[READY] Vesper Finance

[MattGov.eth]

Hello and thank you for your proposal! Throughout the application process, this forum thread will be one of the official means of communication. Please be sure to monitor it for updates over the course of the review period.

I’ll provide some feedback on this proposal, and note that all changes will need to be in by Monday to ensure they’re properly reviewed by other proposers.

First question - Just to be 100% clear, Vesper is not on Optimism yet right?

@michaelmcquaidbloq

What is the size of the grant request? (250k OP max): 250,000

Just a quick one here, this is a very high OP grant request for a protocol with approx ~$20M in TVL, and isn’t live on Optimism right now, so there’s not any Optimism specific data to work with. We could probably compare this to Avalanche / Polygon, which only has approx $600-700K liquidity total, this grant would be almost more than TVL on competing chains. I would recommend scaling it heavily downwards.

@michaelmcquaidbloq

Phase 2 - 40% of the tokens which will be divided into the following:

• Strategic incentivization of third party integrations on Optimism
• Marketing effort for focused promotion of OP integrations. This will include, but is not limited to:
• Publication features
• Social media campaigns
• Incentivization campaigns

Please be aware of the no-sale rule, so these sorts of publication / social media campaigns and other protocol expense items couldn’t be reimbursed / paid for with OP tokens. As this would violate the rule. Please restructure this to make sure you’re following it. I’ve included a quick summary of the no-sale rule below.

• No Sale rule. OP received through Growth Experiments Grants should not be sold by the grant recipient.
  • Includes the grant recipient, their affiliates and any other related persons. These persons cannot receive OP for the purpose of selling (or if the grant recipient knows they intend to sell) the tokens.
  • Includes the direct exchange of OP for crypto or fiat, whether done publicly or privately. Think selling OP in exchange for fiat or crypto, regardless of whether done on a CEX, DEX, OTC desk, at your local park, or otherwise.
  • Does not include using OP to incentivize usage. Providing OP as liquidity mining incentives is not restricted by these parameters.
  • There is no expiration to this rule for Growth Experiments Grants

@michaelmcquaidbloq

Please provide benchmark milestones for this project. These milestones should guide the Optimism community on the progress of your project throughout your work on the project. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

PLANNED DATE	BENCHMARK MILESTONES	STATUS	COMMENTS
2/20/23	Launch Alpha Smart Contract for vaETH on Optimism	Completed	Etherscan Link
2/20/23	Launch Alpha ETH Strategy (Curve)	Completed	Etherscan Link
2/21/23	Launch Alpha Smart Contract for vaUSDC on Optimism	Completed	Etherscan Link
2/21/23	Launch Alpha USDC Strategy (Curve)	Completed	Etherscan Link
2/28/23	Launch Alpha AAVE v3 Strategy for vaETH Pool	Completed	Etherscan Link
	Launch Alpha Smart Contract for vaOP on Optimism	In Development
	Launch Alpha OP Strategy (Aave)	In Development
	Launch USDC, ETH, OP Pools/Strategies to Vesper’s public beta dApp		Vesper Finance Beta
3/21/2023	Launch USDC, ETH, OP Pools/Strategies to production		Vesper Finance
4/1/2023	Add Stargate Yield Strategy
4/1/2023	Add 4th Yield Strategy Yield Strategy
4/15/2023	Third Party Vesper Integration

Please define critical milestones for this project. Critical milestones are meant to show good-faith efforts to accomplish the project. Non-completion of these milestones could lead to revocation of remaining grant rewards. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

PLANNED DATE	CRITICAL MILESTONES	STATUS	COMMENTS
3/21/2023	Deployment of vaETH Pool on Vesper.Finance - Optimism
3/21/2023	Deployment of vaUSDC Pool on Vesper.Finance - Optimism
3/21/2023	Deployment of vaOP Pool on Vesper.Finance - Optimism
4/1/2023	Deploy 4th Unique Strategy to Vesper (Protocol to be determined)
4/15/2023	Achieve First 3rd Party Integration

I’d recommend improving the milestones by including some unique users / tvl under management / other KPI metrics that could be used to gauge the proposal, and the success in the future. Here’s the milestone assessment explainer to learn more - Milestone Assessment

@michaelmcquaidbloq

Phase 1 - 60% of the incentives will be distributed through Vesper pools as an added incentive.

These incentives will be split between the ETH, USDC, and OP pools uniformly for three months after receiving the grant.

I believe that predominantly distributing OP as a bonus will only attract mercenary capital that will only stay as long as the rewards. This is especially an issue for yield farming protocols. Is there anything you could do here to improve this to better incentive align users, and vesper, to ensure that people stay on Vesper without the users?

Maybe this is better asked as - Is there a way to achieve the yield that are being temporarily increased (due to OP tokens) without the OP rewards in the future?

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions.