Risk Parameter Update - February 2021

First, I’d like to applaud @jmo, @tarun and team for beginning the process of methodical, consistent changes to risk and incentive parameters. This is a welcome improvement; thank you for stepping up :clap:

Process
I agree with @Sirokko and @getty that packaging multiple sets of changes together makes it more difficult to:

  • Analyze the impact of changes / experiments
  • Exclude changes that have public opposition

As the community gets into the groove of governance, it makes more sense to start slow; a proposal with specific risk changes, then a proposal with specific incentive changes (or vice versa). If they can be separated, they should be, in my opinion. This goes for a category of changes, too: if we’re modifying risk parameters, why not start with one, and measure the impact of it, before changing many?

Risk
Over the past few days, the risk of the protocol has increased significantly; there is now $7.9B of assets supplied, and $3.50B borrowed from Compound. One month ago, we had $4.5B supplied. Take a step back – these are staggering numbers and velocity.

Prior to increasing risk (by increasing CFs), I believe as a community we should evaluated every additional safeguard possible, to decrease the risk of the protocol. This morning I laid out one strategy for improving the liquidation system, and there are many other ideas/approaches. Optimizing CFs (and capital efficiency) is a tool for growth; now is not a time to put the petal to the metal, in my opinion–we already have extreme velocity. We should add better navigation systems, cameras, and tires to this vehicle, first.

Incentives
In Proposal 35, your team laid out a great framework to think about, and model incentives. Prior to changing incentives, let’s revisit your framework and scientific method; deliberately experiment with incentives, and measure the results.

The idea of modifying the COMP distribution is sound; we could modify one stablecoin, and one collateral market (taking @Sirokko’s idea of re-allocating it to collateral), and measure the results. Decrease DAI, increase WBTC, for instance (or, USDC / ETH, etc). How will this change ETH vs WBTC, or DAI vs USDC? This is great data to arm ourselves and the community with.

Conclusion
This is a great direction to set the protocol on–by getting the methodology correct up front, we’ll have a recurring system that works well to calibrate the protocol.

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