OIP#1 Building and Enabling Staking for the OBOL Token

Token House
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1

Status: [Final]

Proposal Type: Contract Upgrade

Abstract

Tally proposes enhancing the governance engagement of the Obol Collective and the utility of the OBOL Token by implementing a staking mechanism. This proposal allocates 0.33% of the OBOL Token Supply, over 6 months, from the Obol Association treasury toward staking rewards for token holders. Initial incentives are required to ensure the success of this program at launch. The goal is to move to a more sustainable source of funding after the initial rollout.

Additionally, the creation of a liquid-staked version of the OBOL Token can open up opportunities for DeFi integrations and further utility of delegated tokens. This removes barriers and actively incentivizes token holders to delegate their tokens.

In traditional token-based governance, token holders must choose whether to keep their tokens idle while they are delegated, but in doing so, they lose the financial utility of the token in DeFi (for example, as a collateral asset for lending). OBOL Staking removes this tradeoff by introducing a liquid-staked version of OBOL (stOBOL), allowing token holders to participate in governance via delegations while maintaining a liquid token that can leverage DeFi utility. By integrating incentives across governance and DeFi, this proposal aims to strengthen participation, security, and the long-term resilience of the Obol Collective.

NOTE: Locked Investors, Team Members and Partners won’t be able to participate to stake their locked OBOL Tokens and earn staking rewards until their Token is unlocked in the vesting schedule. Only unlocked tokens would be eligible to stake. This means airdrop recipients, RAF recipients, part of Coinlist sale and, once unlocked, investors/team members. The full unlock schedule is available in the Unlock OBOL Token proposal.

Motivation

Active governance is the cornerstone of a secure and decentralized governance protocol. Staking addresses this challenge by:

A) Increased Participation:

For governance to be effective, Token Holders need a clear reason to participate. Without incentives, governance becomes a passive activity, risking low voter turnout and a concentration of decision-making power among a small, active group. By introducing staking, OBOL holders are rewarded for their engagement in governance, via delegating or self-delegating.

B) Capture & Governance Attack Resistance:

One of the core objectives of Obol governance is to establish capture-resistant mechanisms. Once OBOL Tokens are unlocked and available for purchase on exchanges, treasury attacks become possible. Third parties looking to extract value from the Obol Collective’s treasury could take advantage, if the cost of attacking the protocol (by holding enough tokens to gain 51% of voting power) is less than the total funds held in the treasury. (Compound DAO and ENS DAO have recently faced this kind of situation, for example.)

By increasing the number of tokens locked in governance, the cost of an attack increases, improving the capture resistance of the Obol Collective.

c) Increased Token Utility:

This proposal enables a liquid and yield-bearing token, stOBOL. When a Token Holder delegates and stakes their OBOL, they receive stOBOL, which auto-compounds staking rewards. stOBOL can be used across DeFi protocols, allowing Token Holders to retain opportunities in DeFi and restaking while staying engaged in governance and enjoying the OBOL staking yield.

This added utility will act as a supply sink for the OBOL Token at unlock, reducing the sell pressure. This will be achieved by proposing two options to airdrop recipients during the unlock phase:

  1. Simple Unlock
  2. Unlock and Stake with one click

By adding staking seamlessly into the unlock flow, the likelihood of success for this utility and supply sink is greatly enhanced.

Specifications

Tally built the Tally Protocol to overcome the dilemma of using governance tokens to participate in governance versus putting them to work in DeFi. This tradeoff weakens governance participation, centralizing decision-making and making DAOs more vulnerable to governance attacks. The Tally Protocol eliminates this friction by allowing token holders to stake while maintaining their governance power, ensuring that active participation and financial utility reinforce—rather than compete with—each other.

OBOL Staking is built on the Tally Protocol, which is also in the build process for Arbitrum DAO (see passed proposal) and Rari DAO (see passed proposal). Staker contracts take inspiration from Unistaker, the industry standard for staking. They reward tokenholders supporting the long-term success of Obol’s protocol via governance participation and token lock-up.

The protocol provides a modular, secure, and scalable foundation for staking-enabled governance, helping DAOs align incentives while strengthening their security. You can view our public repo of staking contracts here. The Protocol will undergo audit and be complete by March 20, 2025, after which staking will be enabled. (See the timeline at the bottom of this proposal.)

Obol staking is designed to be inclusive and adaptable, addressing key concerns raised in other staking discussions. Earning rewards in the proposed staking model is not contingent on delegating to an active delegate, meaning all stakers receive rewards regardless of whom they delegate to. Additionally, LST tokens that are earning yield in DeFi can still be used in governance. Because Obol uses a Governor with flexible voting mechanisms, the voting weight from these tokens can be split amongst multiple delegates to reflect token holder preferences.

A few modular components come together to power the staking module:

The Collective

  • The Collective will oversee the staking module, while Tally is responsible for deploying and maintaining the underlying smart contract infrastructure.
  • Governance will govern any adjustments to the staking module including: eligibility criteria, timeframes for distributing rewards, and total rewards allocated.

OBOL Staking Module via the Tally Protocol

  • Distributes rewards to stakers, proportional to their OBOL stake over time.
  • OBOL staking rewards are added into the staking module every three months but will be streamed in real time (i.e. block by block)

OBOL Staking rewards

  • The proposed source of the staking rewards for the initial rollout would be 1% of the max supply per year, coming from the Obol Association Treasury.
  • Other staking reward sources could be defined and added in future proposals, such as:
    • OBOL Token inflation (beyond the current 500m token supply limit)
    • OBOL Protocol Revenue (from the 1% fee from staking rewards charged by DVs)
    • Revenue from strategic partnerships or DeFi integrations
    • Additional incentives defined by governance as the Obol Collective matures.
  • The formula for the Staking Rewards should follow a structure that ensures fair distribution based on the amount of OBOL staked by an address and the total available rewards. We propose:
    Staking Rewards
    Staking Rewards638Ă—116 5.66 KB

Where:

  • Reward (i) = The Token reward received by a specific staker.
  • Tokens Staked (i) = The amount of OBOL Token staked by a Token Holder.
  • Total Staked Tokens = The total amount of OBOL Token staked in the module.
  • Total Rewards = The total OBOL rewards allocated to the staking program.

For instance, for total rewards of 0.33% of supply for the first six months, if 20% of the total OBOL Token supply is delegated and staked, those tokens would generate an APR of 1.65%. The exact allocation for each Token Holder will be proportional to their individual stake within the total staked supply. This ensures a fair and transparent distribution of rewards across all participants.

Example staking APR based on the % of the Total Supply Staked:

Chart1200Ă—742 39 KB

stOBOL (Tally Protocol LST)

  • All rewards will auto-compound via the liquid staked OBOL token (stOBOL).
  • stOBOL provides Token Holders a liquid position which can be used in DeFi.

1473Ă—884 28.3 KB

Future Developments

Other rules about staking rewards eligibility can be defined in future proposals, such as:

  • Delegates could be eligible for a portion of the staking rewards based on how much voting power is delegated to them. This would ensure Active Delegates get paid for participating in governance.
  • Token Holders could only be eligible for rewards if they are delegating to an Active Delegate. This proposal does not consider the definition of active delegate but the feature is available in the Staking contract, therefore it can be turned on in the future if Governance defines and approves it.

Incentive

There is no cost to implementing this proposal. The development part has been part of a previous agreement with the Obol Association when designing the Governance launch. The cost associated with this proposal is the 0.33% of the supply for Staking rewards for the first 6 months. Any additional incentives past the first 6 months would be subject to governance.

Action Plan

  • Feb 23 - March 5th: Post proposal on forum for feedback, get approval from 4 top-100 delegates
  • March 6th-12th: Submit proposal on Tally for onchain voting
  • March 20th: Complete audit and share documentation of the Liquid Staking Token contracts
  • OBOL Token Unlock: Launch Staking platform on Tally

Conclusion

This proposal introduces OBOL Staking to enhance governance participation, protocol security, and utility for the OBOL token. By allowing Token Holders to stake OBOL and earn rewards while maintaining governance power via stOBOL, we eliminate the tradeoff between governance participation and financial utility.

We seek approval from the Obol community and delegates to implement this staking module. Your support will enable us to activate staking, launch the module, and unlock new opportunities for OBOL Token Holders. We encourage all members to review, provide feedback, and vote for this proposal to strengthen the long-term resilience of the Obol Collective.

Disclaimer

This proposal should not be relied on as legal, tax, or investment advice. Any projections included here are based on our best estimates and presented for informational purposes only.

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I collected some thoughts of risks and unclear outcome about this topic, would love to get some feedback!

  1. Staking probably lowers the willingness of token holders in providing liquidity on markets.
    • This could cause higher volatility, which in contrast could lower the trust in the token and the project.
    • One could argue, stOBOL would also bring additional liquidity to defi/cefi, but on LST markets, not native token spot markets. It would split the market into native and LST, maybe even LRST.
  2. It adds more complexity to users. I understand more use cases will drive demand.
  3. Staking introduces inflation, which in theory results in lower prices. The simple approach to calculating an outcome would be a net-zero for stakers and a loss for non-stakers (e.g. liquidity providers). More complex models/forecasts for the outcome of this are highly speculative.
  4. Paying delegates could attract and benefit marketing entities rather than topic savvy individuals, making voting more random on complex subjects.
  5. Would stakers delegate their OBOL tokens to just any delegate or do proper research?
  6. The staking APR seems random - why 1 % of max supply?
    • What happens when supply empties up to pay staking rewards?
  7. How much will it cost to implement this?
  8. Who’s implementing this?

I’m unsure what benefits stOBOL would bring to Obol (the project) itself, its goals. Unanswered questions by this proposal about cost and implementer made me skeptical.

I’m not decided on this issue; I would love to read more insights and opinions.

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I noticed that it is unclear whether Token Holders must delegate in order to receive rewards or not.

In the motivation section (a), one key point is:

but later in (c) it doesn’t mentions anything about delegation:

and in the specification section neither:

but then in the staking reward section it does:

I agree that in the future, the Obol Collective must discuss the definition of “active delegate” in the meantime I believe that delegating OBOL should be part of the requirements to stake and receive rewards if we want to empower participation in the governance from most of the stakeholders.

I also have the same questions from @stefa2k:

and also:

  • Who is auditing the LST token contracts?

If delegation is a requirement to stake OBOL I’d like to approve this proposal to move to the voting process.

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Thank you for the proposal. I’ll start saying that I echo the concerns shared above by @stefa2k and @Ariiellus. I’m afraid these proposals sound very sweet to holders, but we need to be extremely careful of falling to hidden/unwanted perverse incentives.

Let’s start dividing this into the two main issues that IMO are critical to consider this proposal:

  1. stOBOL as another token for the Collective
  2. The cost and incentive design of this program

1. stOBOL as another token for the Collective

The main argument for stOBOL is the ability to deposit tokens in DeFi contracts while the underlying voting power is still being utilized. I can get behind the rationale, but we must admit it introduces additional complexity for the users—there’s plenty of projects that have solved of their apathy issues with less complex, and more optimized solutions.

For this first point, it would be very useful to understand what are the intentions from the Obol Assotiation and/or other Collective contributors. The arguments and efforts to introduce this are pointless if all efforts to get the token on markets (CEX, lending, restaking, etc) are for $OBOL, instead of this staked version.

This is very important to note, because if that’s the case, I can see how the Collective or Association will have to end up incentivizing stOBOL/ETH and/or stOBOL/USD LPs to bring more convenience routes in and out of stOBOL. Convenience that come at an additional cost.

2. The cost and incentive design of the program

Assuming stOBOL becomes the de-facto token, or that at least there’s really some efforts to develop its utility, I see other issues with the staking part of this. And here we can split it even further to make it simpler:

  1. The amount is non-trivial.

1% of the supply at the token price of the current Coinlist sale amounts to $1.25M every year. This places this governance program as one of the most expensive in the whole space, only behind Arbitrum and Optimism as per DAOStar’s report (page 7). FWIW, real market price is yet TBD but it is a significant portion of the treasury anyways.

That’s not only an issue on its own, but it’s even worse for us given the very unproven market conditions and governance landscape of the Obol Collective. Intrinsic motivation matters. Throwing money to governance (or anything) at the get go distorts the information we can get out of it and makes it hard to make changes in the future.

  1. The distribution mechanism lends it self to farming games

Most DAOs have gone the route of incentivizing/compensating delegates under very specific circumstances. I think these are a more optimal approach as (on a well designed program) we’d be paying folks to:

  • Provide high quality governance services to the DAO (proposal-making, feedback, etc).
  • Compete on a “delegate market”, incentivizing them to make token holders delegate to them (and thus hold tokens).

I must admit this is a very interesting case, because Obol is a project directly involved with staking. So all of us should know that there’s no free lunch, and staking is a price we pay for very specific and measurable threats to a system.

It’s very unclear what that threat is, honestly. But it’s very easy to see its shortcomings, paying for folks to park their OBOL tokens on a contract just because doesn’t make much sense.

Holders here could self-delegate on the Tally LST, get all the rewards but not vote at all. Where is the increased participation and capture resistance?

Under the current design, we’re paying for nothing.

What do? (possible next steps)

The development comes at no cost for Obol, and from what I understand the non-LST delegation will still work, so we may as well use it. I don’t see a reason not to try it out, but just like everything else it must grow with the Collective. We’re still at a very early phase, and we need to take it easy.

A more sensible approach could look like:

  1. Launch without incentives, at most consider a liquidity mining campaign to get some base markets for the stOBOL token.
  2. Establish periodic reviews (maybe quarterly) where the Collective can review status of the governance and adjust as needed—with more liquidity mining, delegate incentivization or staker incentives on the table if needed.
  3. Repeat.
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Hey @stefa2k, thanks for your questions! I want to be clear that the APR was recommended by the Obol core team, and I’ll defer to them for questions around that.

  1. How much will it cost to implement this?

There is no cost to implement staking. The Obol core team has funded the build of the staking system for the OBOL token, and this proposal is simply enabling staking. There are no additional costs associated with activating staking.

  1. Who’s implementing this?

Tally will implement Obol’s staking system. We’ve been working with Obol for the past ~6 months to launch governance and to design and build this staking system. Tally will also provide a frontend where users can stake and unstake OBOL.

I’m unsure what benefits stOBOL would bring to Obol (the project) itself, its goals.

The “Motivation” section attempts to address this: Increased Participation, Capture & Governance Attack Resistance, & Increased Token Utility.

stOBOL primarily enhances governance participation and aligns long-term incentives within the ecosystem. By staking OBOL and receiving stOBOL, participants signal their commitment to the protocol, which strengthens governance and decentralization. It also helps create a more engaged community by encouraging long-term holding and reducing speculative volatility, key to sustaining governance.

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Hi @Ariiellus! Hoping to clear up some confusion, but let me know if I can be of more help.

To earn staking rewards, token holders must delegate, but their staking rewards are not contingent on whom they delegate to. In the future, the Obol Collective may propose limiting rewards to those delegating to active delegates.

Since delegation is required, stakers can delegate to a burner address if they choose. If that becomes widespread, Obol Collective could introduce eligibility requirements later.

Who is auditing the LST contracts?

Offbeat Security is conducting the audit.

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Thank you @enti @stefa2k for taking the time to ask these questions, well-thought and relevant!

You are right to consider liquidity needs for the OBOL Token as an important consideration towards a successful launch.

  1. We will work with offchain and onchain market makers initially to make sure there is plenty of liquidity for $OBOL at launch so that we do not need to rely on private token holders much initially. As more token enter the circulating supply this will become easier and easier.
  2. We have seen from other successful launch that creating as much utility on Day 1 is incredibly important to reduce sell pressure and create a supply sink. Our research indicates that more utility outweights fragmented liquidity on day one. e.g. Lido/Etherfi/Ethena have stETH/eETH/USDe but also wstETH/weETH/sUSDe as tokens part of their ecosystem and it is driving more demand for the base token, not less.

Exactly, I believe the supply sink and driving demand is worth it. In terms of complexity the goal is to make it real simple during the unlock phase. Users would be presented with two options from the UI

  1. Unlock your tokens
  2. Unlock and Stake your tokens to get X% APR

This should incentivise many to choose the second option and make its UX very smooth.

  1. I agree that staking mechanism are typically net zero for stakers. However, even if there is no monetary gain, there is often other gains. In the case of Ethereum, staking secures the network. In the case of Obol, staking secures governance against attacks and makes sure we keep an active governance with delegates that can be compensated for it.
  2. The proposed source of tokens for the first year would be from the Association Treasury and not from inflation. We are committed to the 500M fixed supply. In that case, it’s actually net positive for stakers as income.

In the end token holders are free to delegate to someone else if we see unaligned behavior from such money-motivated actors. In a rationale world, even if new delegates would enter for the monetary incentives, they have every interest in serving their token holders well by voting properly or will lose their source of income.

The Obol Collective is starting with a very strong base of delegates which are strongly aligned with the mission and I’m confident we can stay on this path.

This is true today already and in any DAO. We hope that people do some level of research and given the quality of the OBOL Delegates so far I would say that it is the case. Something interesting in the Tally Protocol that can be enabled via a further proposal is “Delegation Strategies” where token holders can select high level delegation strategies based on their goals and the rating of delegates. I would welcome a system like Karma as part of this initiative for example. A simple strategy could be to spread equally across active delegates based on their Karma score.

  1. Ultimately the source of the APR should be sustainable, and this is something that is really important to me. I would welcome a proposal in the future where the staking rewards come from Protocol Revenue and not the Association Treasury. The Protocol still needs to grow a little before we get there but by the time this first year expires, we could look at something like that. This would align with many protocols enabling revenue-sharing with their token holders.
  2. At 25% circulating supply and 50% delegated and staked, this would result in a APR of 8% in the first year which I think is a good incentives to get people to choose staking instead of selling at Unlock Date. This was the math behind the 1% supply.

The cost to implement has been paid for by the Obol Association already as part of a package to prepare for the unlock of the token. We hope to be able to publish a more transparent budget across key areas in the coming months.

Tally is implementing the staking module as per the proposal. If it passes, it would be enabled.

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This is definitely the mindset that I would love to be pushed here. The Tally Protocol enables a lot of flexiblity in the future that should be explored further such as

  • Source of APR can be Protocol Revenue
  • Delegates can be paid for their work
  • Delegation Strategies can help a large portion of delegates are incentives to stay engaged not to lose their voting power, etc.

I was also thinking of enabling this without any incentives initially, but I fear that a lot of airdrop recipients will then choose not to stake when they unlock and never will revisit this decision, resulting in additional sell pressure.

The idea is to have two options when people unlock from the Aidrop

  1. Simple unlock and have access to your Obol Tokens
  2. Unlock and Stake to get X% APR

My view is that it will be hard to convince people to go for #2 if there is no APR. We also know that we will never interact again with a lot of token holders post unlock so would love to make sure that this interaction is as productive as possible.

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Thank you for providing important details here, very needed and helpful!
Indeed I agree that unfortunately many airdrop recepients will never look back after the initial claim/interaction, I am myself guilty of that in many cases.
I am no expert on tokenomics, but trust a lot of thinking, modeling and comparing has been done on the 1% and 8% expected APR etc. And it seems that the timelines would also work out if this proposal gets enacted in the first round, to be on time for first TGE unlock?

And just to sure I understand correctly and might make it even more transparent: could you maybe break down which allocations/ groups can participate in governance and staking (or other forms of incentives) with what proportion of their tokens at what time?
(Personally I am critical to the seemingly wide-spread practice of whale dominance in governance and dumping of staking rewards on retail. Not saying this is happening here! But transparency is key)

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This is 100% the intention if the proposal passes so we can capitalise on this important touchpoint with users.

Very important question, we will edit the proposal to reflect these this. I am 100% against the practice of locked tokens being able to participate in staking. This will not be allowed if the proposal passes. Only unlocked tokens would be eligible to stake, so: airdrop recipients, RAF recipients, part of Coinlist sale and in time, once unlocked, investors/team. The full unlock schedule as been published as part of OIP#2 Unlock OBOL Token.

Regarding governance this is a bit more tricky. Currently most of locked tokens are with custodians that do not support voting yet so they are ruled out. But in time I think it could be a good idea to allow locked tokens to be delegated to give the entire Collective a voice in the governance decisions. For now, we are starting with the smaller group described above in the staking section to keep governance aligned and nimble. It will expand over time as per its obejctives to decentralise.

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Much love to all the participants in this discussion! :heart:

I agree, this should be avoided under all circumstances.

What’s the operational cost?

Are there other audits scheduled? Are audits planned on a regular basis?

I strongly agree.

I’m looking forward to more transparency.

Did you think about a lockup period or penalties to make stakers stick to their delegate when staked and make it unattractive to just stake quickly for the snapshot of votes?

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None besides the 1% of the supply for rewards in the first year with the goal to move to protocol revenue in the future.

Smart contracts audits are usually planned once per release. If there is not change to the code there would be no reason to re-audit the same code. Please find a list of all current audits for Obol here.

I don’t think this is an issue linked to this proposal. This concern is true for all onchain voting mechanisms leveraging delegations. I haven’t seen this play out in larger DAOs like Arbitrum much so I wouldn’t be too concerned for the Obol Collective at first but we will monitor the situation and adjust if relevant.

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I understand this, but does Tally just not charge anything for their upkeeping?

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No. Unless we need changes to smart contracts but the provided scope above would already get us pretty far in terms of allowing the basic system to be enabled but also more advanced features such various source of staking rewards, delegation strategies, enabling delegates payments, etc.

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I’ll vote in favor of this proposal. It’s important for OBOL token to reduce sell pressure and explore additional use cases with stOBOL.

My tweet: https://x.com/Stefa2kEth/status/1894711851721605229

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Yes, but this does not reduce sell pressure, and it is dangerous for our governance. Let’s do a quick thought experiment here.

A farmer with a big amount of liquidity could buy a big amount of tokens, park them in the contract, not vote in governance and then just exit and sell. Proposal acceptance has a quorum that’s a percentage of supply; unused funds on the Tally contracts would only make it harder to pass proposals.

But it can get worse, if someone wanted to attack the Collective we’d be paying for it! I can buy, attack, and get some nice APY to then exit.

I think we have to come to terms with the fact that people that sell, will sell regardless. Do we really think those who are thinking of selling will become forever holders because we pay them? Who is in will be in even without incentives, and who won’t will eventually exit. Paying them to not sell is only delaying their decision.

Sell pressure is only reduced when there’s real utility created, if it was so easy to reduce sell pressure all DAOs would be spending their treasuries paying holders to hold. I don’t know any project where pay-to-hold has worked out.

We’ll be on a better position if we instead use this funding to pay for work that create value for the collective over the long run.

Anyways, if we throw $1.25M today or in one year, I’m sure folks will enter. At the end of the day market always finds its way to reach equilibrium, and I rather wait for us to make properly designed program first.

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This is not how the staking module works. The whole point of relying on the Tally Protocol for staking rather than a simple staking contract is that it forces staked tokens to be delegated. This is the beauty of the innovation brought by Tally of not having token holders choose between utility and governance. Not only that, but you can think of governance participation being incentivised through staking, making it MORE resistant to attacks, not less.

I agree that the market is king and better to let it be rational. However, I do not understand why you think that yield and protecting governance is not real utility. It is more real than most utility out there. If we transition later to the yield coming from protocol revenue then it makes even more sense to stake as the token becomes revenue-generating which is the ultimate goal of any serious protocol.

Furthermore, the unlock moment will be the only touchpoint with many token holders before they forget about Obol for months. Educating them on the benefits of staking via the Tally Protocol is key to gain their support in that critical touchpoint. A lot of token holders are unfortunately not as engaged as you with projects and I think we should capitalise on that moment.

We can do both, the goal is to scale the Collective as fast as possible :smile:

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But right now they can self-delegate or delegate to the 0x000 address, which is essentially the same.

Not taking into account the fact that they do not need to delegate to an active delegate to get rewards. What are we protecting exactly? Is it voter apathy? Power concentration like e.g. LobbyFi etc etc

We don’t know what the governance of Obol looks like and needs. Hope we all understand that we’re talking about a non-trivial amount of funding; and that’s the only reason I’m being so pushy here.

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For sure and it will evolve with your help but we do know that more participation is a good thing and the staking module would allow that on top of extra flexibility regarding delegates such as requiring to be an active delegate, compensation and avoid the apathy or delegate to null address. All things that I have a hard time seeing would be negative for governance.

I’d rather use 1% for a strong and long-lasting governance than incentives which gets eaten by farmers in a week.

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Thanks for the detailed proposal @coolhorsegirl. My TLDR is yes to stObol but unsure about issuance rate.

Overall, I resonate with the idea of incentivised governance but share 2 concerns with the other delegates here.

1) stObol competing with Obol for liquidity in DeFi

@Toma-ObolAssoc addressed this with plans in motion to work with market makers to ensure liquidity for $Obol and I agree that we need to create as much excitement as possible at TGE (which can be driven by utility).

2) High issuance/inflation rate
1% p.a. is definitely too high if these staking incentives persist for the long term without an organic source.

I second enti’s suggestion to launch stObol without incentives or with a short-term liquidity mining campaign. We could also cap inorganic staking incentives to 2 years max and put the strategy back up for review at that point.

0% APR stObol is still useful in and of itself.

Other thoughts

stObol as the only non-governance utility on Day 1?

Given the high issuance rate proposed, I’d like us to note that stObol as utility is closer to a faucet than a sink.

If time permits, I’d like the Collective to consider public discussions to explore “sink” type utilities for the Obol token leading up to TGE day to maximise the excitement impact around having stObol from Day 1 if the eventual issuance rate that gets approved remains a high number.

This could be useful even if the “sink” type utility might take months to realise as hope builds narrative.

More nuanced staking models to explore

Reduce total issuance rate substantially to 0.5% p.a. of which only 0.3% goes to stObol holders. The other 0.2% will be used to “pay” qualifying active delegates which stakers themselves (not delegates) will vote for.

Qualifying delegates could be shortlisted by the Obol Association to minimise governance load for stakers.

3 reasons for this suggestion:

  • To the Obol community, having a non-zero APR on stObol is still a step change
  • Active delegates that not just vote but work on new proposals are going to be a bullish signal for the Obol community
  • Delegates are an excellent marketing channel for the Collective
3 Likes