ACryptoS DAO Vote: Should we publish the source code of our Venus Vaults’ Strategies?
We were the first to launch Vaults farming on Venus Protocol, and remained the only ones for 3 weeks after, accumulating a TVL of more than $2M in our Venus Vaults alone. We have published all our smart contract code before, but we did not publish the source code of our Venus Vaults’ Strategies at first, as I was curious to see how much of a competitive edge it would give us. Now that Beefy has released their Venus Vaults, we should now review if we would like to publish our source codes.
Considerations
Beefy’s Venus implementation is a relatively poorer one. We can see this before reviewing their source codes:
- Their deposit transactions cost ~3X more in gas fees compared to ours.
- Their withdraw transactions cost ~4.5X more in gas fees compared to ours.
- Their harvest transactions cost ~5X more in gas fees compared to ours.
This means we can harvest and compound our assets 5 times more often than them at the same cost, and their users pay many times more in gas fees compared to ours.
More importantly, they are achieving a leverage (ratio of total supply + borrow on Venus, to the principal) of ~3X compared to ~3.67X on our Vaults, which means our Vaults have a yield advantage of about 23.3% above theirs.
Looking at their source code, they can adjust the leverage somewhat in a coarse fashion, but any increase in leverage would result in an exponential increase in their already expensive gas costs.
It is my assessment that to match the efficiency and efficacy of our Vaults, Beefy would need to almost completely rewrite their Strategy, essentially taking a fundamentally different approach. I feel it is likely they would not be able to achieve this without outside help, if we do not release our source codes.
OTOH, if we do release our source codes, it will almost surely be immediately copied, and we would lose any competitive advantage from it. However, we may attract more funds from investors who were previously unwilling to deposit into unpublished contracts, and may increase overall trust and transparency in our protocol.
Background
We’ve had a few requests to publish the source codes of our Venus Vaults’ Strategies since they went live, including somewhat aggressive ones from Beefy devs and admins, accompanied by disparaging comments belittling us for believing our strategies gave us an edge.
Wait what
“Roman” is a Beefy dev? Interesting…
You’re welcome.
We’ve also had some feedback from the community who felt we should keep the source unpublished. Although it did make me feel a little uneasy.
We continued to get pressure to publish the source shortly after Beefy’s first Venus Vault went live, so I promised to put this to a vote.
Vote here: https://vote.acryptos.com/#/acryptos/proposal/QmbVJoGoiGLU6e6cNyHeDR6WJYQmQdrBNiFEbGaYEb6SK6
