Hello Sundae DAO Community!
This is following up from this discussion relating to using a portion of the protocol fees to pay for the scoopers who run the protocol.
Context
The scoopers operate infrastructure for the Sundae protocol that costs roughly 16500 ADA a month at current prices. This proposal establishes a payment plan, and directs the treasury administrator to make payments according to that plan.
Background
In Sundae v1, 100% of all fees collected on each trade were paid to the scoopers. Because of the overhead associated with Plutus v1 and the design of Sundae v1, this was just marginally profitable for the scoopers, and generated around 16500 ADA per month after the fees required to collect all of that ADA. Additionally, scoopers cover the transaction fees, which are projected to be around 4k ADA a month, so we should ensure that those are covered as well as a baseline.
In Sundae v3, 100% of all fees collected on each trade are allocated to the protocol, with the assumption that the DAO can then vote to establish a recurring payment of the scoopers.
To avoid a recurring DAO vote from the Clarity DAO treasury, the protocol has the ability to set an “allowance”, which is a portion of the protocol fees that are allowed to be kept by the treasury administrator to cover recurring costs such as this. This can be re-evaluated regularly as the projected protocol revenue changes.
Currently the protocol is averaging around 230 ADA per day from trades, with the 50% discount; There is also 5.4M ADA earning staking rewards for the protocol, which are expected to generate an average of 13,050 ADA per month in staking rewards.
This creates a projection of around 19,950 ADA per month in protocol revenue, or roughly 26,850 ADA per month once the 50% discount wears off.
In deciding how to distribute this payment among the scoopers themselves, we should consider which incentives and behaviors we want to promote. In particular, given the 20s gap between blocks, the process of creating and submitting a scoop is not CPU bound or particularly time sensitive. We should avoid creating a situation where scoopers run more and more expensive software in an effort to compete with each other over the last few milliseconds, driving their own profitability down.
The value provided by a diverse set of scoopers is the availability; if some scoopers go down, there are others there to pick up the slack.
For this reason we propose distributing rewards based on legitimately attempted scoops, rather than successful scoops. To this end, the scooper software can be modified to send each attempted scoop to a Sundae Labs server, and Sundae Labs can validate and track which scoopers are online and attempted a specific scoop.
Decision
With the above in mind, we propose the following vote for the Sundae DAO:
- Set the protocol “Allowance” property to 51%
- Pay the scoopers on the 1st of every month the lesser amount between:
- 50% of protocol revenue from the previous month
- 20k ADA + 10% of the protocol revenue from the previous month
- [NOTE: I’ve updated this value to account for the transaction fees that scoopers are paying out of pocket as well]
- Direct the Treasury Administrator (currently Sundae Labs) to distribute these payments to the scoopers in proportion to the number of scoops they each attempted
- In return for running the infrastructure to pay the scoopers, pay the Treasury Administrator the lesser amount between:
- 1% of protocol revenue from the previous month
- 3000 ADA
The governance vote will have the following two options:
- Vote YES to adopt the scheme above
- Vote NO to not adopt the scheme above and continue discussions
Are you interested in voting in an on-chain governance vote to this effect?
- Interested