Radial Finance (🔘,🔘): Automated coordination strategies to maximize yield on Solidly. Inspired by Convex.

// cool stock image, let’s get a designer with some skills next time

Educational note: if you want to know the main differences between Andre’s ve(3,3) model and the Solidly design — look out for the (1 to 6) numeric notes in the article below. Enjoy the read, and get ready!

Bootstrap ceremony is here:

🔘 if Radial gets the top-20, 5% will be distributed to this bootstrap stage
🔘 if Radial doesn’t get the top-20, 1% will be distributed to this bootstrap

Radial

Andre Cronje recently released a series of blog posts detailing the design and rationale behind his new ve(3,3) model–based protocol Solidly:

ve(3,3)

to be deployed on Fantom following it by open-sourcing its codebase:

GitHub - andrecronje/solidly

The protocol, most importantly from a yield farmer or incentive-maximizooooor’s perspective, introduces the following two novel characteristics providing a great avenue to tickle a game theorists senses:

• (1) Weekly emissions are not static, they are based on Prisoner’s Dilemma-like model. Solidly token’s total weekly emission is dynamic, it reduces when the proportion of ve locked increases and increases when little ve is locked.
• (2) veLockers keep up with inflation receiving extra locked ve with the same weight-period into the same NFT. The protocol ensures that ve lockers keep up with inflation by receiving a proportional share of emissions, also in the locked ve form. And yes, veLockers are modelled as transferrable NFTs (3).

This is clearly different from Curve where the emissions do not vary with the amount of veCRV locked and veCRV holders who aren’t liquidity providers (LPs) do not receive any share of CRV emissions, getting gradually diluted.

And this yet another difference in Solidly, which aims to incentivize voting by veLocking for the most productive and highly-utilized pools. It achieves so by streaming the split of LP fees only to veLockers which have voted for those respective pools (4). As such, if you vote like a monkey, you will be stripped off the LP fees as a veLocker. Moreover, it makes the bribe system more expensive for new projects entering, as “useless pools” make pools.

Llama Airforce

As such, Andre’s design changes some of the assumptions and mechanics required to survive & prosper — Radial Finance is here to help you!

While (3,3) has been wildly popularized in crypto communities by Olympus and its forks, ve(3,3) in fact has little to do with it. It’s a Uniswap V2/V3 with more interesting gauges and inflation mechanism (5).

There are optimizations making it a hybrid between Uni V2 and V3 perhaps, while the gauge model is inspired by Curve. Let’s wait and see for the final protocol to discuss this properly.

ve(3,3) is not about Olympus, it’s about the Prisoner’s Dilemma — DreCron Dilemma (6)

Ultimately, it’s an adaptation of Prisoner’s Dilemma where payoffs of various actors vary based on how well they coordinate with competitors. More specifically, it’s an iterated game for most players which significantly alters the Nash Equilibria from a single instance Prisoner’s Dilemma and thus the dominant strategy. While Andre made Solidly (3,3) by ensuring protocols can integrate and earn fees from Solidly, what would be interesting to see is if the players treat it as a finite move game or as an infinite move or maybe just defer all the decision making to Radial.

Cooperation (3,3). Defection (-1,-1).

As individual LPs and veLockers, it would be a nightmare to balance out the system parameters and figure out at what ratios to lock-unlock. You likely will be very suboptimal doing this yourself! Radial Finance is here to help you figure out the best collaborative approach to ve(3,3) while maximizing your yield!

Radial Finance: Convex-like for ve(3,3)

Radial is a Convex-like protocol which enables LPs to receive boosted rewards while eliminating the need to lock ve themselves. In addition to optimizing for gas (albeit being a small amount on Fantom), managing proportion of ve locked to that given out as rewards to optimally boost yields and promote favourable gauges — the protocol acts as a focal point of coordination between LPs, DAOs/protocols and various ve lockers.

In order to appreciate this tension, consider the following scenarios:

• LPs want to maximize yield (APR). Weekly emissions are maximum when little ve is locked.
• Given ve lockers receive a share of weekly emissions to beat inflation, the owners of the little ve that is locked when emissions are high increase their network share compared to other potential lockers of ve causing the latter to lock ve as well to not be diluted by competitors.
• When multiple uncoordinated ve lockers compete, they all end up locking more ve to maintain network share ultimately reducing the weekly emission and consequently leading to low APRs for both LPs and themselves. The same scenario plays out when LPs compete to lock ve to boost rewards.
• A lower net emission doesn’t only limit boosted rewards for existing LPs but also reduces expected rewards for new LPs & pools that are yet to join.

Radial thus provides a trustless solution to this game of iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma to turn non-cooperative mayhem to a cooperative (3,3).

Why the name the protocol — Radial?

Curve arguably introduced more math into dapps than any project before. In Convex, the emissions are focused on a single static point to maximize reward boosts and further ensure highest utilization of the boost.

Radial however requires dynamicity based on the actions of fellow players outside the protocol. The name quite closely corresponds to its ethos: as the sphere size and mass changes, the optimal target action shifts as well. As such, Radial Finance is here to help ve(3,3) community to find the most profitable return rate with highest efficiency.

What will Radial help Solidly users with?

We believe most LPs and ve lockers will find it time consuming if not outright hard and complicated to optimally play the ve wars on Solidly due to inherent distrust in today’s societies. However, trust issues are what smart contracts were meant to obliviate. And that’s exactly what Radial does.

Radial features:

• Acquisition of locked ve to boost LP rewards;
• Auto-locking ve for compounding rewards;

This will follow in the next posts. For now, docs are being edited to be uploaded and discussed soon. In the next posts, we will dive into:

• Math behind ve(3,3) accounting and resources to keep track of it.
• Multisig: who it is, what’s the plan, and so on.
• Launch strategy: amassing a SOLID stack to keep Radial’s weight in the ecosyetem. In the same piece, we’ll talk about the community distribution & DAO portion incentivizing growth.

Stay tuned for the launch details in a few hours. It will be a very quick timeline to launch & DAO! The interface opens up soon…

Link up with Radial!

• website: https://www.radialfinance.org/
• docs: https://docs.radialfinance.org/
• twitter: https://twitter.com/RadialFinance
• discord: https://discord.gg/S3FrrjzatN
• github: *being polished, check in a few hours*