Alchemix Fireside Chat 9/10/2021

[...Start scene, begin Scoopy streaming a choppy intro song that gets us all hyped]
[Biddls sounds like a completely normal 12 year old]

Scoopy: V2 progress update - The code is very close to completion and should be done in matter of weeks. Audit scheduled to begin Nov 1, then 6-8 weeks of auditing time for the final audit, which puts us in the december/january range if the audit goes well. Longer if they find something.

Scoopy: AIP Update
AIP 20 will be split into two separate votes - both use ALCX as collateral to take out MIM from ABRA.
A portion used to buy CVX to farm / vote to boost our pools. Half used to trade to alUSD to LP it in 3CRV pools to LP/farm that. At any time we could pay the loan back or manage our collateral, with a very low liquidation price. So should give plenty of time to pay or recollateralize if market turns.

AIP 21 proposes setting up a bond program to address long term liquidity concerns and start to clamp down on ALCX supply. More info / discussion below.

Future Tokemak AIP - We are entering into the Tokemak reactor event, working on a proposal that should be out next week. Deposit ALCX, get a derivative tALCX, then we would make an additional farm for tALCX. Plan to incentivize with something small like 5-10% of the farming rewards. If it’s effective we can discuss as a community how to best proceed.

Gorby: Discord update
StreamPay - Gorby uses a payment app called Sablier, which is nice to pay people, but if you want to make recurring payments , then Sablier has your money locked up for the full period. So we should make our own Sablier type thing using Alchemix vaults - you set up the stream of payments by delegating your credit, but it’s only withdrawing capital when it needs it. Gorby + others are in the process of building that. Called StreamPay (or PepoPay or INCOOMStream, other ideas are welcome). Probably needs to rely on the credit delegation feature of V2. It's very early in development - Gorby is mentioning now in case people have really cool ideas for names/features/etc. Upside of using the credit delegation is that it could be automated / set and forget. AW4 says Superfluid finance exists but only works xDAI, DAI, Matic and does a continuous drip - what we’re doing seems better.

Newsletter - We will be doing a newsletter on a regular basis. Worthy and original memes will go in the newsletter and you’ll probably get a worthwhile tip. Artwork as well for the front cover / throughout. Doesn’t have to be high quality, making Gorby laugh trumps artistic talent (but art is cool too). RANDCorp will be collating all the stuff and put it in the newsletter.

New Role - May create a new @Notification Squad role specifically for cool things that aren’t important enough for announcements or governance, and it would be usable by anyone. By default you would have the role and need to opt out. Deriviad said no one wants to have to opt out, but Gorby thinks no one would opt in, so Gorby will make it opt in and automatically opt out Derivad. Have OG and Voter roles, now the point is to have something where we can ping a lot of people but don't disappoint people expecting Alchemix news.

Other Updates:
Patron NFT - Gorby wanted to give a commitment to getting the patron NFT out the door. Scoopy: It’s not a V2 thing. We have the art, we have the data, but all the dev resources are doing V2. We reached out to another dev who said they could probably do it, so we’re gonna follow up and get it out SOON. Apologies, other dev has just taken precedence. Gorby: Medium to long term they will have economic value, not financial advice (devs did not confirm or deny Gorby's statement).

Bonding Partnership with Olympus (AIP 21)
We brought Wartull from Olympus DAO on stage to discuss.

Wartull: Explained that Ohm brings the contractors, contracts, advice etc (ie, this is why people won't just steal their bonding code). This intial partnership is a good catalyst for future contracts (alOHM mentioned. alUSD bonds mentioned in discord). There is a lot of community overlap, and Ohm is excited to partner. [Wartull then summarized the bonding AIP, not included, just go read it]

Bonding Time Period Question (also relates to Butler's question about 1 week vesting period): Wartull recieved a question about if 5 day bonding is adequate: Wartull said If it’s longer, you’d need a higher discount. For alchemix, with low APYs, there is a case to make it longer. But also need to look at how options are priced and understand that bonds with higher time frames are higher risk, since it's further in the future. That’s why 1 week was chosen - no instant arb opportunity, but also not so long that you need to incentivize users to take on the additional risk. There could be an option to offer multiple terms - 1, 2 and 3 weeks for ex. and study how those are used.

Will we stake the ALCX we get from bonding? Scoopy Answer: We will farm the LP tokens we receive to get ALCX, CRV, CVX, SUSHI, etc. Then we could farm the ALCX itself which could be distributed to stakeholders. We don’t believe that in 1-2 years we’ll control 99% of liquidity (like ohm does) cuz we have a lot of demands to make functional markets, so goal is more like 20-40% in a couple years then just farm alongside everyone else and distribute to the DAO or enhance platform. Per Wartull yields would end up reducing which cause more people to leave which gives the DAO more yield (4-5 year time horizon).. Exciting cuz as we launch more alAssets (alBTC first) we can do slow organic growth and build debt caps as we build the LP positions.

AMA Questions
Biddls: What portion of accounts actually borrow against their balance? Scoopy: For alUSD out of 2k people, only 7 have accrued credit (Ie have no debt), everyone else has borrowed.

Butler question 2 (Strats around liquidity targets?): Primary goal is sustainable liquidity in major markets, so since alUSD is biggest it would get the largest share of ALCX bonds. The others are important though, so will likely do it somewhat proportionally.

Butler: Accept DAI or ETH directly to create DAI or ETH positions? Wartull/Scoopy: Ohm has thought about it. It’s definitely something to consider, but since pools are already balanced it’s easier to just take LP to start. It’s definitely a future idea that will be considered. Gonna take some experimentation.

Butler: Optimal quantity of ALCX emissions? Should it be increased? Scoopy: If it was too low, existing liquidity wouldn’t leave. If too much, we’d be concerned the alAsset markets would become less liquid (cuz too many people would leave, esp if they didn’t withdraw alAssets from the pool). If bonds are sold out, we will increase # of bonds offered slowly but surely (or decrease emissions).

Q: Will DAO hold sOHM from ALCX? - answer No, unless we do a separate arrangement.

Miscellaneous AMA items / chat topics:

Emissions vs Locking up ALCX Note LPs, etc will basically be held forever - we never sell the LPs, just continually use it to collect protocol fees. Gorby discussed that often emissions changes make problems worse, then the protocols often revert, which makes it even worse. It reduces confidence from investors. Of course if the vote goes up and the emissions curve is changed, we have to honor it. The point is here it’s better to just try to get the emissions for the DAO and lock stuff up rather than try to reduce emissions, as then we aren’t fundamentally changing the rules behind the protocol but instead just using the DAO to take advantage of them and also help users). We are only 6 months old, emissions will continue to reduce significantly. Scoopy seems to agree that it's better to lock up ALCX rather than reduce emissions (ie locking it up is just having the DAO play the game, changing emissions is changing the game and would be less well recieved).

Layer2's: Gorby mentioned L2’s are a good future way to get more TVL in the system. Scoopy said L2s are exciting and interesting, Scoopy has kept up with the scene but we don’t want to take our technical debt forward, so want to wait for V2 to expand across chain.

wen alOHM? Scoopy: no comment can’t confirm or deny

Would the bonding eliminate the need for tokemak? Scoopy: they are two diff platforms. If we have tokemak reactor and own our liquidity from OHM. If tokemak gives us better bang for our buck, then we probably start bonding tokemak. Idea is that you can deposit with tokemak and have tTokens that you can get airdrops from. Or you can deposit with alchemix which holds the tALCX tokens, which will aim to offer more APY than tokemak giving ALCX rewards, but then the DAO will keep TOKE from tToken emissions to vote with.

rETH/stETH in V2? Scoopy: rETH and stETH are definitely something we have in mind for alchemix strategies. In V2, we can accept multiple collateral types (ETH, WETH, sETH, rETH, stETH, etc can all be staked as collateral to mint alETH then use the native yields to pay them off so that’s one way to expand V2 yields).

Q: alUSD use cases? Limiting factor in debt cap? We want to use alUSD in an options protocol and get partnerships there, and Gorby is doing StreamPayTM. One extension is if you can direct StreamPayTM to a new protocol, and they have a StreamPayTM to you for their worthless governance token and if the first stream is canceled then the other one is auto canceled. Can use that to finance DAOs. Tokemak/Bonding will let us scale and make liquidity more efficient which will let us increase debt cap. Right now we have room in both alETH and alUSD and we have authorization from previous AIPs to increase each one. V2 and Layer 2s, etc, etc will let us incorporate any competitive yield farms on defi which will drive TVL and adoption.

Autopay netflix with ALCX? Scoopy has a contact with a payment processor to consider this next year. Could also use StreamPayTM. Lots of ideas. We need a partnership with someone like TrueFI or something, ie basically need the link to a bank account. (tUSD doesn’t have liquidity though). We need a 3rd party.

Wen Patron: Soon ™ (see above)

(biddls tech jargon question) - didn't seem to be much of an answer.

V2 permissionless? New alAssets Permissionless? Permissionless depends on what auditors say / let them do, but building on top of V2 will exist in some capacity (maybe a hackathon)? New alAssets are pretty involved so likely not permissionless to create those.

DAO/NFTs: The DAO has partially gone back to the drawing board. Stalled a bit when alleycat left, but other changes are likely due to the ongoing evolution of the NFT scene. Time weighted voted / materia system / security system all still exist. Which L2 for the DAO has not been decided (needs low cost, security, ease of onboarding). DAO is an ERC-998, it’s an NFT that has slots for you to deposit other NFTs into it. You’ll have a bust (ie, head/neck/shoulders) and a desk and your alchemix NFTs go on your bust and desk. Items will be mix of ERC-721 and-1155 (some batches, some uniques)

Vote Farming: Probably can’t prevent vote farming for NFTs but you don’t get an NFT every time you vote.

Fees: We probably won’t vary protocol fees based on strategy

Community Needs: For now everyone focused on V2, no major needs from community right now. Always looking for more people to do dashboards/data - dyor front end will be opensourced as the dev is now fulltime elsewhere. If anyone is familiar with front end and handling web3 data please reach out. If into SQL, also worth reaching out to Gorby and discussing flipside crypto. Basically Alchemix needs some data people right now, so reach out!

Randcorp came on to discuss the newsletter - gonna be a fun project and great way to keep everybody up to date between AMAs.

DAO NFTS may not come with the DAO right away.

Layer 2's - Scoopy is more partial to ETH friendly chains. Rollups, Polygon, etc for now but not necessarily limited to those. Protocol would work differently on L2 than on L1 or sidechain cuz of how the contracts are set up cuz of cross chain alAsset minting. So solution is to mint alUSD on ETH then bridge it over and load up the sidechain with preminted alUSD. In L1 there’s a debt ceiling. Right now there’s _250m alUSD supply with 150m debt cap, so debt ceiling is soft cap in L1. In L2 it would be a hard cap. Arbitrum and Polygon are current biases.

How to get involved as new community member? Be like biddls - talk a lot, make suggestions or offer to do things (or just do them), then eventually you will make friends and contribute.

Can we customise the looks and traits of our NFTS? Scoopy wants to say yes - pay a little bit for random, or pay more to character creator it.

NFT Benefits in the DAO Character upgrades / NFTs will have benefits in the DAO

Will we have crafting with the NFTS - scoopy wants to say yes, will it get done? Maybe. Can’t just yolo contracts, smart contracts are dangerous.

Cleaning up #Governance Proposals - We will try threads for gov proposals and see how it goes. They close after 1 week of inactivity.

Rebalancing Vaults - in V2 In vaults you can rebalance within a collateral type seamlessly. Switching from one collateral type will not be as easy. (ie, multiple types of stablecoins or ETH types)