To start with I would like to say that I'm for locking as it'll provide long term stability. After reading various inputs and knowing different views, here are my 2cents.
- There's genuine concern that locking might be off putting to a lot of newcomers who joined recently and also to potential joinees. Have we reached critical mass to take this risk at this point in time? If we've, then go ahead with locking. If we haven't, then locking as the only means to earn high APY, should be put off until we reach the desired adoption. Until then, a voluntary locking mechanism that has been proposed by many people, whereby you keep getting higher rewards by staking for a longer term would work best. This is again a temporary measure until we've decent adoption.
- Since there isn't a defined roadmap, new comers should not find themselves joining OHM today only to find out that tomorrow / next week, the locking would be implemented and the base APY would drop considerably. This can be a turn off. After any proposal is passed, there should be atleast 3-4 weeks of announcements, tweets etc whereby the newly voted proposal is repeatedly mentioned on all avenues, whereby a new / potential OHMie is aware of the impending changes. Even if someone joins today and the approved / voted proposal is implemented the next day, there should be a history which clearly shows that this was announced for weeks and if someone did not know about it then they did not do their research.
- An exponential incentive structure for staking is good, as long as it's not locked and voluntary. The APY multiplier can be tweaked in such a way that there is real incentive to staking with each passing month, without the fear of liquidity and losing rewards. I believe most people want to stake for a long time, but also want the ability to unstake anytime. So cut the rebase rate to bare minimum and keep increasing it exponentially over time. For any OHMs that are unstaked and staked again in the future, you start with the day 1 rebase rate.
- Another way to ensure that people don't unstake and sell off, in case of a black swan event is that rewards earned could be made available in % per month. For example, at any point in time, you'll have base rewards + multiplier rewards that you've earned on staked OHM. Multiplier rewards are available at the rate per month. This way the original OHM is liquid, the base rewards are liquid and only x% of the multiplier rewards are liquid. The more time you stake, the multiplier rewards that are available also goes up. For example, in the 1st month, principal staked + base rewards + 10% of multiplier rewards that could be unstaked. In the 2nd month, principal staked + base rewards + 15% of multiplier rewards earned. This way, some of the earned rewards are always locked. Upon completion of the locking period, you'll have access to 100% of multiplier rewards.
I believe this would let the OHMie 1) keep principal OHM + base rewards liquid, from 1st day 2) stake until they actually desperately need to unstake and 3) An option for longer locking period, like some people suggested, upto 4 years.
From the UI standpoint, an OHMie should be able to see how much OHM is staked for next rebase, base rewards earned, multiplier rewards earned, and Max OHM available to unstake.
I believe that those who are opposed have issued with liquidity and losing all rewards if they break the locking period. The above scheme or something similar could help in keeping some rewards liquid and locking most of the multiplier rewards for the locking period.
This idea definitely needs a lot more thought to come up with various scenarios, but if the general idea is acceptable, it could be worked upon.