marketing perspective, L2/sidechains are essentially distribution channels. I would argue we as a community need to understand the tradeoffs with any mainnet alternatives and collectively decide if we are comfortable with encouraging our users to use them. I think the same can be said for defi integrations here also (regardless of chain).

With the scaling/multichain world conversations only growing from here I think we will essentially have to have a dedicated L2/sidechain strategy and even a pod to manage it.

PS. APWG, appreciate the immediate reaction to the proposal and poll may feel disappointing but this is really good work. It is always good to challenge our collective thinking, prompt reflection and drive these important conversations.

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Separate post to set out some data points.

Maybe before thinking about bridging products to other chains it would be useful to see what demand for the bridged equivalents of our product’s underlying components is like.

For instance, using DPI as an example I can see there is:
~$95m of Uniswap bridged to BSC (1% of mcap)
(Be very careful to check addresses are valid/correct!)

~$110m of AAVE (3% of mcap)

$15m MAKER

$15m COMP
etc
So not a massive demand on BSC for eth based defi bluechips.


DATA
$233m LINK (2% of mcap)

$111m FIL (2% of mcap)


MVI

$816m AXS (>1%)

many MVI “bluechips” not found on BSC


DPI currently captures ~0.5-0.7% of total mcap of its components (aggregated) on mainnet.
If we assume 1% of DPI components have been bridge to BSC and then dubiously assume a repeat of DPI success there we could expect $1.9m in AUM

This may not be the best or even appropriate way to gauge potential demand but I do think it is interesting and worth exploring further if anyone in APWG wants to keep digging here (would be great to see the numbers for Polygon too! $7m UNI.)

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I’m going to make some points here (not necessarily related to conversations today) that might make some people uncomfortable, but they are worth discussion if so. I was on the AWG OT call until @MrMadila @anthonyb.eth and I called it quits at the 2.75-hour mark; 1.75-hours were spent discussing only this topic, and I can’t thank you both enough for it (along with the dozen or so Owls that started the OT journey, including @Don-ETH). We covered an enormous amount of ground and my brain got a pretty solid workout; just doin reps with the Owls. I digress . . .

Point 1: We have not permissioned partnerships to date, other than with methodologists (but not until late-stages and there is a specification for it).

I don’t see any blockers given there is no monetary or resource ask associated. @Matthew_Graham may co-lead F.Nest, but he’s expert at driving partnerships and integrations in the face of broader DAO challenges, I’d recommend seeking his council on how to navigate here if there’s a desire to press on.

Point 2: Nothing bad happens to IC at a protocol-level in the event of catastrophic bridge failure.

A feature however, is that assets locked in a bridge forever will remain forever streaming fees to our accounts. This is not meant to wax insensitive to would-be-affected-users, but their anger would likely not be directed at any particular protocol affected by chain or bridge failure. We make the good stuff; I see it like wrapped bitcoin. Call it wDPI if it helps conceptually; it did for me to work through this.
cc: @edwardk @dylan for input if time allows.

Point 3: The result of increasing TVL anywhere is an increase to TVL overall.

Choosing to meet users where they’re at when the net effect to IC’s treasury is positive seems obvious. I would counter the “mrhmmm chain looks real bad from over here” takes with: There probably aren’t diversification options available on BSC as robust as IC products; are we saying that BSC users don’t deserve access to our products?

Pretty powerful mission statement to live up to in our Guiding Principles. Are we endeavoring hard enough here? I don’t see passing judgement on over 100MM users L1 choice as productive in this context. Busiest DEX in the world lives on BSC, I want IC products trading on it, and every other DEX.

Point 4: We don’t just onramp assets, we onboard community members.

Everyone comes to understand our products and us differently. We claim to be a global community open to all. In my view, given the technical requirements of purchasing our products, no one is on-ramping without onboarding to some degree (even if it’s just a pass by coingecko). Killing the network-effect of early higher-context users becoming evangelists and contributors, at the root, seems short-sighted. Further, how are all those BSC folks going to know how much better Ethereum is if we never build a bridge to tell them? Just be sure to let them know that gas fees for DEX swaps are holding steady at 0.25 BNB equivalent currently on mainnet.

Point 5: We empowered APAC WG to deliver on a WG proposal.

If leaders within this WG see fit to pursue a BSC strategy (or Cardano strategy, or a Hex partnership), it should not affect the DAOs commitment to reasonably providing support; similarly, we should not be dedicating IC resources to facilitating challenges to actions taken by a WG. We delegate responsibility and autonomy for exactly this reason. As far as I know anyone can propose a new specification in this forum; if anyone feels strongly enough to the negative about BSC I suggest that those undertaking the challenge do the diligence to make that challenge - the burden does not fall to APWG to respond to challenges (as I’ve seen some request) given that no request for resources is being made yet.

The message I wish to convey in relation to the last point is simply that WGLs should execute as they see most appropriate within the limits of our guiding principles and WG remits; I’ll be disappointed in anything less. In a sense, this would be an at-risk endeavor if it informs a large part of APWG’s impact at the end of Q1’22 and the DAO is still 2/3 against; on the other hand impact is incredibly easy to track given that APWG seem to be the only WG broadly looking to drive into this space (all BSC IC AUM would be mainly attributable to one WG if no further resources are allocated) and this seems well-suited to an incremental approach while executing on other WG initiatives.

The original post should inform a template for highlighting partnership opportunities more broadly imo; I doubt many (or any) would compare to the size of the opportunity you’ve illuminated with hard data. Great work on this @Louisaraj @sriram and @pujimak_in. I’d be particularly interested in further BDWG input if time allows @Mringz @BigSky7.

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Great discussion yesterday and the more I listened to the discussion the more complicated the problem becomes.

  • Decentralisation vs Growth of AUM
    In the IBG (@mel.eth noticed this aswell) there was a discussion of how different customer geographies can hold assets in different ways e.g digital asset custodian, trust/spv, ISIN fund structure. Whilst ALL of us would currently hold Index product on ETH in self custody wallet the broader target customer base is far more diverse. For me similar arguments for multi chain / layer 2.

  • Use of limited resource for Growth
    Personally I think the Index Coop will need to make some tough decisions formed with possibly limited data on what is prioritises outside of ETH (Layer2/Multichain). From my personal experience on a non Eth chain I bridged a token into Eth and set up DEX LP pools. It was a huge time and capital sink as its really tough to just bridge without DEX pools and marketing campaign.

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I voted for and reading the arguments of both sides it’s clear we have pros and cons.

My opinion is that indexes have a huge potential for people beginning in crypto market and for those that are not really willing to balance their positions so often. They’re not trading in places we wanted them to be like more descentralized places. People start trading in centralized solutions.

L2 expansion is really the first obvious move for scalability. But further scaling might mean taking some risks.

I’m really not a tech guy and I’m not saying BSC is the final solution for our products. But I really would like to see them available in more popular places. What if we start to list our products in CEX like Binance and Coinbase? Wouldn’t be better and easier than creating a BEP-20 version of our products?

I saw how ILV token spread after listing in Binance. It was built in a Ethereum L2 solution but now it’s available in Binance.

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We are working hard on doing just that but it takes a long time and many CEX charge high listing fees etc. Soon though.

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I do not like alt L1s but I voted FOR to support this initiative because of a few things I noticed (as a local resident in PH).

  • Metamask has 10M active users, last September. 20% of that came from the Philippines.
  • This November, it grew to 21M active users. (Probably PH still has the most number of users)
  • P2E is driving this massive growth here in PH and 25% of them never had a bank account.
  • Majority of the players still do not understand crypto but I believe IndexCoop, in collaboration with BanklessDAO, can onboard these users into crypto and lead them to a truly decentralized chain.

Sept. MM users

Nov. MM users

Nov. MM users

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I was excited by discovering this topic of discussion just now and immediately voted for having an index on BSC.

However, I’ve just seen the results of the poll I’m truly disappointed by the lack of support.

Let me share an everyday user and investor perspective here:

Many people in crypto are here because of the financial Holocaust that’s occurring around the world in fiat. Crypto is inherently risky and most of the investors that are here understand that.

We are here hoping to find an asset vehicle that is stable (as stable as can be) and will allow us to grow our savings and increase financial security for our families.

As soon as I saw the index and did my due diligence I immediately knew that I wanted to invest some of my funds. Knowing that a basket of large market cap projects comprised the index gave me a feeling of security and trust. Indexes are familiar because they’re similar to the Fiat world. Users can understand them.

In fact, I tried to double my investment earlier this year but gave up due to high gas fees and an inability to find a low-cost bridge from BSC to ETH. See Purchase with Binance Stablecoin

Most of the users on BSC despise ethereum gas fees. To say that they hate Ethereum would be an understatement. Most simply refuse to transact on it.

As soon as a project is forked on BSC or Avalanche users flock there because of the low gas fees.

Anyways I’m not really saying anything that you haven’t heard before.

There is, however, one consideration that I don’t see mentioned here: many projects on BSC are low-quality memes and apps. A highly procured decentralized managed index would likely get even traction then your most optimistic estimates. Why? users don’t have a high-quality class of investment on BSC outside of the pegged tokens that already exist (
BToken : Community Support). Indexcoop has already built a reputation of quality, so BSC users (many of which are new to crypto) would adopt it quickly.

I hope the team does launch an index on BSC despite the results of the poll. Keep in mind: the results of the poll here are skewed given the nature of membership of the index right now.

If you want to make a truly data-driven decision about if BSC is supported, ask on Reddit or somewhere else where users are transacting across multiple chains so that your results will be chain agnostic and more representative.

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