I’m very positive to this as having a runway of USDC will reduce risk with (seemingly) no real downside to ENS or the DAO.
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Thanks @James and everyone else who’s been working on this.
I’m glad we’re getting this done.
Maintaining the next 18-24 months opex in stables is very prudent, and the Gnosis auction is a great strategy.
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Trading a widely popular and fairly decentralized currency of value for something that can be arbitrarily locked/potentially exploited doesn’t have risk. Agreed there.
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Seems like this large amount is what OTC is for. Adds a trusted counterparty to the mix tho
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DAI > USDC
DCA > Gnosis Auction
Probably makes sense to get input from Karpatkey - will this Stablecoin amount be handed over to KK team as part of the Endaoment, or just sit idle in the treasury?
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The choice to use USDC is dictated by the proposal we passed last year to fund ENS Labs (TNL at the time).
Alisha mentioned that proposal above. It passed last year, [EP2.1] [Executable] Funding True Names Ltd, it outlines that $11,500 worth of USDC is streamed daily to the ENS Labs team to fund the operation.
The DAO wallet literally has to have USDC in it so that the stream contract can deliver it.
I believe James is planning to re-write this and break it up into several smaller Gnosis auctions as a way to DCA the swap.
Yes, it would be good to hear more from Kartpatkey. They did participate a bit in the Twitter space earlier. Their proposal includes a similar swap to USDC, but it also contains several other components that have been contentious and might need more discussion. The thought here is we can decouple this move to get it done soon, so that we can meet budgets now and ensure that the endowment discussion won’t be pressured by the dwindling USDC reserves.
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Why do they need money when they already have a bunch of tokens they could sell? There isn’t any active development taking place either. Some open source commits on the libraries, but that should only have bounty costs. GitHub - ensdomains/ens: Implementations for ENS core functionality: The registry, registrars, and public resolvers.
It’s a bunch of standing around and making proposals counter to the ethos of decentralization, liberty, and censorship resistance. I’m bitterly disappointed with people here I respected for long time. Everyone I work with is as well. We are stunned.
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Hi All, great discussions here and on the Twitter spaces. As @AvsA and others have mentioned, DCA is the optimal strategy to execute this trade on-chain vs Gnosis auction.
We’ve built a tool to allow DAOs, protocols, and whales to efficiently DCA on-chain in a gas-optimal manner: TWAMM. From the reception on the call by @James and others, it seemed like the best fit for a trade of this size.
I did not want to de-rail the conversation here and therefore made a long-form post here for more details on our tool, background, advantages, risks, etc: TWAMM: on-chain non-custodial DeFi protocol for large asset swaps.
As I mentioned in the Twitter space, our tool is going into audit on January 23, 2023, by SpearbitDAO, and pending a successful audit will be ready by Eth Denver (March 01, 2023). The first pool we plan to deploy will be ETH/USDC.
I understand that there’s hesitation to execute a large trade of this size on a tool that hasn’t been battle-tested, but I’ve addressed the different risks and mitigation strategies in the forum post linked above.
Happy to answer any further questions!
Wasn’t aware of the USDC requirement - if there’s no way to change that another option could be to deposit this amount of stables in 3Pool on Curve and withdraw USDC as need for operations (perhaps something for Endaoment team to handle). This achieves two things:
- less amount of funds at risk of being blacklisted by Circle (likely a very low risk, but in DAI or 3Pool it’s eliminated)
- some arguably very safe yield i.e. 1.5% with $500M+ TVL
3Crv option ofc does bring exposure to USDT, just something to be aware of and consider.
less amount of funds at risk of being blacklisted by Circle
This was discussed in the US Financial Services Committee ad infinitum last year in the outgoing house. There are a strong number of representatives who want to get rid of all stablecoins. They know they can demand blacklisting, which is honestly impressive given that in 2021 almost nobody read contracts or understood blacklists take place.
The most common use of the blacklist now has been hacked funds, and also funds sent to wrong addresses. USDT is pretty efficient even and returns stuck funds sent to contracts for a 10% fee, and wrong addresses too if you know the right people.
While you may discount a direct blacklisting of the ENS, it is definitely possible to get wrapped in sanctions or sweeping legislation of DAOs with governance token. The main threat though is simply a KYC mandate for all stablecoin transactions, and making them illegal with a future rollout of a CBDC down the road. They did exactly this almost overnight with the UIGEA, and they are very likely to pull a similar stunt when it comes to stablecoins.
You may counter with the fact the ENS is ‘transparent’ with known directors, but that’s not how this works. In 2006 there were very transparent and fair gambling sites for poker, while in 2023 there is a mess of gambling legislation at the state level in the US, and nothing is good for anyone. It took way longer than anyone expected for even the most basic things to take place, and the fad of poker long moved on.
Putting money, even in DAI is high risk for anything but a short term movement of small funds. There are practical reasons to do this.
- some arguably very safe yield i.e. 1.5% with $500M+ TVL
The yield of Ethereum will vastly destroy any stablecoin yield by growing as a network. If the ENS makes it, Ethereum does. There are scenarios where the ENS fails, and Ethereum does well, but it doesn’t seem very likely. This is why what is going on here is so shocking. Any basic understanding of risk and economics means you would never suggest this, unless of course you knew it was going to fail, or you had dark motives.
I’d be supportive of DCAing, and your project seems like a great tool for that - but we can’t be its first user with such a large amount of money at stake, particularly prior to an audit.
A Gnosis auction is a straightforward way to do this that will get us a good price - albeit, the equivalent to the spot price on the day. An alternative would be to send the funds to be exchanged to a Gnosis Safe using the Roles Modifier that allows, eg, the metagov stewards to exchange funds and send them back to the DAO; they could then make the trades but would have no access to the funds.
In the interest of not getting tied up in bikeshedding I’d propose we go ahead with the Gnosis auction for now, and find long-term sustainable approaches down the road.
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Yup totally reasonable given your timelines. Look forward to ENS DAO using TWAMMs down the line post-launch!
I’d be an advocate of doing this over a longer period of time. 10000 ETH is quite a bit. I’d also like to know the current performance of the budget spends from various working groups to understand if the currently-utilized budgets are getting the expected results.
Also curious to know the answers to @Ronald’s point - why does ENS Labs need $11,500 per day? (4 million per year)
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In short, because we employ 17 talented individuals full-time, in a highly competitive field. We also have not insignificant infrastructure expenses on ENS’s behalf, such as the site and the metadata service, as well as travel to conferences, marketing & PR spend, etc.
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Thank you! Also thank you @Coltron.eth for sharing this - [EP14][Executable] Funding True Names Ltd
That topic aside, I would be more for this sale of ETH if there were a few options presented like 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc.
Hey everyone, I’m Nicole Maffeo the cofounder of SIZE Markets. Read through the proposal & thread. It sounds like there are three main pain points:
- Needs to be on-chain.
- DCA with scheduled recurring auctions.
- No front-running.
Treasuries use SIZE to easily create custom on-chain, sealed bid auctions. ENS DAO could schedule a recurring ETH auction, set auction duration and reserve price. You could also add vesting parameters if of interest.
Thanks!
Nic
Hey ENS community and delegates!
(finally managed to get permission to post comments in the forum)
I’m leading BD for CoW Swap, we’d like to propose an alternative solution to Gnosis Auction.
Our team has built Gnosis Auction, with the main use case of selling newly issued tokens where the price is still not established with a liquid on-chain market. In those cases Gnosis Auction shines, serving as a price finding mechanism.
Gnosis Auction is still a decent choice for large trades of liquid tokens - but for this purpose we’ve built CoW Protocol!
CoW Protocol employs a similar batch auction to the one used in Gnosis Auction, but auctions are much faster and the solvers competing to provide best-execution prices for users, can also tap into any available on chain liquidity (something that is missing in Gnosis Auction for this use case)
The price impact of a single trade selling 10k ETH is less than 1% - so from this perspective, TWAP won’t help a lot, unless the purpose is to DCA. If splitting the order into multiple smaller orders that will execute over time is a hard requirement, this is also something that CoW Protocol can handle, let us know and we can explain how it could be done - requiring only a single transaction from ENS DAO.
Finally I want to provide a few real world examples of similar trades being executed using CoW Protocol, demonstrating its execution efficiency and ability to execute order of this size consistently.
- 15k ETH sold for USDC
- 0.5% slippage tolerance fully protected
- Additional price improvement of 0.08%
- Indicated as 0.58% of surplus
- 10.5k ETH sold for USDT
- 0.5% slippage tolerance fully protected
- Additional price improvement of 0.03%
- Indicated as 0.53% of surplus
- 15.6k ETH sold for USDC
- 0.5% slippage tolerance fully protected
- Additional price improvement of 0.08%
- Indicated as 0.58% of surplus
We would love to answer any further questions and to provide any support needed for crafting the required transaction to create the sell order using CoW Protocol 
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@middleway.eth
Can we use cow protocol to set up, on a single call, a batch of auctions set in the future?
- create 100 orders of selling 100 eth each
- each order is an auction at market price that lasts 24h and is each starts at a future date over 100 days in the future
- we set a minimum floor for eth price
I’m a user of Cow Swap and like it personally but I am trying to see if it can be useful for the DAO
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Can you explain how we could do this, given the one week delay between proposing a vote and its execution?
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