2023.07.07
Missed last week due to traveling, but yay for a successful chain launch!
In today’s call we discussed some new data from the chain post-launch. Namely:
- Gas pricing and its effects
- Fee Grants
- The Protocol implementation of the economic model, and reconciliation
1 Gas pricing and its effects:
Obviously Gas prices on Archway are more expensive, and anybody who has been following the tokenomics of the chain isn’t surprised by that, however an assumption made in simulations is reasonable access to liquidity. With the chain being freshly launched, there is currently a lack of access to ARCH liquidity that would permit substantive chain usage. This led to several downed relayers at times, and rate-limited users’ ability to explore the new chain. As liquidity grows this will get easier, but in the meantime some potential fixes could include lowering the mPoG to 500 GWAY, getting additional funding for relayers, and/or substantive Fee Grants, which brings me to point number 2.
2 Fee Grants:
While testing Astrovault and the Airdrop it became apparent that there were several bugs in fee grants, be it module or implementation, that were previously undiscovered. Multiple ecosystem teams spent an insane amount of hours finding errors, patching the SDK implementation, and working tirelessly with the wallet teams directly (shout out to Cosmostation and Leap for incredible response times and detailed troubleshooting!). Luckily the Fee Grant implementations worked pretty well, and users enjoyed the typical top-of-class UX they’ve come to expect from Archway! There are still some issues with some wallets where fee grants aren’t possible on ledger, or with 0 balance, but for the most part we should be able to recreate the work that was done by these core ecosystem teams for future dapps. Unfortunately however, fee grants aren’t quite as free currently as had previously been discussed, because of point 3.
3 Protocol Implementation of the Economic Model
The Archway protocol has undergone many versions and variations, as protocols do, prior to launch. After dedicating much time and effort to the development of the time-based model, with time-reflexive parameters, it was decided to move forward with a fully audited and code-frozen previous implementation, with several tokenomic updates such as mPoG rather than MCF, and Premiums, but leaving out time-based metrics and inflation, token burn, and a couple more things. One oversight during the upgrades was that we didn’t revert the basis of determining DIT distribution from Max Gas/Block (from the MCF version) to half of Gas Spent, causing us to remunerate devs from inflation at rates mimicking maximum congestion.
In layman’s terms, devs are getting only about 50% of what is intended at this time, and the other close to 50% is being rolled over into the Dapp Treasury.
Props to TJ from Lydia Labs for noticing this discrepancy from Archgregator, and of course to Igor from Nuclear Block for building https://archgregator.online!
Though this means that Fee Grants will only be 50% reimbursable immediately, we’re actively tracking DIT rewards and block fill, which will enable us to retroactively reimburse devs the rest of their rewards from the Dapp treasury in the coming months.
Thanks to everybody who came to the call, and congratulations to everybody for the chain being live! I will not be hosting next week due to being at AwesomeWasm, but will have the next call on July 21.