Gauges in v3
The team is in the final stages before launching the long-awaited Canonical Vaults. We wanted to highlight an important change to the gauges that we are currently implementing.
Testing of v3, alongside future-looking tokenomics, shows us a better way to handle emissions across the platform, and we’ll take that opportunity now rather than later.
In this article we’ll talk through the difference and the impact it has.
YAXIS Gauge
We are adding YAXIS as a gauge alongside USD, BTC, ETH and LINK vaults instead of being on its own separate rewards system.
Adding a gauge is like adding a spoke to a bicycle wheel.
Holders can lock in their YAXIS for a period of time in return for veYAXIS. This gives them voting power to skew emissions towards their favoured gauge of USD, BTC, ETH, LINK and now YAXIS.
Users can lock for any duration between 1 week, and 1 year. The feature allows users to continually update or add to their voting power in order to effectively react or compete with others.
In the future we will add dozens of vaults to this same system, just as Curve has dozens of LPs. This has proven to be an effective tokenomic model.
Benefits
- Ability to withdraw your principal YAXIS. Previously you’d have to lock your stack in for up to a year, which meant no access to funds which may become vital to an individual in unforeseen circumstances.
- To future proof the platform. We want to eventually use YAXIS like a vault and have a yield strategy attached to it on top of emissions.
- Align tokenomics across token holders. The purpose of the gauges is to incentivise users to lock in through competition. By maintaining a separate YAXIS lock (with higher APY), it dilutes the importance of it.
- Users can potentially earn more from one larger reward pool.
- Creating a smoother transition of emissions over time towards those willing to lock rather than trying to balance two sets of users.
Impact
The community has supported a rate of 50k tokens per month going to the vault gauges. And 200k to YAXIS stakers. This change would create one rewards system, with a combined rate of emissions set at 250k tokens per month to compete for.
Initially, this would mean more emissions to YAXIS stakers, but over time they will have to fairly compete for those emissions against rising numbers of vault users with a growing stacks of YAXIS.
Weighted voting means that vault users will be able to play catch up, and not be forever dominated by YAXIS stakers.
C4 Audit
C4 has completed the ‘Judging’ phase, whereby a member of the c4 team acts as an impartial reviewer of both findings submissions and our labels.
The process has now moved into the final ‘Awarding’ phase, with a $60k prize pool being shared by the 13 contributors.
We again want to underline how valuable the c4 audit has been, and to thank the organisers and wardens who participated.
Update on launch
Github activity remains high as we fit the pieces together and resolve issues that are found during testing.
An example of this is our Harvest function needing to flexibly use SushiSwap where appropriate as certain tokens we intend to farm are not available on Uniswap.
The YAXIS gauge we’ve talked about in this article has already been deployed on the Kovan testnet, where our front-end devs will hook that up and make the necessary additions.
As a reminder, the initial vaults at launch are 3CRV, wETH, wBTC and LINK. These will be expanded rapidly in the future to support many more assets.
While we don’t want to commit to hard dates, we are making good progress and looking to release in the coming days.
