[IIP-9] - Shield Mining Campaign on Nexus Mutual

Authors

@ETM612

Summary

The purpose of this proposal is to define the design of the Shield Mining campaign and approve the transfer of 15,000 $IDLE ($100,000 USD at the current price of ~$6.667/token) from the Ecosystem Fund to the treasury multi-sig to fund the Nexus Mutual Community Staking Incentives contract. This represents approximately 0.87% of the Ecosystem Fund’s current holdings.

Motivation

A Shield Mining Campaign can increase cover capacity and lower insurance cost to a target rate of 2.6% annually, allowing the community to access economical insurance and for an insured strategy to eventually be developed. Insurance can provide peace of mind — increasing stickiness of funds in the pool — and be used to attract new capital (especially from other protocols who are hyper-sensitive to the risks involved with all protocols)

Background

After discussions with the Nexus Mutual team, we gathered the following information on past Shield Mining campaigns:

  • Avg campaign had a reward rate of ~0.25 USD per NXM staked per week
  • Avg campaign lasted about 4 weeks
    • Time is dynamic and not an input; we set the reward rate and budget
  • Every campaign successfully brought down cost of cover to the minimum 2.6%
  • Given past campaigns stats, targeting 50,000 NXM staked on each contract (IdleDAI and IdleUSDC) should bring down the cost of cover to the minimum and provide significant capacity for the community

We believe a campaign in-line with other successfully executed campaigns (details of which were shared on the forum here) is the best route to pursue.

Specification

We propose a campaign that distributes $0.25 USD per week (0.0375 IDLE using a price of $6.667/token) to each NXM staked behind each of the IdleUSDC and IdleDAI contracts, with each campaign having a budget of 7,500 $IDLE. This aims to achieve 50,000 NXM staked behind each contract with a target length of 4-weeks, in line with guidance from Nexus Mutual on past successful campaigns.

At a current NXM price of ~$99, these rewards represent an APR to stakers of ~13.1% per contract staked behind. Given the ability to stake NXM behind different risks via Pooled Staking, NXM holders can earn an APR of ~26.2% for staking behind both contracts, which should be sufficient to garner at least 50,000 NXM (if not more) staked on each.

Note: Campaign length is dynamic. If 100,000 NXM were staked on each contract, the program would run for 2 weeks.

Upon successful passing of this proposal, the Leagues will transfer 15,000 $IDLE from the ecosystem fund to the treasury multi-sig. In sync with the Dev League’s completion of the insurance UI on Idle’s home page (towards the end of this month), and in coordination with Nexus Mutual on the marketing front, the Leagues will create and launch a Shield Mining Campaign for each of the IdleDAI and IdleUSDC contracts on the Shield Mining Sponsor Dashboard; the UI calls the function depositRewardsAndSetRate which will be set to the specifications discussed above.

Note on timing & $IDLE price: If the proposal passes, there will be a short period of time (target 7-14 days) between the transfer of $IDLE to the treasury multi-sig and funding/launching of the campaign (to accommodate completion of the UI on Idle’s home page and coordinate marketing with Nexus Mutual). If there is a significant change in the price of $IDLE, we may need to revisit the campaign details; if at the time of the campaign launching the 15,000 $IDLE transferred are worth materially more than $100k USD, the campaigns will be capitalized with $100k of $IDLE priced at that time and the remaining $IDLE will be returned to the ecosystem fund.

Next Steps

We are going to leave this thread open for comments regarding this implementation, and in about 24 hours, if there are no objections, we will proceed with the on-chain proposal and the voting phase.

7 Likes

IIP-9 was just deployed for the community to vote on

Vote here

4 Likes

With the passing of IIP-9, the leagues have been working to complete the insurance UI on Idle’s home page, coordinate marketing, and finalize campaign details with Nexus Mutual. The targeted launch date for the shield mining campaigns is early July!

Observing some of the recent market dynamics as they relate to Idle’s strategies, specifically around the capital inflow to the USDT best yield strategy (which is now near the USDC best yield strategy in AUM), and the yield (which is now much higher for USDT), the Leagues and Nexus believe it’s in the best interest of the community to now incentivize the IdleUSDT contract instead of IdleUSDC in the shield mining campaign.

There should be more demand for coverage on the IdleUSDT (over the IdleUSDC) for the following reasons:

  • Higher APR on USDT best yield strategy, making insurance more economical
  • Influx of capital to the USDT best yield strategy and increase in $IDLE rewards, increasing the potential demand base and expected future potential demand base
  • Yield Token Cover also covers de-pegging risk, which is much higher with USDT than USDC, providing additional value to cover purchasers

For these reasons, we plan to proceed with campaigns as follows:

  • 7,500 Idle to IdleDAI Contract Stakers (0.0375 IDLE per NXM Staked per week)
  • 7,500 Idle to IdleUSDT Contract Stakers (0.0375 IDLE per NXM Staked per week)

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please share them below

5 Likes

After discussions with Nexus, it was suggested we make a slight tweak to the program distribution rates to make sure we hit minimum cover price. With this in mind, we changed the campaign distribution to 0.05 IDLE per NXM Staked per week, targeting a 3 week program, and launched the campaign yesterday with Nexus Mutual.

As of today, we have successfully attracted enough NXM staked behind our contracts to hit the minimum cover price (2.6%), and reached a capacity for over $6.5M USD (3.3k+ ETH) in cover!

Community members interested in covering cross-protocol risks (and even de-pegging risk) can buy cover for IdleDAI and IdleUSDT here

6 Likes