RFC-000-028: Adding more utilities to REN

Requests For Comment | RFC
1

Name: Adding more utilities to REN
Category: Government
Status: Draft
Scope: To increase our investment value.

Overview

Since there is only one utility of REN token which is to run a Darknode to collect network fees and participate in the governance, I propose to add as much as we can more utilities to REN.

Increasing the value of our investment is the main goal for all of us. This RFC aims to see what the community thinks about the idea of increasing REN price and what areas exactly should be focused on.

Details

REN price should be increased for the following reasons:
1- Increasing TVB value in order to regulate TVL against TVB.
2- Increasing REN price means new holders, hence new community members, and governance participate.
3- increase the value of our DNs.
4- Bring attention from the users and integrators.

I propose the following ideas in order to add more value to REN token.
1- in case if there is a request from the token/blockchain community to get their token supported by our network while DNOs don’t expect high volume for that token, we can charge them a big listing fee (i.e $1M) and this fee should be paid in REN to DNOs.
I believe that there are projects that have a huge budget just for marketing and partnerships regardless of the expecting volume through our bridge. This fee could be fixed or determined case by case by DNOs.

2- RenVM smart contract fee paid in REN to DNOs. If the other option will be applied which is that you pay in whatever token, we can apply a good discount (10-20%) if paid in REN.

3- Building a new staking system for REN holders who owns less than 100K REN for the following benefits (same as DN owner):
A- Airdrops by RenLabs.
B- Participate in the investments by using our Ecosystem Fund.
C- Participate in the governance
D- Getting listing fees.
E- Getting network fees.

Note that this new staking system is completely separate from any staking pool that is being built by a third party. it is just a proposal to incentive REN holders who own less than 100K. This kind of staking has no effect on the protocol security since they are not going to participate in the consensus and execution at all, hence it could be activated as one of the core components.

4- Reduce the DN registration and deregistration period significantly, since DNOs are not participating in the consensus and execution in the current phase, also slashing is not activated at the moment. This update could be canceled once the DNs become connected to consensus and execution. This will help the investors to try and enjoy the income in BTC, ETH, SOL…etc without big restrictions on their capital, hence more DN registrations and increasing the price.

Next Steps

1- Discussing more ideas by the community, we could get some ideas that are Inspired by other projects.

2- Define the best ideas that we can implement in the short term and long term.

3- I’ll write up a separate RIP for each implementation that will be submitted for voting.

4- An official announcement of the new REN utilities that are being built.

2

Some of the ideas in here might be good in their own right, but systematically increasing the value of REN without increasing the income for DNs might actually have the opposite effect of increasing TVB. By increasing the value of a DN without increasing the income you lower the APY, thereby disincencitivizing new registrations and potentially incentivizing deregistrations. Therefore I think it is actually counter to the security model of RenVM, happy for anyone to prove me wrong though.

I think the reason why DNs follow the same rules as they would when they actually will participate in consensus and execution is to get valuable information on how the DNOs behave. It validates the economics behind the security model before we “flip the switch” and hand over execution to community DNs. For that reason I would be against this particular idea.

I like this one as it goes hand in hand with increasing DN income

2 Likes
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Nice write-up @akram01127. Great to see so many RFC proposals appearing lately.

IMHO we would benefit from supporting as wide a range of tokens/chains as possible, and charging a high fee might slow down adoption. If there is significant work involved in supporting the new chain (e.g. Solana) then it makes sense to charge a higher fee.

If <100k holders are not going to participate in consensus/execution then they are not doing anything to earn a share of the fees. DNOs would be subsidising these <100k holders for no reason other than to (hopefully) pump REN’s price. This would negatively affect the ROI for DNOs, potentially reducing the security of the network as DNOs deregister (and lowering REN’s price, as these former DNOs sell their REN).

I appreciate those with <100k want to earn a share of the rewards, but people with <32 ETH are in the same boat. They either need to use a pooling service, or keep stacking until they have the requisite amount to stake independently.

1 Like
4

Maybe we could use the treasury to bribe people on Votemak, this way we could have a chance to see a REN reactor on Tokemak.
People with less than 100k REN would then be able to earn TOKE on their REN, (as we can’t inflate the supply to reward LPs this could be a solution).

=> more buy pressure on REN as people could earn rewards in single asset staking.
=> DN colateral increase in $value.
=> sub 100k holders could put their REN at “work”

I think the treasurery was set to sponsor projects that would increase the volume of transactions in renVM and this way create an incentive for people to register more DN resulting in a more collateralized network, but with a Tokemak reactor we could achieve the same result through another mean.

Risk :
if rewards are higher in the reactor than running a DN it could result in a deregistration wave