Introducing Radial
Good afternoon, friends. We are back with an exciting update for Radial.
A few weeks have passed since Solidly’s launch by Andre. As you know, not all things went according to plan with Solidly. The initial bugs in code (we will come back to that later) and the worsening marketing conditions over time, have made a hole in many ecosystem projects’ plans. After all, how can one coordinate efficiently if the framework has certain issues at its core?
Coordination under attack?
Before we dig in, let’s spend a minute rehashing the events of the past. With Andre publicly leaving the ecosystem, the interface was handed over to Solidex, and other projects he worked on were given to other teams to maintain. As the hype wound down, some projects have merged, and some even left Fantom ecosystem to try their luck elsewhere. For example, Velodrome on Optimism trying to push a modified Solidly version with no clear outcome, and Solidly forks further appearing on Polygon, BSC and other chains. All with no success.
As for Radial, we were slowly working on releasing the product, although constantly updating the codebase to learn from others’ mistakes. Meanwhile, one of Fantom’s main degenerates, Roosh, attempted a few buy-out events for the veNFT that Radial community owns. It seemed that some community members wanted to entertain the idea, so we facilitated the conversations, but nothing productive came out of it despite multiple attempts.
As the conversations were ongoing, Roosh’s collateral was liquidated time and time again. At this point, we are not expecting the buyout to happen in the near future, but any member is always free to ask for help in coordinating any such process. Overall, here are some of the ideas that were brought forward by the community in the past few weeks, see twitter.
Anyway, our ultimate goal isn’t to complain. Our goal is to understand the problem and deliver an efficient tool for the ecosystem we set out to build at the beginning. In this regard, the community once again came to our help and suggested problems in Solidly that were worth tackling to benefit not only the community but the ecosystem at large. Let’s go through the issues and possible solutions, together with what we are building.
Restoring coordination
When talking about coordination restoration, let’s point out the main issues:
- Solidly’s bribing bug (internal Votium system)
That is the case where trying to replicate votium inherently in Solidly has resulted in being impossible. Solidly’s native implementation bribes voters for the amount of time they vote for a pool. However, only the final votes at the end of the emission count towards emissions. This design allows voters to receive bribes from various pools and then change their vote at the last moment making the bribing pool give away bribes without receiving any benefit.
A simple solution to this issue is to of course redeploy the Solidly protocol which either:
(a) Bases emissions for pools on the time they are voted for; or
(b) Gives bribes based on the final votes that count towards emissions; or
(c) Limit voting to once per epoch
Since it was recognized that redeploying Solidly on other chains was a futile effort and Andre’s implementation on Fantom would most likely be considered as the canon, we figured allowing users to vote through a layer 2 protocol like Votium was the best way to proceed.
Radial, thus, allows RDL to be locked in the form of vlRDL who can then direct votes of the NFT owned by the Radial community along with RDL/wFTM LP lockers to receive correctly calculated governance coordination incentives (“bribes”) based on votes at the end of the epoch.
2. Votium’s off-chain implementation
Votium currently relies on off-chain servers to aggregate voting preferences and then distribute “bribes”. This is of course not an ideal implementation for a decentralized protocol. Votium is designed the way it is because it allows bribing token holders who place their votes even outside Votium protocol, events that the Votium contracts can’t detect.
Radial makes a trade off where all bribing calculations and distributions happen on-chain but mandates that votes be placed through the Radial contracts so that coordination incentives can be distributed appropriately. Of course, this restriction doesn’t affect Solidly and voters may still choose to vote outside Radial for whatever reason.
3. Whitelisting pools on Solidly
Solidly currently places a hefty fee in SOLID to whitelist new pools. Without a bribing mechanism in place to do the same, protocols are required to communicate with NFT owners onchain to get their pool whitelisted or to buy SOLID on market which is quite illiquid.
Radial allows anyone to incentivize vlRDL and RDL/wFTM LP lockers to get their pool whitelisted thus opening up access of Solidly to new trading pairs.
4. Moving Radial’s veNFT to contracts
So far, we have been diligently claiming weekly SOLID rewards, which architecturally add up to the veNFT Radial’s multisig first received from Andre. The voting was always 100% for the RDL/wFTM pool. Going forward, the protocol will direct 10% of the votes for the RDL/wFTM pool while the rest can be determined by vlRDL and RDL/wFTM LP lockers.
Moreover, the control of the NFT will be moved from the multisig to the contract removing any apprehension around the ownership of the NFT (a possible emergency withdrawal function that can be called by lobsterDAO multisig is being contemplated for unforeseen circumstances). This move also has the benefit of providing boosted SOLID rewards to LPs.
5. Empowering LPs
RDL/wFTM LPs in Radial have long complained about the inability to vote on Snapshot. As shared earlier, Radial now allows LPs to lock their LP tokens similar to vlRDL to vote for both directing the NFTs votes and whitelisting new pool pairs to receive incentives. Since the LP tokens are locked in the same contract as Radial’s veNFT, LPs receive boosted SOLID rewards (the NFT dedicates at least 10% of the NFT’s voting power towards the pool; LPs can always sponsor governance incentives for a greater % of votes).
In addition to RDL/wFTM, other Solidly LP tokens can also be locked to receive boosted rewards for a fixed fee that will be directed to the treasury (whose use is left to the community to decide).
Repo: https://github.com/RadialFinance/Contracts
We hope Radial will help Fantom’s ecosystem and Solidly to restore coordination efforts.
