Pollen Dev Blog — Second edition
Today we reflect upon the learnings from the first phase of the beta, announce our plan to redeploy the protocol on Weds 2nd February with optimisations and refresh the contest in a fair way for all.
THE LINK TO THE BETA
If you are on the whitelist and wish to submit a portfolio, or just curious to see the protocol, visit: https://beta.pollen.id/
Join the Discord to discuss the beta and get help if you need it.
If you missed Dev Blog — First Edition
Please start here. TLDR, the purpose of the beta and contest is to improve the ability of the protocol to derive good quality signals from the ‘Pollenators’ to balance ‘Asset Pools’ when mainnet goes live.
It’s a good read that explains a lot, so please, have a read, and return here afterward.
In this blog:
What we learned from the first phase of the Whitelist Beta, on testnet.
Notice of our plan to re-deploy the beta and refresh the contest on Wednesday 2nd February.
Announcement of upcoming Community Reward Program.
What we learned from the first phase
Thank you to all those in Discord and Telegram, the feedback from the community has been invaluable. Over the course of the week we have implemented many tweaks and changes based upon your suggestions.
There have been two significant observations.
Observation one:
Frequency of Virtual Portfolio rebalancing was significantly more often than hypothesised.
During the first week of testing, many Pollenators rebalanced numerous times per day, pursuing a scalping strategy. There is nothing wrong with this strategy for traders, but for management of large Asset Pools it does create challenges.
If you read Dev Blog — First Edition we explain that in the process of managing their virtual portfolios, Pollenators are working together to balance Asset Pools based on their collectivised intelligence.
The requirement to efficiently purchase and hold tokens for the upcoming Asset Pools (based on the signals aggregated from the best performing Pollenators) places a constraint on Pollenation. When tokens are bought and sold for the Asset Pools, slippage and trading fees will occur. Updating assets at this frequency captures short terms price moves, but the friction of getting in and out of position will negate these gains. We therefore have adjusted the beta to encourage longer time preference when balancing assets.
We have added a cool-down period between an individual user’s portfolio balances to allow for a more suitable data feed for the Asset Pools. It is set for one hour, but we will potentially adjust this up or down as we build the dataset and continue to refine.
Observation two:
The price data feeds initially employed for the beta were not suitable
There are a very limited number of Chainlink price feeds available for Avalanche tokens on testnet (list here).
We used feeds from various sources to provide prices for the testnet beta so we can offer a varied portfolio of Avalanche tokens. However many of you observed that some of these feeds update slowly or unusually compared to live market price, and in the opening days were able to exploit the difference to scalp in and out of positions. Hats off to you, this is why we ran the beta. Those who reported the observation to the team will be contacted individually regarding a community program reward.
During the opening days we made some changes to react to these two factors. We added a cool down window between rebalances and increased the frequency at which we called the reference prices. These changes already had an impact on the quality of the aggregate data derived from the Pollenators but we are now baking them into the system from the start of a refresed test phase.
To further improve these, additional changes are being added in a beta V1.1 redeployment:
- The limited Chainlink feeds available on Avalanche Fuji testnet will be supplemented with CMC price feeds. In the opening days of the beta some tokens had CoinGecko price feeds, but due to the way they are calculated (based on volume), they are not as reliable and accurate for the beta protocol.
- Removal of low volume tokens without multiple vendors (CEX and DEX) that experience extreme minute by minute volatility. We are seeking solutions to re-add in later deployments.
Summary of observations and the next steps.
It is clear that the two observations are linked. Many beta testing Pollenators rebalanced frequently to capture short term price swings, based on their ability to monitor price elsewhere and act before the protocol updated.
The team discussed multiple scenarios and decided upon the following; we will divide the testnet beta into phases, and pay out the prize fund pro rata.
Notice of change to whitelist Pollen beta contest
The beta on testnet will be divided into phases:
Phase 1 is the period from launch on Thursday 20th until Friday 28th January.
A snapshot of the leaderboard was taken at 16:00 UTC on Friday 28th, and the top 100 will receive a pro-rata share of the prize pool based upon the original prize weightings in the Contest FAQ. For this period of the beta, the prize pot shared will be 1/7 of the total, amounting to 31,428.5 PLN. This will be shared out amongst the top 100 in our snapshot.
Phase 2 is the period starting from Wednesday 2nd February 16:00 UTC.
The phase will run until 31st March, or to the point that we observe something that requires the leaderboard to be reset. The purpose of the beta testnet is to make discoveries and acquire usable data for protocol development, so if the circumstances occur we will update the contest in a way we believe is fairest to all.
The prize fund remaining is 218,573.5 PLN tokens for remaining phases of the whitelist beta.
How will prize tokens from beta Phase 1 be awarded?
Tokens will be airdropped straight to mainnet wallets for the addresses used in the beta. We cannot accommodate changes for regulatory and security reasons.
The tokens will be supplied as follows: 20% immediately, then a further 20% each month for four months. The airdrop will be the business day closest to the 16th of the month, starting Wednesday 16th February.
To wrap up
Thanks to all Pollenators who are actively engaged in testing the beta and participating in the contest.
The snapshot of the leaderboard for Phase 1 has been taken and winners will be airdropped according to the above schedule. The contest is now on pause until Wednesday 2nd February, 16:00 UTC. At that time the beta will be deployed with the changes shared above, the leaderboard will be reset, and Whitelist Beta Phase 2 will begin with 214, 286 PLN tokens remaining in the prize fund. Pollenate afresh with a reset leaderboard!
Please note: new PLN testnet tokens will be airdropped to your wallet, and the contract will be published here and on the DApp itself.
Upcoming Community Reward Program
Two things to say here. Those who approached the team to work with us to discuss the challenge with price feeds will be sent a reward. Thank you for the amazing detail shared in your reports.
Secondly, we are making our ‘Community Reward Program’ official. A separate explainer will be published, but there is an open call for feature ideas, user experience feedback and for finding bugs. We will pick out community members each month and send them token(s) of our appreciation.
Please jump into the Discord to continue the conversation.
About Pollen DeFi
Pollen is a first-of-its-kind Virtual Trading Arena where the community holds all the power. Decentralized finance is designed to be by the people, for the people, and Pollen is acknowledging this by building the first, truly decentralized platform for measuring trading skill and on-chain reputation with its Pollen Virtual suite of products.
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