I’m having a hard time following this post and I think a more simplistic explanation would be helpful.
Primarily I’m confused if we are only talking about delaying the ability to claim rewards one is owed (this is what I consider to be vesting) or if we are also talking about providing bonus incentives to a certain subset of users who choose to lock their comp? Or if we are talking about both?
not sure I understand this point, could you expand further? COMP’s volatility vs farming assets doesn’t seem relevant to vesting
I believe (and @tarun correct me if I’m mistaken), that the simple “fixed period” vesting would be a regularly scheduled window to claim COMP, e.g. every 60 days. So, February end, April end, June end, etc.
Users would then be forced to judge the future value of COMP (and their desire to hold it in the future) vs using the protocol today. Purely capitalist yield farmers would find this to be more unpalatable than “natural” users. Taken together, the impact of fixed period vesting might be lower usage by farmers, and more rewards for long-term holders.
Did I get that right?
I would like a more complicated solution, a vesting contract that allows the owner to delegate/vote before he could claim the COMP in this case a longer vesting period could work.
I think the current model works. If the goal of this is to limit the number of people selling COMP regularly, I think it is over complicated and unnecessary. Those who are interested in a vesting solution should write out why and then think what is the best change that can be done to accomplish that is.
The COMP launch has been a huge success. Any changes at this point should be carefully considered.
Apologies if I mired the initial explanation with jargon. Here’s what I mean in hopefully simpler terms:
Assumption: A user prefers to receive COMP now rather than later
Concretely: For a user, receiving 1 COMP now is equivalent to receiving 1.1 COMP in a month if you can reinvest the 1 COMP you receive immediately and earn 10% in a month (e.g. via being a Uniswap LP, lending on a venue that lends COMP, etc.)
Analysis
Thus, even if COMP never has an incentivized pool (like Synthetix), the choice of how vesting works effects the value of COMP when used elsewhere on chain. If a large portion of the community wants to utilize their COMP in other on-chain financial products, the vesting effect will be quite important to analyze carefully.
Since the precise implementation of how vesting is added to the protocol will effect the time scale, frequency, and amount of user interaction needed for vesting, it is important to keep this effect in mind, especially if the community deems on-chain usage of COMP to be a high priority.
As an explicit example of what might happen if the user has to manually claim vested COMP rewards, consider the Balancer gulp() bug that led to losses due to a deflationary token. While COMP will not have losses of this form, there is an issue if claimComp() is called on cTokens in an LP share a long time post vest. Consider the following numerical example:
If claimComp() is called every block/continuously vested, then the LP share’s value k blocks after vesting begins is $1.01 + k * $0.01. On the other hand, if the vest happens every 100 blocks, then the price of the LP share at block k is $1.01 + floor(k/100) * $0.01. And if the user forgets to call claimComp(), then there will be a bigger shock to the price of the pool share when the COMP is claimed.
We’re only pointing this out because the continuous (e.g. every block) vs. discrete (e.g. user has to claim ever week/month) vesting schedules will require different levels of COMP holder attentiveness, especially when COMP is in other protocols.
[0] Slightly misleading in that you have to include Uniswap/gas fees on withdrawal, so the price might differ slightly. However, in a low gas price and 0% fee world, this is true.
The main point of vesting is two fold:
We strongly believe that spending the entire budget of the protocol on liquidity provisioning, as is the current status, is suboptimal. There are a number of components and facets that a protocol’s budget should be spent on, such as (but not limited to):
There is much that DeFi protocols can learn from layer-1 communities that have faced similar issues, albeit without the consistent cash flows of DeFi.
I know that speaking about the COMP price is a bit taboo here, but this can’t really be addressed without bringing it up.
I think the main issue here is an irrational market. The current value of COMP is highly inflated due to speculation and limited supply. The large farmers are more likely to be rational actors and that is why they most likely dump their COMP asap.
Vesting could have varying outcomes:
It’s anyone’s guess.
But the more fundamental issue is that governance and price speculation aren’t really compatible.
If you truly want COMP to be a governance token, charge a 10% fee every time it’s transferred. That way it can’t really be traded and will serve it’s real purpose of assigning voting rights to users of the protocol.
If you choose for price speculation, it’s fine to leave things as they are. Let the farmers fill the reserves and keep the TVL high. List some new assets to attracts more capital. Start talking about a way to reward holding COMP with dividends.
This is the real crossroads we’re at. And this seems to be the discussion nobody really wants to have. No need to make the contracts more gassy by adding more bells and whistles.
Anyway, my 2 cents.
@tarun - Vesting period is a (looking back) annoyance barrier and would only serve to delay selling, rewarding for holding $COMP is a good (looking forward) idea on the other hand.
As an example paying out $COMP dividends driven by the market conditions quarterly. Would be very interested to see in practice.
Not sure that keeping tokens in a Uniswap pool works as a proof that the tokens are being kept “on-chain” in the long term. If there are incentives to doing so, wouldnt there eventually be a service offered by a CEX to custody your tokens while they are inside a uniswap pool earning the incentive? Likewise, if earning COMP through a CEX service, they could offer to buy off your unvested tokens, messing up that incentive too.
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As a follow-up to this, we [@peteris, @jmo, Rei] just added a PR to the Compound repository for a vesting implementation. It proposes a change to the protocol to add periodic COMP vesting, as per the discussion in this forum post. This will enable the protocol to do the following:
The current implementation, which will be proposed to be added, also adds a few other features:
We are excited to get community feedback on this! 
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Something I believe is very important, but I don’t see any new function actually allowing for this.
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Indeed — that’s the next piece of code we’re working on! Just needed to get a little space in the comptroller…
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This may encourage long-term holding, but it will likely drive users towards trading COMP derivatives to manage their risk. I am not convinced this fixes a problem or if there is a problem here.
So if you mint COMP two days before general claim schedule, you basically did not vest your tokens.
This system looks inelegant to me because it does not apply the same vesting period for everyone.
I propose a bonding curve to distribute the COMP farmed on a 23 day basis.
Smooth and time constraining.
Logically, the vesting structure should be refined first, my opinion is that the users of the project then have more control, and with that come security advantages (it is easier to simulate possible attacks and manipulation). Continuous vesting is a better solution if the main argument against that model is gass costs. However some parameters for vesting factors need to be defined, does not need to go to extremes.
Don’t mind if I missed something and criticism of my opinion is of great importance to me as I am new to the forum.
I like the idea of fixed vesting periods. I would prefer quarterly as it would simplify tax accounting. It could potentially work like this. COMP earned from Dec-Feb would vest in Mar, Mar-May would vest in Jun, Jun-Aug in Sep, Sep-Nov in Dec.
With ideas like this in a few years we can expect the protocol to become a commercial bank. Priority is given to security, decentralization in decision-making, incentives for project development and flexibility. If tax accounting is the main problem of the DeFi protocol it is only a matter of time before regulatory institutions take control.
