Community Fund Proposal: Airdrop Funding for Optics Bridging Ethereum -> Celo

To encourage usage of the Celo Protocol and Ecosystem as well as facilitate transactions from Ethereum, proposing an allocation of CELO from the Community Fund for Airdrops. Specifically, users bridging assets from Ethereum to Celo via Optics would receive CELO in the form of an airdrop for transactions >$50. Below is a mock-up of how that could look on the Optics website. Given the high cost of gas fees required for bridging from Ethereum, many platforms like Avalanche have provided an airdrop that effectively subsidizes asset bridging.

The actual airdrop amount should be determined and voted on by the community. In general though, it doesn’t seem like the airdrop amount should be higher than ETH gas fees for security reasons to prevent potential DDOS attacks.

Below is a potential framework to think about the total cost:

  • Currently there are ~2-3 transactions per hour >$50. Assuming 8,760 hours in a year, that would be 17,520 to 26,280 bridge transactions per year. If each transaction receives an airdrop of, for example, $10, the cost of maintaining airdrops for 1 year would be $175,200 to $262,800 worth of CELO per year.

How is the airdrop amount determined?

Community vote

Suggestions on funding sources?

As there is currently 2m cEUR unused in the community fund, this cEUR could be converted into CELO for deployment.

Please post any questions you have below.

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How is the airdrop amount determined?

If it were me, I’d try to set up an oracle that reads the total gas fee on the ETH side up until a certain ceiling and subsidize equal to this fee. If the fee is more than the gas cost wouldn’t folks be incentivized to move assets across the bridge indefinitely?

Another thing to consider here is perhaps the airdrop is time-released: once the bridge has been made, the bridged assets must remain on Celo’s chain for X period, or the airdrop is never received (not sure how implementation would work here…)

Further Thoughts…

One thing to consider here is that to build an effective liquidity environment on Celo, there will be key cryptoassets on Ethereum that should probably be bridged over. If certain assets could be priortized through this subsidy – perhaps with some sort of bonus subsidy – it would be extremely synergistic with growing Celo’s ecosystem. Namely:

ETH — part of Celo’s reserve
DAI — part of Celo’s reserve
WBTC — part of Celo’s reserve, not sure if there’s a direct BTC bridge enabled by Optics but this seems like the next best thing

In the context of Celo’s Regenerative Finance program (kickoff next week — production program subset of the Climate Collective!) we would benefit from the following:

BCT — a tokenized carbon credit by Toucan Protocol
OHM — the native stable-token of OlympusDAO backed by protocol owned liquidity.
KLIMA — the native stable-token of KlimaDAO backed by natural capital protocol owned liquidity.
USDC — one of the most used ecosystem stablecoins and a useful asset for a cUSD/USDC pool (helps stabilize cUSD…)

I suspect there’s more strategic crypto-assets outside of the aforementioned that could synergistically improve Celo’s liquidity environment. I’d invite other folks to chime in. But the key takeaway here is that it’s better to have certain cryptoassets bridged than other cryptoassets to achieve our ecosystem’s tactical aims.

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Hi what date will be the snap shot? and will the snapshot be on avalanche?

Hi :wave:

Wollemi from OlympusDAO here. Just wanted to pop in here and say that we’re very interested in the proposal which @papa_raw has outlined and would see such a partnership as being very inline with Olympus’ mission to see OHM contributing to real world prosperity, reaching real people across the globe and seeing OHM move towards being the reserve asset of choice in crypto (defi and beyond).

Practically speaking we’re in the process of launching an incentive program called Proteus which would exactly look to partner with ecosystems/chains such as celo in bringing cross chain liquidity. This would be for the upcoming gOHM (the next generation of cross chain enabled wrapped Staked OHM) which has cross chain portability whilst still benefiting from rebases of staked ohm on ethereum.

We’re here to help in any way to make this a reality. Big fans of Celo over here at Olympus.

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Hey @wollemiPine – what is the best documentation // resources around gOHM right now? Would love to spy on the development.

Apologies for the slow reply!

The only public info out at the moment is this announcement: Introducing Olympus V2. Olympus has been live for almost seven… | by OlympusDAO | Oct, 2021 | Medium

Launch is happening any day now so there will be more details shortly, as well as gOHM in the wild. Once that happens I’ll pop back over here and update.

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You can read more about our liquidity incentives here: OIP-45: Proteus - OlympusDAOForum

I see a few ways this benefits protocols on Celo:

  1. Acquiring liquidity - thru Proteus, we will bootstrap CELO-gOHM pair and then co-incentivize gOHM-X for any project that’s interested in building that pair.
  2. Retaining liquidity - thru Olympus Pro, protocols can start accumulating their liquidity after bootstrapping phase. This reduces inflationary emissions and guarantees long-term liquidity for the whole ecosystem

This lowers cost of liquidity on Celo while also adding gOHM to a project’s balance sheet. Imo, ties in strategically with Celo’s proposed regenerative finance program.

Proteus is launching this Monday (Nov 29) on Avalanche & expanding to other chains subsequent weeks.

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hmm paying for ETH fees actually seems less important to me than giving people dust for 1 or 2 tx on celo. I very much support providing gas for people bridging into Celo. Without this people effectively need to go thru a CEX even though optics exists.

//
The other dissuasions on this thread are awesome. (love the idea bringing KLIMA to Celo) but not really about the proposal so i suggest we move them to another post.

Hi all,

Unfortunately missed the governance call yesterday

What is currently missing to move this draft into a proposal?

It is honestly mind-boggling to me that in 2022 we still have bridges that don’t fund the initial gas for using the chain.

Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, Harmony, all have been doing it.
The smooth bridging experience was imho even the main reason for Avalanche to take off.

Dual incentives on dApps are fun, but incentivizing the bridge is an inevitable requirement to further TVL growth.

It is literally the single worst user experience whenever this is not the case for me to be forced to go through a CEX.

Would like to understand if it is the Foundation’s intentions to exclude anons (for whatever reason) and therefore purposely give up on TVL that could float and hype up the ecosystem or it is just a long dragged-out process.
If the latter, how do we expedite it?

Maybe that has all been covered in yesterday’s call and I am wasting everyone’s time, but still checking in.

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Another thing to consider here is perhaps the airdrop is time-released: once the bridge has been made, the bridged assets must remain on Celo’s chain for X period, or the airdrop is never received (not sure how implementation would work here…)

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but this makes no sense to me.

The purpose of the airdrop is not to bribe users to bridge over, but just get them enough CELO to do the first 3-5 tx.

I.e. user bridges over 100 DAI from Polygon to Celo.
Drop 0.1 CELO into their wallet. Cool.

On Celo, this is enough to interact with like every smart contract ever deployed right now :sweat_smile:
And if then they could still go to Ubeswap and buy another 25 CELO at the current price.

Just need enough for first few tx.

On the call yesterday we discussed the approach that will go to a governance proposal. The overall changes are:

  • Call it dust not really an airdrop
  • As a community, we all want this to work well, therefore, we will increase the fund allocation (we said 100k CELO) but dropping the dust to something between 0.1-0.X.
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“Dust” makes sense and is also corresponds with my understanding of the proposal.

Any mentions of timeline on the call?

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If that’s the purpose then you’re right in that a time-lock doesn’t matter. I was approaching it as a mechanism to attract liquidity to Celo without the mechanism being gamed by multiple bridge transfers.

If it’s just dust to facilitate the first few TX then it’s moot.

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