The Gauge Vote Strikes Back

Painting with sound.

Just like life, music is a dance of change and evolution. It’s always moving, flowing seamlessly from one moment to the next. Tension and release, emotion and expression. It’s the contrasts that make it so beautiful, so apparent. The interplay of dissonance and harmony allows the player to paint a vivid picture with an infinite amount of colour and creativity. A soulful interpretation and a magical re-imagination.

Inspired by growth and change it’s time we painted a new picture for our beloved Ludwigs. A lot has been re-shuffling over the past couple of weeks and it’s now time we took a look at the Gauge Vote.

Some changes are about to grace the stage, and it’s looking positively funkadelic. Let’s dive in.

In this article we’ll cover:

• The Gauge Vote — A Little Bit of History
• What’s New?!
• Reliquary Changes

A Little Bit Of History

One of the most widely utilized contracts in DeFi is something known as the MasterChef. Created by SushiSwap, the contract has become a central part of DEXs far and wide. So, why is it so popular? The MasterChef has allowed DEXs to not only offer rewards in terms of swap fees but also additional Liquidity Mining incentives.

For Beethoven X, these additional Liquidity Mining rewards are distributed in our native token — BEETS. The MasterChef emits these tokens on a per-block basis, meaning there is a constant stream of BEETS incentives flowing to the pools on the Fantom DEX. Delicious and nutritious, liquidity providers on the platform unlock the ability to earn these Beets.

For all newly minted Beets emissions, a small portion flows to the treasury, and the rest flows to Liquidity Providers in the ratio shown below:

The question then arises: which specific pools do these incentives flow to?

Well, up until now, the incentives flowing to Liquidity providers have been split into the following ratio between core pools and pools integrated into the gauge.

Core Pools - are Liquidity Pools that are deemed to be the most efficient, popular and profitable pools for both users and protocol. These pools are governed by the Music Directors and are subject to change depending on market conditions.

Gauge Pools - are Liquidity Pools that have passed a certain set of requirements to be integrated into the Beethoven X Gauge vote.

Hold up, hold up. What’s a Gauge?!

The Gauge Vote

The Gauge vote is a system that has become an industry-wide standard for Decentralised Exchanges. It allows governance token holders of the protocol to vote and dictate where a portion of the DEXs emissions flow to. Let’s break it down with the BEETS Gauge system.

The Gauge vote has proven an efficient mechanism for directing BEETS emissions to Liquidity Pools on the Fantom DEX. Rather than the protocol deciding where all the token emissions flow (Core Pools), the decision is shared amongst Beethoven X’s treasured governance token holders — fBEETS.

The distribution and direction of these BEETS are decided on a bi-weekly cadence. As outlined above a portion of these emissions flow to the treasury (10% of Max beets supply) and the remainder to Liquidity Pools. Thus, users who hold Beethoven X’s governance token, fBEETS, unlock the ability to participate in a bi-weekly vote to determine which specific pools 30% of the BEETS emissions flow to.

Voting is a simple procedure that involves users connecting a web3 wallet on Snapshot and selecting the specific pools that they wish for BEETS incentives to flow to. The particular power that a vote carries is in the direct proportion of the total fBEETS that the user has over the total supply of fBEETS that’s voted in that gauge.

For a DAO or protocol with a Liquidity Pool on our platform, there is a strong incentive to ensure that their specific pool receives ample incentives. As such, Protocols/DAOs often offer gauge bounties for users to vote for pools hosting their tokens. In simple terms, users are rewarded to vote for pools. Users who vote for protocols that have offered bounties are either airdropped these rewards or must claim them from third-party sites.

Why do protocols offer bounties? The Gauge vote has unlocked a capital-efficient mechanism for protocols/DAOs to essentially incentivize their pools. With Gauge incentives historically yielding a positive ROI on $BEETS emissions/ $ bounty it makes sense from a capital efficiency perspective for DAOs/Protocols to do this.

Take the following stat, for example, The previous gauge vote saw a 297% ROI on bounties for protocols, meaning that for every $1 of bounty offered, the protocol earned $2.97 in BEETS incentives for their pool. Sheesh! This efficient mechanism has given rise to the BEETS WARS!

Protocol Bounties — BIP 24

On top of third-party protocols/ DAOs offering gauge bounties, back in August, the Beethoven X DAO approved an exciting change to the distribution of protocol fees. Rather than a portion of protocol fees flowing to fBEETS holders in the form of a BEETS buyback, the protocol implemented a new gauge bounty distribution model for core pools. BIP-24 saw Beethoven X offer bounties on pools that are deemed to be the most profitable for the protocol. Since August, the protocol has been offered $60,710 for users to use their fBEETS voting power to vote for the DEX’s most profitable pools. For the past few months, this pool has been A Late Quartet.

A successful system

So far, the gauge system has been a huge success!

Since its inception the Gauge vote holds some impressive stats:

Successful, yes! But there is always room for improvement, always room for progression. Funkadilically fresh twists to make the music really POP!

So what’s new?

If you recall from above, 70% of the total BEETS emissions flowing to liquidity pools were allocated towards core pools governed by the Music Directors (DAO) and 30% of emissions were governed by fBEETS holders via the gauge vote.

With the momentum flowing over the past couple of weeks and a hint of change in the air, the Music Directors sat down to re-evaluate the gauge vote strategy. After a hearty feast and a bunch of BEETleJuice it was decided that a couple of tweaks and changes would be made to further optimize the gauge Vote.

The major change that needs to be remembered is as follows: Instead of only 30% of the total emissions flowing to the gauge vote, this percentage will now be increased to 50%.

This change ensures that the Gauge vote plays a more impactful role in the operation of the protocol, it also means that all fBEETS holders harness greater voting power when directing the emissions on the DEX. Each vote made by fBEETS holders now directs more BEETS incentives! Alongside the change in BEETS distribution, Beethoven X will also implement the following updates to ensure the maximum efficiency of this updated system.

Protocol Bounties and Gauge Cap

To ensure the protocol continues towards its mission of longevity and sustainability, a gauge cap will be implemented in relation to the proportion of protocol fees that each specific pool contributes towards.

Gauge Pools that contribute to less than 2% of the month's previous Fantom protocol fees will be capped at 1% of the vote allocation (0.5% of total farm emissions)

On the other hand,

Pools that achieve greater than 2% of protocol fees will have NO cap AND will be eligible to have Beethoven X offer bounties on them.

To add to this, the protocol will no longer only be offering bounties to solely A Late Quartet, but rather to all pools that contribute more than 2% to protocol fees. These bounties will be offered on a weighted average basis factoring in all eligible pools.

A dashboard has been created that outlines each pool's statistics and whether it passes this cap or not:

https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/ce0e46c4-fd56-4512-beca-3cb6ffd24b11

For those of you who are interested, for a pool to become eligible for a gauge entry it must fulfil the following requirements:

• 20k TVL requirement (Previously 50k)
• Pools must be owned by the Beethoven multi-sig (0xCd983793ADb846dcE4830c22F30C7Ef0C864a776), this is the default owner when creating a pool through the UI.

Simple, refreshing and effective!

The idea for the restructure is to allow fBEETS holders to have a greater impact on deciding where protocol emissions flow through the Gauge Vote and at the same time increase the profitability of Beethoven X by optimizing for pools that are better aligned with the future of the protocol.

Speaking of the future. What about Reliquary?

Reliquary Changes

With the rollout of the Reliquary just around the corner, we must take a quick look at how the new Gauge changes will impact the user.

For those that don’t know, the Reliquary is a new technology that will offer innovative, fair and playful mechanics for your fBEETS position:

☑️ No locking

☑️ Increase your APR with time

☑️ Increase voting power with time

☑️ Exit your position at any point

☑️ Receive an evolving NFT receipt token

The overall voting structure will stay the same as outlined above. But by incorporating a maturity curve for voting power, the ability to direct votes and earn incentives will now be determined by how long you stay in your fBEETS position.

The new system is essentially the reverse of the vote escrow(ve) model.

Voting power won’t be dictated by how long you are willing to lock tokens for, but instead by how long you are a participant in the protocol.

There will be a lot more information released regarding the transition over to the new Reliquary model. Soon Ludwig, soon! In the meantime, dive into the articles below:

Outro

Okay, that was a lot. Let’s have a little recap of the essentials:

• The Gauge Vote is a system that allows users to engage with the emissions distribution for pools on the protocol.
• This Gauge Vote has received an upgrade which has changed the distribution structure.
• Instead of the previous 70/30 distribution split between core and gauge pools respectively, the split is now an even 50/50.
• This new split ensures that the Gauge vote now plays a more impactful role in the operation of the protocol.
• It also means that all fBEETS holders now harness greater voting power when directing the emissions on the DEX.
• Protocol/DAO pools have the ability to earn more BEETS incentives.
• There is a new cap placed on pools to ensure the DEX continues it’s ethos of sustainability and longevity.
• All qualifying pools can receive Beethoven X bounties
• Reliquary is soon to be released which adds a maturity adjustment to voting power.

Exciting times for sure and new opportunities lie unexplored. At BEETS we’re all about re-imagineering DeFi and the Gauge vote is certainly no exception. Progression is always exhilarating and we’re stoked to be making steps towards creating more vibrant music for everyone.

It’s definitely a constant evolution — a masterpiece in progress but it’s beautiful.

Painting with sounds and building new futures.

Who could ask for more?