MobiusDAO — Decentralizing and Roadmap for Q1 2022
The last two months have been quite a wild ride for Mobius. While our primary focus going into the end of year was preparing Mobius for full-decentralization, we had a wrench thrown into the situation. With the recent events surrounding Optics V1 and the migration to Optics V2, we have had our hands full with non-Mobius-specific tasks. Nevertheless, we managed to deliver on several key areas, including:
- Launched the first ever Avalanche USDC / Celo Dollar liquidity pool
- Released our Sub-Graph for tracking key metrics, such as weekly volume
- Created a mechanism for stakers to slow the MOBI release by voting to burn a portion of rewards
- Launched CELO rewards for MOBI stakers
- Created a migration tool for users to swap from Optics V1 to V2 tokens
- Integrated with DeBank so users can easily manage their portfolio
As we head into the new year, the team will be laser focused on empowering our token holders to control the protocol. Outlined below is our Q1 2022 roadmap on how we plan to get there.
Decentralization
If you own a Ledger hardware wallet, you may have noticed the following engraved on the back of your device: vires in numeris–strength in numbers. Or as we like to say: 🦍 🦍 🦍 Apes Together Strong 🦍 🦍 🦍. As a small team, we recognized early on the power of community involvement in decision making. We were the first DeFi protocol on Celo to decentralize the allocation of liquidity pool incentives, empowering our stakers to decide for themselves how newly minted MOBI tokens should be distributed (or burned).
While this was a great achievement, pool incentives are one of many important decisions to be made–and consequently, powers to be held. Powers such as deciding what new tokens to support, liquidity pool compositions, swap fees, and control of the massive 300M MOBI treasury should not be held by a small group of people. Centralized control over these core functions does not pose a security risk, but it does limit how aggressive the MobiusDAO can be when it comes to new features, tokenomics, and more.
To ensure that the Mobius protocol will always be trustless and permissionless, we are fully decentralizing control of the protocol. This means there will be a governance contract deployed on the Celo network that allows veMOBI holders (stakers) to submit and vote on proposals–changes to the protocol. The governance contract will have full control of the protocol, mainly control over the Mobius treasury and admin power over all of our deployed contracts. We will continually transfer ownership of different pieces over the next week, and will post the transaction IDs on Twitter and Discord. Our target date for complete transfer is January 8.
The First Decentralized Protocol on Celo
Mobius has offered the first for many things on Celo–and now we are excited to be the first fully decentralized protocol on Celo! Unlike other DeFi protocols on Celo which are controlled by a 1–4 people (i.e. Moola Market, Ubeswap, and parts of Mobius), ours will be controlled by the hundreds of MOBI stakers / veMOBI holders. And unlike Celo governance which requires stakers to vote via command line, the Mobius DAO will ship with an easy to use interface for submitting and voting on proposals.
Limitations of Decentralizing
Decentralized governance poses many benefits, but also some drawbacks as well. Instead of just the core-team debating, approving, and implementing changes, it’s the entire Mobius community. Community members will have to step up and let their voices be heard when they want to enact change. This will require public discourse and debates amongst veMOBI holders to persuade the community one way or another before voting.
Reaching consensus on issues in a large public forum is no easy task–it’s a lengthy and cumbersome process–but it’s not just proposals that are affected. Partnerships will also be harder to come by without a single point of contact/control. For example, when we decentralized the decision making for pool rewards, the core-team lost the ability to leverage these incentives in partnerships (e.g. new pools with dual incentives from bridge provider).
In almost every scenario, centralized control is much faster than decentralized governance. While most decisions are not time-sensitive, some can be extremely urgent. Take for example the Synapse metapool exploit that prompted immediate action from the core-team to pause all swaps with and deposits to the pUSD/USDC-LP metapool. The team responded within hours of the first member becoming aware, which saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. If this were decentralized, it would take at least 5 days just to pause the pools and much longer to develop + implement a solution.
Emergency Powers Held by Core-Team Multisig
To protect against time-sensitive edge cases highlighted above, there are specific emergency powers that will be held by the Mobius multisig which include the ability to pause any pool and kill any gauge. Pausing a pool stops deposits and swap but still allowing for withdrawing liquidity and killing a pool stops rewards from going to that pool. We feel that this control is necessary for the safety of the protocol in case of a critical bug. We will also still be under control of the MOBI used for Ubeswap rewards, as this requires weekly refreshing that would be very difficult to do with governance. DeFi for the people rewards are also under the control of the Mobius multisig.
What Governance Controls
Control Over Funds
The Mobius Community Fund holds 300M MOBI meant to help with development and ecosystem growth. Similar to the Celo Community Fund and Uniswap Treasury, veMOBI holders will now control how these funds are allocated. One example of how this may be used is to fund the creation of a Convex fork built on Mobius. Another example is to fund a Mobius analytics dashboard, or strategic integration with a mobile wallet. Any project or initiative that provides value to the Mobius DAO should be considered. Projects can be funded in many different ways, such as traditional grants or more novel retro-active gifts. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming article on what we think about all of this, but it is ultimately up to the community to set the strategy and direction of the fund.
Control Over Core-Contracts
Mobius governance needs to be in control of all the Mobius swap pools and MOBI reward system. Each of these contracts have specific admin functionality. Each swap pool has an admin that can change parameters such as amplification coefficient and fees. Gauges, which are the farming contracts for Mobius, have two administrative functionalities that are important to note.
The first is the ability to kill the gauge, stopping rewards from being distributed to this contract. The second is the ability to set external rewards, which can allow us to change the contract for distributing Poof, Moo, Celo, etc.. Finally, the GaugeController contract manages all the gauges, directing MOBI rewards and allowing people to vote for future reward distributions. It has an admin that is able to add a gauge to the rewards, set a type for a gauge, and then set a reward amount for each type.
How Governance Works
Mobius governance works by allowing veMOBI token holders to submit and vote on proposals, which can alter smart contracts that are under the control of the Mobius governance contract. The basic building block of this governance platform is proposals. Proposals can be submitted by anyone who has at least the minimum threshold of votes, which is currently set to 1,000 veMOBI. Before submitting a proposal, we highly encourage you to share it with the community so they can ask questions and provide feedback.
After a delay period of 24 hours, the proposal can be voted on by all the veMOBI holders. The voting power for a proposal is proportional to the amount of veMOBI at the time the proposal was submitted. After the voting period, if the proposal has more for votes than the quorum and more for votes than against votes, then any wallet can send a transaction to queue the proposal in the timelock. After the timelock period has expired, any wallet can send a different transaction that executes the proposal on behalf of the timelock.
The Mechanics
This governance platform is a fork of Compound Finance’s Governor Bravo contracts. This comprises all the smart contracts that make up the DAO, plus several scripts for submitting, and moving proposals through the steps until execution. To learn more about the deployment, read here.
Roadmap for Q1
Despite no longer controlling protocol governance, the core-team will still play a key role in maintaining and upgrading Mobius. We will show everyone how to engage the community with and submit a proposal, help develop new technical features, and rally behind proposals we agree with.
Governance Interface
Earlier today we launched an interface for the Mobius DAO that allows MOBI stakers to submit and vote on proposals, even from their smartphone. Users can view proposal summaries, vote yes or no, and view the results of a proposal. For those with at least 50M veMOBI, we also offer an interface to submit proposals for vote. You can check out the interface here.
First Proposal: impactMarket Team Allocation
Our first governance proposal will be to allocate a large amount of MOBI tokens to the impactMarket DAO. For those that don’t already know, impactMarket is the world’s largest privately funded universal basic income (UBI) initiative — and it’s built on Celo! impactMarket coordinates transparent, cross-border donations using a hybrid trusted/trustless model. Community managers around the world (i.e. NGOs) submit UBI proposals for local communities to receive X Celo Dollars per day over some duration. Community managers are responsible for performing attestations and onboarding users. Once a beneficiary has been onboarded + attested (trusted), they can start receiving direct payments from donors on impactMarket (trustless).
The team recently released their governance token, $PACT, which people can earn into existence by donating on their platform. $PACT can be used to govern the future direction of the impactMarket protocol, which functions as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). We believe that an allocation to the impactMarket DAO helps decentralize funds, empower them to easily earn yield with idle assets on Mobius. More importantly, it sends an important message to DeFi builders and stakeholders that profits and governance can (and maybe should) be strategically allocated to those doing the most to create the conditions of prosperity for everyone. Or maybe we are crazy :)
Before officially submitting our proposal, we will engage with the community via Discord and Twitter to get feedback and opinions. This allows voters to ask questions and conduct proper due diligence before the voting deadline–and again, we strongly encourage all prospective proposers to do the same.
MOBI Buy-Back Program
With each swap on Mobius, a portion of the swap fees are reserved for an admin fund. This fund has been untouched for the first few months of the protocol. Other similar protocols have very successfully used this fund to buy back their own governance token from the open market and return it to existing stakers. We think this a great opportunity for MOBI stakers to gain a share of the profits from the protocol that they are supporting. While it was possible to implement this for the last few months, regulatory risks have caused us to hold off efforts. Now it will be possible for any MOBI staker to propose the buyback, which will then be executed autonomously.
New Pools: Terra UST, Token Standards, and more!
Over the last month we have been engaging various bridge providers to source a Terra <> Celo bridge. We are extremely excited to announce that several bridge providers are almost ready to go live with this integration. In fact, the first Terra UST has already been bridged to Celo and is in our possession. Since multiple bridges will soon support UST on Celo, the community is faced with an important decision: which bridges should we deploy a pool for? To mitigate this decision and subsequent vendor lock-in, we will be proposing that Mobius adopts an open token standard–in collaboration with a consortium of top bridges and cross-chain DeFi protocols.
Better Community Engagement
Communication will be more important than ever as we decentralize. We will start holding weekly community calls in Discord and on Twitter to provide a real-time public communication channel for our members. To stay up to date on these events, be sure to follow/join our socials linked below.
About Mobius
Mobius is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) on Celo based on the StableSwap invariant that specializes in low-slippage swaps between price-stable tokens. Mobius also includes a bridge interface to allow users to easily migrate their assets, thereby paving the way for more capital to be bridged to Celo and efficiently swapped for other assets with the same underlying.
