Introducing Aquarius Bribes
A decentralized way for anyone to reward liquidity voters
It’s only been three months since Aquarius liquidity rewards went live, with their effects on market liquidity visible. In response, many projects looked for ways to attract more votes from AQUA holders, moving market pairs up the Reward Zone helping increase hourly AMM & SDEX rewards.
The most popular technique has been “bribes”. The term bribe has been used in various DeFi communities for a while to describe the practice of buying votes.
Bribes offer a way for voters to earn incentives just by voting, with no need to place funds at risk inside of AMMs or order books. Essentially, bribes offer another utility benefit to AQUA holders.
The current state of ecosystem bribing
As voting happens on the blockchain with all data public and verifiable, any project can start tracking and rewarding wallets who vote for their markets. Open, traceable data is why bribes exist in similar ecosystems on other networks.
The projects that wish to offer bribes need to invest time & effort building tools in tracking Aquarius voters and distributing bribes accordingly. A few projects came up with the implementation of bribes, but there are dozens more that can not afford to spread their resources building add-ons for Aquarius. Also, nobody benefits from having multiple projects re-invent the wheel and roll their own implementation of bribes functionality.
So, how can Aquarius adapt & incorporate bribes into the ecosystem, create a fair playing field for all projects, improve AQUAnomics, and make Aquarius more attractive for Stellar projects to adopt?
🎁 Aquarius Bribes
We have brought bribes native to the Aquarius protocol, allowing everyone to view voting incentives all in one place. At the same time, through a simple interface, anyone can quickly set up and distribute bribe rewards on desired markets.
Discover Aquarius Bribes at vote.aqua.network/bribes
The key advantages for bringing bribes native to Aquarius are:
・Inclusivity — Reduced complexity to implement bribes! Aquarius provides all the resources to select and deploy bribes to markets. Any project can now offer bribes by spending less than 5 minutes.
・No extra coding — There is no need to build complex vote tracking and distribution logic into projects. Bribes can be created directly from the Aquarius interface without coding at all.
・Open participation — Anyone can get involved. Projects and users can quickly and effectively deploy bribes in a few simple steps using the permissionless, automated process.
・Guarantees for voters — Using Aquarius bribes guarantees distribution to users. Currently, projects can promise bribes but later stop or reduce them, meaning voters might lock AQUA for prolonged periods but end up with lowered or no rewards.
・Transparency and visibility— Aquarius Bribes will be visible to users on vote.aqua.network, making it easy to compare all bribe offerings, including the details on bribe amounts and their schedule.
・Flexibility — Any Stellar asset can be used as a bribe. Projects could use their token to provide bribes or use popular assets such as XLM or USDC. Even a mixture of tokens can be used as there is no limit to the number of tokens that can get assigned per market.
How bribes work
Using the interface, users allocate bribes to their chosen markets by selecting a market, the size of rewards, and the time period for the bribe.
From a technical standpoint, creating a bribe initiates a new claimable balance payment. The claimable balance has two Stellar wallets as claimants. One of them is the Aquarius bribe collection address, with the second being the indicator towards which market the bribes inside the claimable balance get allocated. It is also possible to schedule bribes in advance (e.g., several weeks ahead). Such schedules are also enforced on-chain through the use of timestamp predicates.
Every week on Sunday, the Aquarius bribe collector will claim all available claimable balances for the coming week. The Aquarius bribe collection address distributes all collected bribes to voters through the following Monday-Sunday.
The flow for voting will stay mostly the same. If a user decides to vote for a market pair offering bribes, they should expect to get their share of voting rewards daily.
Multiple tokens can get assigned as bribes for a market. Since bribes get delivered through standard Stellar payments, a user can choose not to accept certain bribe tokens by not making a trustline to the token.
♒️ Minimum bribe size & AQUA conversion
There is a minimum requirement for a bribe value to ensure bribes provide meaningful voting incentives and protect voters from volatility.
The bribe collector will only accept bribes that have a value of at least 100,000 AQUA, ensuring that the minimum daily bribe budget for the voters is at least 14,285 AQUA.
When bribes are collected, Aquarius will make a path payment, converting part of the bribe into 100,000 AQUA. The purchased 100K AQUA + the remainder of the chosen reward token will be distributed to voters.
If Aquarius can’t convert to at least 100,000 AQUA, the bribe collector will reject the bribe as it’s too small. Instead, Aquarius will send the bribe back to the sender, and no reward will be visible on the Aquarius voting website.
Say there are 1,000,000 XYZ tokens offered as a bribe.
If it takes 100,000 XYZ to buy 100,000 AQUA, there will be 900,000 XYZ left for Aquarius bribes to distribute to voters. The 100,000 AQUA will also be distributed to voters of the same market, effectively guaranteeing a minimum bribe value for voters in AQUA and protecting against the volatility of XYZ token.
This process creates a min value threshold for those who wish to offer bribes and acquire more visibility on Aquarius and helps protect against spam and dust bribe offers.
🚀 Launch information & promotion!
We have already launched the website, which users can find at vote.aqua.network/bribes.
Aquarius Bribes will start to distribute from February 28th, with projects already able to prepare bribes in advance.
As a launch bonus, we have dedicated 10 Million AQUA from the team’s wallet to promote bribes within the ecosystem! Every time a valid bribe for a NEW market pair gets created, we will add 100,000 AQUA bribe on top until the 10M AQUA runs out. That means the first 100 markets to have bribes initiated on them will receive an extra 100,000 AQUA bribe.
🗞 Subscribe & Follow
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