It’s easier to say than actually do it. I don’t know how to quantify that the development work is worth paying off for the benefit.
hey @sak thanks for posting.
It is complicated to register an ENS domain as is for folks who aren’t deep into web3, I don’t see this simplifying things.
It doesn’t have to be more complicated that the status-quo…
The only difference for the user is:
before: you need 5 dollars worth in ETH
after: you need 10 dollars worth of ETH (*)
(*) a part of that can be redeemed in the future, meanwhile you get voting tokens, click [here] to know more.
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Sorely against it. $ENS is not a “currency”. Perhaps it is too early to make that transition anyway. Several people already pointed it out
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Agreed with those that don’t think $ENS should really be used as a currency. I like that it’s primary utility is voting power, and agree that we should be incentivizing holding it as opposed to incentivizing getting rid of it.
In the same vein, I wouldn’t be opposed to discounting registration/renewal fees for $ENS holders/stakers. It would reward people who are keeping skin in the game. Maybe even a requirement that it has to be staked for X amount of time prior to the discount taking effect, to avoid having people just quickly buy and sell $ENS for the discount.
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I am all for rewarding anyone who stakes the $ENS token, but I think it should be done independently of ENS and the DAO.
I also don’t think it makes sense to discount registration/renewal fees based on staking rewards. The fees the protocol collects themselves are, for the most part, very modest. I think you could have another discussion about whether the fees for three and four character names are too high.
The real issue here is the price of gas. Providing a discount on registrations/renewals wouldn’t do a lot to incentivize holding $ENS long-term if someone still had to pay a lot in gas to access the discount.
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Agreed on the gas being a major issue. Unfortunately it seems like we’re at Ethereum’s mercy just waiting for them to move to proof of stake.
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How about, a staking mechanism, where ENS holders can deposit their ENS in a smart contract, a smart contract that will receive x% of all ens domain registration profits?
For each domain renewal or registration, x% of that fee goes to the “stakers”, in pure ETH, that they can “claim” whenever they want. We can even make claiming cost a y% of their ENS, to make people commit for longer durations to staking.
We can vote on x and y through governance. This idea would incentivize holding ENS, and the more the ecosystem grows, the more domains are registered, the more the treasury fills up, and the more the community benefits from this growth too.
Someone give me counter-arguments, what am I missing?
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Just curious to understand, I can see the upside for the staker, but what is the impact on the DAO Treasury?
I think you’re replying to me, so I’ll reply.
The downside for the treasury is that it makes x% less money. At the cost of giving a yield bearing intrinsic value to the $ENS token, the more time it is staked, the more that ENS is worth.
And evidently sharing some of the renewals and somewhat stable yearly income with the userbase.
In fact I know this goes beyond the scope of the question but I’ll elaborate further on this, so while I do understand that “skimming” from the treasury is in theory a bad thing; for example adding a 1:1 exit() method would definitely be completely destructive to the project (This is a method some DAOs use, where any user can redeem their tokens for treasury funds, at a rate of Total Treasury Funds/Total Token Supply); I still feel almost all DAOs tend to completely forget and undermine the importance of monetary profit for their userbase.
$ENS might not be a currency, but it inevitably cannot avoid having monetary value. In fact, a healthy governance token has a value that is proportional to the entity it governs’ success. I’ve experienced the birth of DeFi firsthand, from the first days of YFI and Yam to today, and am almost saddened to see very little has changed on the “token vs treasury” perspective of management.
In my opinion, if we completely disregard the token’s financial value, it will inevitably start losing it, just like UNI’s “switch” that might never be flipped, just like YFI or AAVE that are almost inversely proportional to the yield staking APR. This scares off most token holders, and in theory centralizes governance, since the only people that become invested are ones that somehow don’t care about losing their capital (?) in exchange for owning a higher % of the voting power.
The only short term benefit to this, is that the treasury funds will be at their maximum possible, but at the benefit of whom? The devs are going to get paid, community management, grants and community work, marketing… All these expenses are almost irrelevant to the people actually doing the work, because the money spent on that work is spent with the intent of improving and maintaining the ENS ecosystem. So if this money is just going to be spent; through my vote; on expenses that are going to benefit the ENS ecosystem, what benefit do I get myself, as an $ENS holder, and an ENS domain owner?
The treasury isn’t about to run out of funds because they’re being spent on maintaining the project and promoting it, so what really is my individual role here? If my vote is expendable and replaceable with any other person’s, I’d rather just let the treasury fund manage itself. You could invest it into Element Finance and multiply it tenfold or split it in half, with the majority of the voters having no skin in the game, I fail to see how they will choose what to do with them as they would with their own funds. (Well, the devs and directly-related-to-ENS might, because they are concerned with their existence and safety.)
To sum it all up, in my utopia, if ENS makes money, $ENS makes money; maybe even if ENS loses money, $ENS loses money, and I’m willing to figure out how to achieve this with anyone that is willing to share this vision.
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What if $ENS is burned, like EIP1559?
Given that the DAO has the right to mint about 2% of the total cap per year, then it would be very similar to sending it to the DAO, but with an added cap.
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Sounds like, ENS1559?
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Burned how/when? $ENS isn’t really transactional and if anything it will only encourage more hoarding.
Plus, introducing a burn mechanism would mean migrating the current ENS token, or creating a smart contract where users can burn their tokens in exchange of some benefit? So for now I still don’t see the wrong sides of rewarding $ENS holders with pure ETH.
What if I send my coinbase fractional share of an EnS token through the u.s. postal service to Gemini and then the twins double it and write a check to the dao?
I think the main issue behind the whole “this is ony a governance token” is that you can only rely on the goodwill of others to participate for so long without there being some kind of reward for doing so. Even if I think this is a great project, there are opportunity costs involved with participation. In my own case, I would love to be more involved, but I only have so much time and energy to commit to all the projects that I’m involved in, so I have limited my involvement and time. There really is no ROI for me besides “good feels”, so if there are other projects that give “good feels” AND renumeration, it ticks more boxes so those projects gets my time and energy,
To expect that people will simply give their time and energy without renumeration for their efforts is something I find rather insulting. I would never ask someone to record a guitar solo for a song project and just expect them to do it for free. As much as I think my music is a worthy cause that will delight the ears of my fans, it does not give me the right to exploit another musician.
For me, a big part of crypto and blockchain is to create a more fair and equitable economic models, and to remove the exploitation that we find in the typical capitalistic models that we currently are fighting against. The “this is only a governance token” trope with no mind to finding ways to reward supporters and contributors is, to me, just another form of social explotation and shaming for wanting to be fairly rewared.
“So you want to be rewarded for your contributions? This is a public good! How dare you!”
And yet, the core team is paid with full time salaries. Why does the core team feel like they should be renumerated for a “public good” and not other non-core team contributors? To me this smacks of elitism/self serving. At the very least, the core team should be paid in $ENS, then lets see how much the token price doesn’t matter.
Another topic entirely is that by ignoring any efforts to add any economic value to the token, you decrease the value, which then limits the ongoing ability to fund the treasury. I would think you would want the price to increase to fund different initiatives.
I think until these issues are discussed openly and resolved, the amount of talent that will choose to not participate will be a key problem. It incentivises only the core team who are drawing full time salaries to contribute.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting this. The DAO working groups are actively working on budgets at the moment, that ensure remuneration for people who measurably contribute to the success of ENS. This is entirely separate from rewarding tokenholders for holding tokens.
But who judges what is measureably contributing? Only role holders? And are they renumerated in $ENS or something else?
And that just shows the point even more succinctly: If someone doesn’t have a defined role, what is their incentive for contributing? If anything they do does nothing but enrich official role holders, and all they get is “good feels” for helping a public good, then there is still no value for them to spend time on this project.
Meaning, if someone takes time read, comment, vote, and is active in the community, nothing they do increases the value of the token, which is really the only financial reward for contributing to the success of the project. This is still discouraging people from being active in the community because they see no tangible reward for their efforts.
TLDR: There are plenty of talented people who will not contribute as non-role holders because of opportunity costs are too high with so many other projects that they could otherwise work on.
That is up to stewards. Stewards are elected by the DAO twice a year.
Like I said, the stewards are establishing budgets right now so that people who contribute can be remunerated. You don’t need a “defined role” to do something and get paid.
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