The below reflects Blockworks Research’s opinion in our capacity as a Research Member of the ARDC and not as a delegate.
When it comes to Gains Network’s relatively high Sybil ratio and the measures to prevent it through modified trading incentives, we acknowledge that our short-form comment on findings has been written misleadingly. We apologize for this oversight. We understand that the PnL% category had been removed during the original incentive program, as noted in the qualitative data spreadsheet within the workbook we posted. Additionally, as mentioned in your addendum, the PnL% category would possibly only be reintroduced after implementing an attestation solution. Our intention was to highlight the ambiguity regarding your points program and the distribution of trading incentives across different categories in your addendum. We recognize that many projects have designed their incentive structures with some flexibility and believe this does not warrant further scrutiny from the community in relation to the STIP-Bridge.
We are still unsure of how increased liquidity for GNS enhances the user experience, considering that GNS is traded over-the-counter when vaults are over-/under-collateralized. However, we acknowledge that high liquidity for a protocol’s native token is generally advantageous and that many projects allocated incentives to their native tokens for the Bridge, making this approach somewhat common.
Our primary concern, which pushed us to recommend that the community might want to inspect the incentive program further, was the transfer of ARB to wallets associated with influencers after the incentive period ended. Your explanation has clarified the reasons for these transfers, and we no longer believe this requires further inspection by the community.
We appreciate Gains Network’s prompt and thorough response to the main concerns raised in our qualitative analysis. Consequently, we are revising our recommendation for further community inspection to none/minimal.