Thanks @overanalyser, this is great stuff!
I think that everyone is probably in agreement that intrinsic productivity will happen in the index space sooner rather than later.
The more important questions are around the timing and the mechanics. I leave the mechanics to you as you’ve spent much time on this.
On timing, I think there’s nothing (other than dev resources) stopping us from setting up the farm. Farming using Treasury tokens is our prerogative and, technically, we don’t even need to backstop it with staked $INDEX. Once we trial this out and with better analytics, we can consider extending this to external $DPI holders via staking and lock-ins.
I don’t think it matters much whether we do it now or with ETH after CoinShares index launches. Yes, perhaps doing intrinsic productivity with ETH via ibETH or stETH will yield better results. But these protocols are less tested than Compound and Aave & stETH, for example, can deviate from 1:1 peg to ETH.
In my mind, timing largely depends on the availability of development resources. If we have capacity, then let’s start building the contracts. If there are other priorities, let’s push it back.