Definitely a discussion to be had. Some thoughts:
All data referred to can be found here: https://us.holistics.io/dashboards/1099511651903?_pl=e4bef309924c7b5459623193
Volume concentration:
Taking a look at items one and item two, its pretty clear that a majority of volume comes from Arbitrum and Ethereum. Beyond that you have a second tier that consists of BNB, Optimism, Avax, Base, and Canto. If the goal of this proposal is to reduce emissions strategically, we should look at places that are "low ROI" on emissions. This suggests that we should look at BNB, Base, polygon, and optimism who all spend nominally more on emissions for similar volumes as avalanche and canto.
Another important consideration is how CCTP and Synapse X implicate future emissions. In the bottom three figures, you can see that CCTP has steadily increased its share of total bridging volume, particularly as big protocols (Like GMX) migrate to using native USDC as their base asset. Given that 55-60% of all volume is stables, we can assume that the share of CCTP will increase as CCTP integrates more chains and more protocols adapt native USDC as standard. What this means is that generally across all stable pools the protocol should be able to spend less for users to still have good cross-chain quotes.
Additionally, Synapse X enables the use of external liquidity pools. Adoption has increased steadily, but leveraging this technology is a great way to support more assets than before and make prices cheaper than before (for no-emissions). Generally these two things mean that we should be able to reduce emissions across stable pools on chains with CCTP enabled without much pricing impact.
Fee Concentration
The fee figures tell a similar story for bridging volume but for swapping there are two outliers: Base and Canto. Both of these pools combine for 40-50% of all swap fees. Given their efficiency at generating fees, and Canto's low emissions, this may be a reason to not edit emissions on these pools.
Conclusions:
Yes, we should reallocate idle PoL and should tie this into a general proposal to reduce emissions. Some personal recommendations:
- Move 1/3 of m.USDC to the Canto nUSD pool and take emissions to zero on the pool
- Move the remaining 2/3 of liquidity to Optimism and cut emissions in half
- Reduce emissions by 1/4th on the Polygon pools
Additionally think we should pay more attention to the BSC pool which is underutilized and a bit less efficient since it is a 4-pool as well as think about adjusting base emissions
