Introduction
At the UBC Blockchain Club, we aim to provide students with an opportunity to learn about the emerging industries built on blockchain technology. Through our community engagement, events, and educational resources, our members are exposed to the possibilities of these new industries and have opportunities to get involved with the future of finance. Our efforts align with our overarching goal of fostering innovation and accelerating the adoption of Web 3.0 in our community.
We believe that the Meta Delegate initiative is a great opportunity for our members to get hands-on experience with an established DeFi protocol. This program aligns with the club’s aim of creating value and connections within the Web3 industry. For this reason, we want to provide committed delegates who will work diligently alongside the DAO to learn more about the protocol and propose improvements.
Working with Idle Finance would greatly benefit our members: the experience would teach our members about the diligence that is required to run a DeFi protocol with high-security standards and new methods for tranche development and yield optimization.
Additionally, Idle will benefit from our representative’s commitment to driving innovation on the platform and increased governance activity.
Past works
The UBC Blockchain Club was founded in January of 2022. In these few months, we have cultivated industry connections varying from DeFi protocol DAOs, blockchain data companies, NFT projects and many other university blockchain clubs.
We have hosted in-person and virtual educational events for our community, such as:
- An inter-university meetup at ETHDenver with 100+ attendees;
- Weekly AMAs with industry professionals;
- A Vancouver industry night with founders, VCs, DAO contributors and more.
On the educational side, we have created two workshop series - one for onboarding new members to the industry and cohosted a developer-focused series about building on NEAR.
Currently, we are developing NFT memberships and a DAO to manage club assets and decision-making.
Motivation
We want to be involved with Idle DAO to provide hands-on industry experience and connections for our members. If granted delegation, our members will work to create proposals that can improve:
- Protocol’s features
- Marketing strategies with the aim to increase awareness;
- The frequency of activity on the Idle Governance forum.
Our connections, activity and marketing team will help showcase our shard development on the platform to a wide range of university students.
The Idle-specific education will benefit both our technically inclined and finance-oriented members:
- Our development team will be incentivized to build on Idle-supported chains like Polygon. Also, the club will be sure to promote the bounties on Idle to bring more developers to the community and perhaps even future Development League candidates;
- Our finance-oriented members will have the opportunity to hypothesize, test and propose new strategies for yield optimization. These members would benefit from the tokenomics education and will be able to enrich the pool of proposals the DAO receives.
The real-world utility is an aspect of digital assets we strive to highlight and deliver to our community, and our involvement in this protocol will help us do so.
Delegate Address
Gnosis Safe Address [3 of 5]: 0x645090dc32eB0950D7C558515cFCDC63D5B4eA6c
Our first idea: the MakerDAO proposal and the connection with Idle
A tokenomics DAO proposal that we noted is“MakerDAO: Maker Staking and Tokenomics Revision’’, published by a member of the Risk Core Unit for the MakerDAO.
We recognize how important utility will be throughout the growth of digital assets, but $MKR holders realized quickly that utility does not always equate to value. In this proposal, the element of tokenomics that stood out to us was their staking mechanism.
In the proposal, staked MKR (stkMKR) is the replacement governance token for MKR. $stkMKR is non-transferable, similar to $stkIDLE, which inherently reduces risk during “disaster recovery” because malicious owners are unable to commingle assets with lending or AMM pools. The proposed “unbonding period” refers to the time it takes to unstake stkMKR and withdraw it.
We found this to be a fascinating long-term strategy to prevent usually inactive members from staking their MKR and quickly liquidating after their vote has been cast:
- The unbonding period, along with the proposed disaster recovery, aligns with the safety-oriented ethos of Idle;
- The disaster recovery mentioned in the proposal calls for the bifurcation of staked and unstaked MKR to ensure that funds deposited in lending or AMM pools are not contaminated by the MKR withdrawn by the attackers.
The next proposed step for recovery is where we see an application for Idle emergency protocol to further increase the platform’s safety.
