Revitalising the dYdX Rewards System: Innovative Strategies for Enhanced User Adoption, Platform Growth, and Increased Trading Volume

Hello ser!

First of all, great proposal overall. I think you raised some really good points here that merit discussion and deliberation. I’ll add some of my insights below however, I will be re-reading this and would probably post further feedback or discussion points as there is a lot of valuable material to digest.

one of the main concerns that immediately caught my eye was the fact that one account ‘takes around 40% of all rewards’. This relates to, most importantly, the ‘Economic Decentralisation’ of the protocol as a whole. What do I mean by this?

Distributing value amongst the system’s stakeholders is an essential pre-requisite to achieving economics decentralisation. Thus, by economic decentralisation one means that incentive mechanisms for example (such as the one cited above) are built in a manner that equitably distributes that value to ecosystem stakeholders. I can delve deeper on this particular point however the aforementioned is enough to ensure that a basic understanding of the concept is digested (you can read more on the concept and even re. proper incentive distribution in this paper published by Miles Jennings re. principles and models of WEB3 Decentralisation).

In line with the above, the problem arises when one has economic centralisation (such as the current state of affairs where one account accrues almost 40% of rewards), and how one ought to tackle/mitigate such centralisation. The solutions you have provided are, in my honest opinion, satisfactory and merit further research (even potentially looking at other protocols and thus carrying out a comparative analysis so as to assess how this issue is mitigated).

One last point I have is that I’d really like to see you and @Callen_Wintermute work on a joint proposal on this. Callen has recently published a DRC re. Introducing allocation for trading rewards per market (DRC - Introduce Allocations for Trading Rewards Per Market) (this would be aimed at incentivising users to participate in other less-traded markets on dYdX with, presumably, reward rates fluctuating based on the trading volume-ranking of those markets). Hence that DRC also has to do with incentivisation and the proper manner within which one is to incentivise the user base to act/trade/allocate funds in a particular manner.

I’d be of the opinion that since both proposals are incentive based in nature, a joint proposal by you and @Callen_Wintermute containing a holistic approach to proper user incentivisation aimed at decreasing the current economic centraliastion of the rewards system would be an excellent value-add for the Ecosystem.

Furthermore, considering that both of the proposals would potentially ‘clash’ with each other re. amending the allocated funds to rewards, creating a joint proposal where all ideas are taken into account with you guys coming up with a proper distribution framework based on the ideas posed in both (now separate) proposals would be more efficient.

I look forward to hearing from you and am keen to (fingers crossed), seeing you and @Callen_Wintermute work together on this!

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