Gearbox Update: March-May 2022
Hey there, GEARheads, it has been an exciting few weeks since the last time we wrote an update. Gearbox DAO has been coming together beautifully:
- more active and contributing members, 10+ full time now;
- community GEAR delegation framework for governance;
- active proposals on contributor compensations;
- great traction from developers at ETH Amsterdam;
- HackMoney 2022 participation;
- limits have gone up, new assets have been added;
- snapshot votes for the utilization curve;
- v2 on the horizon, and more…
Let’s dig in on what has been happening and what’s next!
DAO Notion page with more information & reporting
Pool Limits & TVL to Double +
We have not been optimizing for TVL in the past few months, granted there wasn’t much to do with V1. But with the new Credit Account limits (up to $500,000) it has at least become interesting to test-in-prod more! To make that possible, TVL had to start growing a bit — and it did. The pool size grew by about 2 times in the last couple of weeks, but still has a way to go…
Has there been some promise of GEARs?
As we get closer to V2 and the new adapters, it’s important to get the traction going. Based on that thought, there has been a vague discussion about retroactive LM rewards for LPs and a little bit for CA testers…
Next to that, we have just finished a vote to increase the max borrow amount by 12 times. This is to ensure whales looking to take large position sizes have the liquidity they need. What can you do with Credit Accounts right now?
New assets in AllowedList
- short/long BTC or ETH
- farm in Yearn’s yvUSDC or yvDAI
- long CRV, LDO, SUSHI, and more
- portfolio margin some of the assets in AllowedList
- overall, prepare for V2 and new protocols!
Check the full AllowedList of assets and contracts here:
We observed 4 liquidator bots live at most times, that have done 23 liquidation events so far. We anticipate more liquidators to be on-boarded as the system scales. So far, they have worked well and diligently.
Try the dApp, provide liquidity, and be part of early governance ->
Community Expanding Faster Than The Universe
Bad physics jokes aside, we have been rapidly adding members to the community. The latest community call had close to 150 people joining in. There are close to 2400 people joining in the conversation at Discord. We believe in a DAO-first approach to community building.
What this means is if you wish to contribute to the product, all you need to do is join in our Discord and begin contributing. We are currently in the process of discussing compensations for core contributors. (seems like the author of this piece will be an unpaid intern). If you have worked in HR capacities in the past and have strong opinions — hop in the discussion here.
Here’s the TL-DR you need to know:
- Selected contributors will have a cap on the compensation they receive per month. It will be based off a transparent hourly rate. They receive an additional GEAR token component to their compensation. These tokens are vested over a few months.
- The value of a token compensation will be based off a FDV of $250 million initially. Once the token is freely tradable, it will be based on a weekly TWAP of the token in the week prior to the payments being made.
Delegation Season
As of writing this, there are over 8,000 token holders. Token holders cannot transfer their GEARs yet so all of these are users that have “earned” their place in the network through pro-active contribution. This is higher than certain listed assets in the markets have in terms of traction. Naturally — this also means we are now able to extend the governance modules of the protocol.
All users are usually not active for voting. Sometimes, it could even be that users would rather rely on a fellow member’s experience instead. This is why we have released support for community delegates.
Here’s what you need to know regarding delegation:
- Current list of delegates can be tracked here.
- Find the list of delegates or apply to be a delegate through the delegate application form at the bottom of our documentation page.
Get Paid To Break Gearbox
DeFi is a risky game. Protocols get broken, and users lose their money. There is no permanent fix to this apart from being super careful and spending on security non-trivial amounts of funds… which is what we have been doing.
We have allocated heavily towards a bug bounty program which has already paid out a considerable sum of money through Immunefi. Recently a user named nnez detected a critical bug in our contracts and reported it to the team at Immunefi. The whole process from initial report to bug bounty being paid and a fix being deployed took roughly 30 hours:
If you are a hacker with interest in bounties, consider checking our Immunefi page. We pay +$150k depending on the threat level, and can do more.
ETH Amsterdam & Community Recap
Speaking of all things dev, Gearbox had amazing traction with developers at ETH Global! Check the recap of what was built & presented a week ago:
- Tokenized Gearbox strategies with #ERC4626 to simplify access
- An infrastructure with a simple trend following strategy
- Enabling leveraged LPing on UniswapV2-like DEXes
HackMoney 2022 also had a very cool winner, check it out here!
Minor Updates & Media Mentions
- Catch ivangbi discussing all things governance at TechCrunch recently
- Or chatting about governance at ETHGlobal TV
- A thread based breakdown of Gearbox by N3l Intern
- Research on new protocols and assets done by the risk committee
Also, appreciate the mentions from the following outlets in the recent past! Mentions by LobsterDAO, ETH Denver, Consensys, and DeFiant:
What’s next?
As you might have seen some clues on the title picture, we are not far away from new protocol adapters & utilization… v2, higher APY and GEAR itself! To share a bit on what has been happening on the tech side (you can find it all in Discord’s citadel chats where DAO workers grind!)
- a degen mode with a select list of wallets that will get access to V2 first;
- adapters for Lido, Curve LP, and more vaults for Yearn;
- LP incentivization program (wink: it already started up a bit)…
Join the next DAO Community Call on May 10, Tuesday 🔉
How To Get Involved?
If you would like to join — just get involved on Discord. Discuss, research, lead and share. Call contributors out on their bullshit and collaborate on making things better. Here is how you can follow developments:
- Website: https://gearbox.fi/
- dApp: https://app.gearbox.fi/
- User Docs: https://docs.gearbox.finance/
- Developer Docs: https://dev.gearbox.fi/
- Forum: https://gov.gearbox.fi/t/start-here-forum-rules/
- Blog: https://medium.com/@gearboxprotocol
- Github: https://github.com/Gearbox-protocol
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/GearboxProtocol
- Snapshot page: https://snapshot.org/#/gearbox.eth
- And, of course, the DAO working docs:
