Background
Roughly six months ago the Proteus programme was funded to facilitate the cross-chain expansion of Olympus. The intent of Proteus was not only to reach new users of other chains (that were often excluded due to Ethereum gas fees) but also to create new partnerships and integrations and develop use cases for the gOHM token.
In that time period Proteus has allowed us to:
- Expand gOHM to Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, Boba and Optimism.
- Start the developments for a CosmWasm expansion.
- Introduce Olympus to a new, wider audience through marketing, social media exposure, and AMAs with protocols on other chains.
- Create gOHM price oracles on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, and Fantom - a necessary step for most integrations.
- Support the cross-chain econOHMy and innovate cross-chain gOHM use cases, e.g. Dopex, Jones, Vesta, Thales, Rari, Market.xyz, Tracer, Impermax (and others in development).
While the original Proteus budget was significant, the actual costs to run the programme turned out to be way lower than expected. This is partly because the expansions were strategic in nature, but also due to tight-knit partnerships with cross-chain DEXes who shared the burden of liquidity incentives (and stopping gOHM rewards when possible).
Over these six months we have been extremely conservative with proteus rewards, spending a total of 222.6 gOHM - significantly below the $100m (at the time, approximately 5,000 gOHM) that was originally approved. A quick note; ~20 gOHM of the actual expenditure was used for a token swap with SpiritSwap, allowing for permanent liquidity on Fantom through gauge rewards.
Motivation
Proteus was originally approved for a period of six months and this mandate is now coming to an end. The initial burst of cross-chain expansion has arguably been successful in nature as illustrated by the bullet points above. A large part of the value has also been intangible in nature, such as introducing Olympus to new audiences and building partnerships with protocols that are native to other chains.
Creating a cross-chain expansion budget provides optionality to explore new opportunities and to develop new use cases for gOHM on other chains. At the same time, the learnings over the last few months have shown that we don’t need to spend significant amounts to pursue these objectives.
In this OIP we would like to propose a maximum budget of 50 gOHM/month - to be spent only when necessary. Those necessary actions are as follows: bootstrapping liquidity through gOHM incentives, doing minor DAO-to-DAO swaps, or funding other small but necessary expenses. More generally, this budget is to be used to fund and support the cross-chain econOHMy and gOHM use cases.
Please note that a key difference in this budget proposal vs. the original Proteus programme is that it’s focused on supporting and expanding the current cross-chain econOHMy rather than reaching new audiences or serving as R&D for cross-chain POL. This means, for example, that we will not be funding liquidity pools on new chains unless there are clear opportunities for gOHM use cases.
Downsides
There are some natural drawbacks to cross-chain pools and use cases, such as increased cross-chain gOHM arbitrage and the potential risk of farmers selling liquidity incentives (in the case of gOHM liquidity mining). In our view these drawbacks are worth it to pursue and support more gOHM integrations and utility.
Proposal
- Fund a new cross-chain expansion budget at 50 gOHM/month from DAO funds.
- This budget is to be used to support and expand the cross-chain econOHMy and gOHM use cases. Note that this is an upper limit that allows for optionality in exploring new opportunities and partnerships, but that the budget won’t be spent unless we find those.
- Run the new programme for a maximum of 6 months before re-evaluating and doing another governance vote.
