Proposal Details
Proposal #671
Proposal title
Automatic Staking of Osmosis Incentive Rewards
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Proposal #671 description
This proposal would approve a change to Osmosis tokenomics during a future software upgrade that automatically stakes internal OSMO liquidity rewards to a user’s preferred validator set.
Background
Under the current tokenomic design, OSMO liquidity rewards are mainly allocated to Supercharged pools, as these cater for the majority of volume, accumulating block by block, requiring a claiming transaction.
With the increased swap fees generated by the efficiency of concentrated liquidity positions, the fee subsidy rate on Osmosis has fallen below one, meaning that more fees are being generated for liquidity providers than they are receiving from OSMO incentives.
Graph of Fee Subsidy Rate over time
This has changed the purpose of OSMO incentives from being the main reason to provide liquidity to being a guide to which pools should have additional liquidity deployed to optimize trading routes.
Since the loss of the OSMO multihop discount with the implementation of taker fees, this will likely be pairings directly between two non-OSMO assets. Incentivizing these pools to attract liquidity will maximize volume by minimizing trader fees per trade. Therefore, the purpose of OSMO incentives is to bootstrap these pools initially, followed by supplementing any impermanent loss over time by Liquidity Providers.
Historically, Osmosis governance has been reluctant to allocate OSMO incentives to non-OSMO pools as these liquidity providers have no reason to keep the emissions by compounding back into the pool. This led to governance proposals being passed, such as:
- Proposal 128: Add a bias factor to external incentive matching
- Proposal 264: External Incentive Matching Reduction within non-OSMO categories
- Proposal 273: Phase out Incentives on smaller Other Category pools
- Proposal 389: Remove Non-OSMO Pool incentives
Suppose OSMO incentives are to resume being allocated to non-OSMO pools. In that case, alignment must be encouraged between Liquidity Providers for these pools and Osmosis. Since these liquidity providers are mainly after the trading fees in their pairings, they will likely sell any OSMO rewards for bonus yield rather than engaging with its usage.
This proposed tokenomic change adds some friction to an undesirable user flow for Osmosis while lowering it for a more desirable one, making the choice of OSMO reward usage a conscious one rather than routine. In the event of losses by liquidity providers, they may unstake these rewards and sell to recoup their losses. Until then, the minority of their rewards will further secure their liquidity on chain and earn them staking rewards, partially composed of the taker fees their liquidity helps generate.
This awareness of the governance process also encourages active liquidity providers on Osmosis to engage with Osmosis governance to request developmental improvements that improve the platform and attract further liquidity providers.
Validator Set Preferences
Implemented in v15 of Osmosis, users can choose their preferred validator set. This allows easy distribution of staked tokens amongst a wider variety of validators while maintaining the desired weighting for new delegations by signing a single transaction that delegates to this weighted validator set. Validator sets can also be recommended by third parties to encourage the distribution of stake amongst validators who match criteria that the third party determines, e.g., active governors, relayers, or core stack contributors.
If a user has not chosen a validator set, the delegation will default to a user’s current staking distribution as the validator set. This would ensure that rewards are still staked to provide security and earn staking rewards, even if the user has not explicitly chosen a validator set.
For users who have not staked any tokens, the proposal would cause liquidity rewards to require claiming with a vesting period equivalent to the unbonding period. Liquidity providers should choose a preferred validator set so that their liquidity rewards earn yield rather than being merely vested and does not allow liquidity providers to bypass the auto-stake system by not choosing a validator.
Forum Thread: https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/automatic-staking-of-osmosis-incentive-rewards/481