Echoing from our post regarding the previous community staking proposal from Reverie, we think the community would make a well informed decision if the proposer could present the effective changes this proposal would introduce, if passed.
Example:
It would be perfect if the original author @pSTAKE could update the first post and provide similar information to guide user’s decision with clear data points.
Anyway, we want to show our support for this initiative which we see as a good opportunity to balance community allocations between the different Liquid Staking Tokens (LST) providers.
We support pSTAKE’s proposal for dYdX Community Staking with pSTAKE Finance.
The proposal offers a zero percent fee structure, a revenue-sharing policy, and delegation milestones that are in line with the interests of the community. These measures are fair and reasonable and would benefit the dYdX ecosystem in enhancing chain security and decentralization.
There does not seem to be a strong need for the treasury to use another staking pool right now. First, we should get more data on how it’s going with Stride. Second, instead of allocating lower amounts to multiple staking pools, I think the community should start allocating directly to validators. This could be used to incentivize good validator behavior and also removes the need to pay fees to staking pools
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Antonio, but so far most of the replies in this thread from validators and community members were in support of pSTAKE, and dYdX v4 is decentralized so I think one person should not dictate and determine the governance in dYdX v4? I appreciate that you write ‘as community member’ but you are the founder of dYdX so such a strong opinion could centralize a lot governance results and this is against the main reason why dYdX v3 moved to v4, ie. total decentralization, and this includes governance as well.
The Stride proposal was a signaling proposal like this one, and it was for 20M DYDX and not 5M DYDX, and in both cases the goal is to improve the security and decentralization of the network, so why is it ok to use 20M for Stride but not 5M for pSTAKE?
This is an interesting idea but how would it work?
-By ‘community’, who do you mean exactly that will be selecting the validators? And how these people themselves will be selected?
-Which on-chain metrics or subjetive metrics will be used to select validators?
-How will delegations be updated efficiently in case of changes in these metrics?
Antonio, could you clarify your position a bit more?
If we’re after “get more data”, wouldn’t it be simpler to go with the pStake offer of zero fees plus an extra 20% profit sharing, especially since it’s on a much smaller amount like 5M dydx?
Looking at it without getting bogged down in the technical details of each proposal, pStake’s offer seems much more decentralised and financially sound for the protocol.
I saw on Twitter that Quicksilver has their liquid staking product ready to go. Let’s have them pitch in with an offer as well. Then, after checking out the TVL metrics and the number of staked dydx, the community can decide whether it makes sense to delegate to any liquid staking protocol at all, and if so, how we should split it up.
p.s. For someone on the outside like me, since I’m not going to use liquid staking, and who thinks that community treasury shouldnt be staked, the automated approach to choosing a validator on pStake appeals to me much more than “Let’s stake with some nice guys from Japan with a two-week-old validator”.
Are your personal thoughts different as the founder, @Antonio? Why have the community and this forum at all if you don’t want the community to decide things.
But doing an experiment with 20M DYDX at all? That is quite a gamble… if something goes wrong, then we are talking about massive amounts of DYDX affected. I think LST-providers are kinda safe (until we find a critical vulnerability ofcourse), but we should never ever put all our eggs in one basket, especially not with these amounts of funds.
Then why go for Stride at all? If you have the opinion that using a LST-provider is not the way to go, then you should be against the 20M DYDX in the first place as well, right?
This would be very exciting indeed. Best of all would be if the community would stake to community validators that then allow endorsed delegates to vote with the help of the upcoming x/authz module.
My opinions are not dictums, and I very much do encourage all to share theirs as well
Generally, I feel that there should be a strong reason to pass any proposal so scrutiny is warranted. For this issue specifically, since the community funding Stride is already in a pretty advanced state, there is not a strong need to have a second duplicative effort right now
I’m a much bigger proponent of the stride proposal because it has been more widely adopted and battle tested, including on the DYDX chain.
In the future the community could choose to stake directly to a well researched and intentionally chosen selection of validators once authz is implemented and the appropriate legal structure is in place
I disagree with this. When Stride shared their proposal about the 20M DYDX, pSTAKED suggested a collaboration to split the 20M DYDX in a reasonable way and this suggestion was ignored. Moreover, the Stride proposal wasn’t in a pretty advanced state, only the signalling proposal was approved, and pSTAKE shared also a signaling proposal.
In your first comment you said that you were against the proposal because of the ‘need to pay fees to staking pools’. Then, it was clarified to you that pSTAKE charges no fee while Stride charges a 7.5% fee and now you changed your argument and don’t mention about the fees. Moreover, in the first comment you didn’t show a clear preference for Stride, in this comment you clearly show a bias towards Stride despite the fact that they charge a fee while pSTAKE charges no fee. And in the first comment you were suggesting to allocate to validators directly not to pay fees to staking pools.
Again, the challenges here are to define ‘community’: how will the community members or council be chosen to select the validators? How will the validators be selected and delegations updated on an ongoing basis?
Community allocating to validators to support good validators is clearly not working out for dYdX based on staking ratio historically. Moreover, good validators for an average user would only be the most famous validators, hence leading to more centralization. pSTAKE’s delegation mechanism is actually a game changer for this.
I agree that this is the best idea moving forward. Perhaps @rspa would be a good candidate to help set this up after seeing the incredible job they have been doing with the STBP.
I recommend that moving forward, where you have a strong opinion, you share it before a proposal goes onchain. It’s always helpful to know what teams of the networks in question think about a given proposal. This is not to say it will sway our opinion at Stakecito, but it does add colour to the picture.
As we have highlighted in other topic, we believe that delegating the treasury’s assets via an LSP undermines the long-term prosperity of dYdX.
The decline in APR results in a diminished attractiveness of dYdX. We think that the focus should not be on the benefits to LSPs or specific validators, but rather on prioritizing the interests of stakers and traders.
Currently, 25 validators are supporting the proposal and only 7 are against the proposal. But Ex Machina has almost 24% voting power, this is absolute centralization including also in governance voting power. Is the dYdX v4 governance decentralized and community driven, or dictated by Ex Machina? Is Ex Machina even on this forum?
In other top Cosmos ecosystem networks such as the Cosmos Hub, the top validator has around 8% voting power, not 24% voting power. It is concerning that Ex Machina is voting yes for Stride and no in this proposal. Given their 24% voting power they should at the very least abstain to let the wider community vote and decide the result. The second validator in dYdX v4 does have around 8% voting power. I think until the issue of centralization of voting power with Ex Machina is fixed, the dYdX Foundation and dYdX Trading should request Ex Machina that they abstain from all governance proposals: https://twitter.com/CosmicValidator/status/1776129850446659594
One might also consider the presence of at least a minimal level of ethics when dealing with conflicts of interest. A case in point is Imperator. They invested in Stride and subsequently voted Yes for Stride and No for pStake. In this instance, they acted solely in accordance with their business interests, rather than the interests of the wider dYdX community.
A thing seen commonly for validators sadly is political voting.
I have seen countless examples where validators vote in a specific way based on their interests, the interests of other chains they validate on and more. But I believe the sole purpose of a validator should be to safeguard the project of the chain in question itself and the accompanying community. Even if it “hurts” their own (short-term) benefits or another chain they validate. In the end the project and community in question is the only thing that matters.
The entire thing is rigged for the interests of certain parties. It’s been like this since day dot. And now with v4 it’s worse. Complete fail if decentralisation is the goal here. Reverie and a few of their connections/validators control and decide how dYdX is operated. And this proposal perfectly illustrates that there is no point being a part of this community or wasting time trying to contribute. Unless something is aligned with them and their interests it isn’t going to matter. The community needs to seriously think carefully about which validators they are supporting.
Taking into account that the first community staking proposal was focused on ensuring the economic security of the dYdX Chain: As the amount of USDC deposited has increased at a faster rate than the delegated DYDX I think the factor of the execution speed is important. Given that, I would suggest that we take a more holistic approach for any further community staking initiatives. Creating a separate subDAO that handles community delegation and maybe other treasury management topics might be a good option to achieve that.
