Whitelist LinkPool (LPL) Plus 250K BNT Co-Investment Limit (Attempt #3)

Read the original proposal on Discourse

TL;DR

• Proposal to whitelist LinkPool (LPL), activating single-sided exposure and IL protection.
• Proposed co-investment is 250K BNT
• There are no apparent security concerns that would prohibit whitelist status.
• There is no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the LinkPool project.
• LinkPool would not add major risk to the Bancor Protocol.
• Since the inception of the ERC-20 token, LPL has consistently been a top pool on Bancor in both liquidity and volume among protected and non-protected pools alike.

LinkPool token address:
0x99295f1141d58a99e939f7be6bbe734916a875b8 1

Project Websites:
https://linkpool.io/

app.linkpool.io

Staking App | LinkPool

The LinkPool Staking app is the leading platform for Chainlink staking. Discover pools, stake LINK tokens, borrow and lend staking allowances, and track reward APY.

https://docs.linkpool.io/

market.link

Chainlink Market

The Chainlink Market is a search engine for Chainlink nodes, adapters and data sources. Discover all the resources needed for smart contracts to integrate with external data sources and other blockchains.

Project

LinkPool [1] is a leading Chainlink node service provider with the goal of providing tools and services that benefit the Chainlink ecosystem. Their aims include lowering the barrier to entry to staking on Chainlink nodes, easing the amount of technical experience required to run a Chainlink node, and providing smart contract creators with the tools to easily search and identify Chainlink nodes that can suit their data requirements. LinkPool achieves these goals by offering an easy to use and intuitive staking dApp, providing node infrastructure through their eventual Node as a Service (NaaS) [2] and managed node offerings [3], and their industry first Chainlink Market [4], the definitive listing service and search engine for the Chainlink network. They have also developed powerful, trustless contracts [5] that can fairly distribute any form of revenue between a set of wallets.

The project was born thanks to two Chainlink community members (Jonny Huxtable [6] and Mat Beale) who started talking through the now defunct Chainlink Slack channel and realized that Chainlink staking 1 [7] was not going to be easy for the average Joe, due to the fact that it is much more difficult to manage a Chainlink oracle than to manage a PoS or PoW blockchain node. So they decided to come up with a project [8] that would allow users to deposit LINK collateral on the LinkPool node [9] in a secure and decentralized way so that users could experience the benefits of staking, without having to be exposed to most of the risks involved.

Between April 15, 2018 and July 31, 2018 LinkPool opened a crowdsale to raise funds in which they offered 25% of their company for sale in the form of 1000 tokenized shares in exchange for 1000 ETH. Thanks to said crowdsale they managed to raise ~705 ETH, however they decided to proportionally distribute [10] the "unsold" portion among those who had contributed ETH to the crowdsale.

A lot has changed since then: on March 26, 2021, LinkPool announced that they had redesigned both their token and their platform [11]. Among various reasons (listed below), this was done because the original LinkPool token (LP)'s contract [12] had integrated a biweekly airdrop mechanism that did not conform to the ERC-20 token standard. The original token also presented additional problems:

• Lack of visibility within the DeFi ecosystem
• Lack of liquidity: there used to be a very feature-limited DEX [13] as the only way to acquire LinkPool tokens.
• Significant barrier to entry (a minimum of 0.04 LP with forced 0.04 increments)
• Lack of transparency: unless you were very familiar with reading and understanding Ethereum transactions, hashes, input data and block explorers, it was quite complex to know what was happening on-chain.
• Lack of DeFi composability: per Jonny Huxtable [11], "the importance of composability became dramatically apparent. That's why we've since rebuilt the token and platform from the ground up to provide a staking ecosystem that's not just for us but the entire Chainlink node ecosystem across multiple blockchain networks in a fully composable manner."

Tokenomics

The LPL token supply is fixed at 100,000,000, of which at least 25,000,000 are currently available to the general public (see: Distribution) [14]. According to on-chain data [15], at least 71,450,000 LPL are currently owned and staked by LinkPool at time of posting (based on a rate of 1 linkLPLA to 1 LPL staked). 15 LP (375,000 LPL) are owned as severance by former Head of Operations and co-founder Mat Beale. These particular tokens are fully locked until September 1, 2021 [16]. Some of the available supply is still dependent upon holders of the previous token migrating to the ERC-20 token. At time of posting, 3960.08 out of 4000 LP have been migrated [17] to LPL (at the rate of 1 LP to 25,000 LPL, this is 99,002,000 LPL).

The contract with the highest concentration of LinkPool tokens is the LinkPool Owners' Pool [18] (the Staking Contract); at time of post this is around 97,000,000 [19]. At time of writing, the BNT-LPL pool is the fourth largest [20].

Read the original proposal on Discourse