Include IDLE earnings into APY % calculation

Currently, the APY % displayed in each of the asset pools are not inclusive of any IDLE distributions earned. Instead, they are shown underneath the APY % as such:

USDC pool
15.442% APY
plus 2,548.14 IDLE/day

Current issue: For new investors coming into IDLE, having it shown separately the way it is now is simply confusing (if you look through the Discord chats, you’ll see questions about the APY calculation every so often) and for those with a shorter attention span, there’s a chance they’d be deterred by the relatively ‘low’ APY % that IDLE offers compared to similar projects like Saffron.

As a result, we’re likely losing out on additional TLV from these investors who misunderstood the APY % or they simply didn’t have the timespan to look at it in more detail.

While I understand why it’s been shown this way in the past (more accurate + IDLE prices constantly change), I believe the benefits of displaying this as a single APY % is simply more advantageous altogether. From what I’ve seen of other projects as well, most, if not all other projects like to display it as a single APY % anyways so following the standard would make it easy for investors to compare APY %s between different projects.

Proposal - I propose tweaking the APY % display so that it’s inclusive of the IDLE token distribution. A simple way of doing this (as an example) is to take the daily IDLE distribution amount multiplied by the USD rate taken from a price index site like CoinGecko (better than Uniswap spot prices IMO since it’s more scaleable in the future if liquidity switches over to another exchange), multiplied by 365 days and divided by the total pool USD amount and added to the APY %.

Using the best yield USDC pool as an example, there’s 52.74M USDC in the pool with a 15.658% APY and 2,548.14 IDLE/day up for grabs.

We’d display the APY so that it shows:

2,548.14 IDLE * $11.71 (current spot prices per CoinGecko) * 365 days = $10,891,132.58

$10,891,132.58 divided by $52,740,000 total pool = 20.65% APY + 15.658% APY = ~36.308% APY

So in the example above, the APY % would simply show 36.308% APY as opposed to 15.658% + 2,548.14 IDLE/day.

Again, I understand the previous way of displaying APY is a more accurate/honest method of displaying it to investors, but I believe following standard practice here would lead to higher TLVs in the long run.

In the example above, investors would easily see that IDLE’s best yield USDC compound pool is outperforming Saffron’s DAI compound pool S tranche, which yields an estimated 23.3% APY (inclusive of both DAI & SFI distribution)

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Hi @wlamhk, great to see that you started this discussion and you noticed this particular.

In the Idle.finance website, the allocation of $IDLE can not be displayed in other ways than the current one, as it would be against the Idle Labs Team Policy (“promote $IDLE as an investment opportunity”).

Your statement is true and the mentioned solution would definitely improve the visibility of the protocol over the DeFi community.

This issue can be easily solved by developing new community-managed user interfaces.

This would allow the Governance to create many different UIs, give more data sources and metrics to the community, and customize design/visualization with community feedback.

It could also be designed as a stats page, the MVP does not need to directly interact with the smart contracts (deposit/redeem from the protocol).

This approach would push a higher grade of decentralization while providing more awareness and visibility for the community, hence potentially increasing the TVL.

I think this task might perfectly fit with the Pilot League mission, that could incentivize new community interfaces by issuing grants to developers.

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Hi @Davide, thanks for the insight and totally understood. I agree this task would probably be a perfect fit for the Pilot League once we get that up and running.

Initially, I thought this would be a low hanging fruit that we could easily and quickly implement, but in this case, I guess the best course of action is to decentralize the UI and leave it to the Pilot League like you said.

A lot of people often say that a value differentiating product will market itself, but personally I believe product and marketing goes hand-in-hand. IMO, most of the time, a great product without any marketing and still getting traction is more luck than not, as the right people ends up landing on it and the network effect builds itself. If we’re leaving it to the Pilot League, we can potentially look into some heavier lifting marketing initiatives (ie. website revamp) as well with the primary goal of increasing awareness + increasing TVL. The APY % was just a quick little thing I initially thought would be a low hanging fruit.

Cheers,
Wayne

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