[Proposal] Reinstate $LEND to the Liquidity Mining Whitelist

This proposal is also on Balancer's forum.

This proposal does not necessarily reflect my (@rabmarut) personal view. I am relaying the request from the community.

TL;DR

Add the recently removed $LEND token back into the liquidity mining whitelist. Because $LEND was already whitelisted, it would be reinstated at its existing cap tier (cap3=$10M).

Context

The Aave protocol recently introduced a new token called $AAVE to replace their existing token, $LEND. The new token will have a fair amount of functionality within the Aave protocol moving forward, whereas the old token is intended to be deprecated over time as token holders migrate. A 1:1 bridge exists for migrating $LEND to $AAVE, after which the $LEND is forever removed from circulation. At time of writing, there is no fixed timeline for the token migration, but the Aave community may introduce a deadline in the near future.

Proposal

This past week, a whitelist request for the new $AAVE token was honored. The typical procedure for token migrations is to directly edit the existing whitelist entry for a token with its new contract address; this is designed to incentivize Balancer LPs to migrate to newer contracts to the benefit of the wider ecosystem. As a consequence, in this particular case, the (very popular) $LEND token is no longer whitelisted on Balancer, having been replaced by the $AAVE token. The spirit of this decision is that $LEND liquidity will become less useful over time while $AAVE liquidity will likely undergo a period of rapid ramp-up.

Some users have expressed frustration at this decision, initially citing tax implications. Other users may have other considerations, including but not limited to the gas costs of a liquidity migration. This proposal provides an opportunity for those users to vote to reinstate the $LEND token to the whitelist such that both $LEND and $AAVE would coexist on Balancer and draw BAL rewards from the liquidity mining program. New tokens typically enter the whitelist at cap1, but $LEND is not a new token - having already been whitelisted at cap3 - so its former cap tier would also be reinstated.

Though undoubtedly some community members would hope that this change may apply retroactively, it doesn't seem fair to any users who already migrated thinking that it would be necessary. This hardly seems the time to set a precedent for retroaction, so hopefully LPs would be satisfied enough with these changes taking effect at 00:00 UTC on Monday, October 12. A week's worth of BAL rewards would be lost to $LEND holders, as the previous whitelist proposal made clear that the token would be removed this week.