I am confused that some worry that TVL goes down. The incentives for REN are based 100% on darknode rewards, so rewards is ALL that counts. TVL is just a liability that earns us nothing. So I hope it is consensus that we need to maximise rewards: Volume*fee.
No-one really knows how higher or lower fees will affect volume. So we need to experiment until we see a significant impact. And then we need to go back and forth around the sweet spot to see if our experiment is reproducible. So far, increasing the fee was very successful and I don’t see why we should not continue the experiment as suggested in RIP 1:
To be sure that sweet spot is not a local maximum, I would throw in cheap discount epochs every now and then to check our assumptions.
I agree that BURN should also be experimented with, but we need to master MINT first. Doing both at the same time is a mess. I think it i also fair to let people out for cheap as long as we are still in the early stages.
Regarding use cases that are only viable with low fees: Is it possible to offer special rates to certain actors/addresses? Like whitelisting an arb bot, 1inch, 0cf… Maybe even discounts for an introduction period…
EDIT: I see such concepts are discussed here: RFC-000-014: Time-based burn (and thus total) fee