Proposal to Whitelist LPL

Read the original proposal on Discourse

TL;DR

• Proposal to whitelist LinkPool (LPL), activating single-sided exposure and IL protection.
• There are no apparent security concerns that would prohibit whitelist status.
• Proposed co-investment is 1,000,000 BNT
• 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

Project Websites: https://linkpool.io/ https://app.linkpool.io/

https://docs.linkpool.io/

https://market.link/

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 [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].

LinkPool tokens (LPL) serve two purposes:

1. By staking LPL in the LinkPool Owners’ Pool the user is entitled to claim a proportionate share of the fees generated by the company’s services (see: Monetization: Products & Services) [14]. Rewards are distributed as derivative tokens (lpoLINK), and a user’s lpoLINK balance will automatically increment as their LINK rewards accrue (at current rates of LINK earned, this is estimated to be around once every 12 hours). A user only needs to pay gas once to swap their lpoLINK balance for LINK, which can be exchanged 1:1 at any time. APY is calculated as: APY = (User’s Staked LPL Amount / Total Staked LPL Amount) x Total Fees generated by LinkPool. Users can estimate how much LINK LinkPool’s node is earning by checking its metrics [21] on Chainlink Market.
2. After staking LPL into the Owners’ Pool, the user will also receive LinkPool Allowance tokens which provide access to future staking pools. The first of these tokens is linkLPLA [22]. linkLPLA tokens will proportionally determine the amount of LINK a user will be able to stake in the LinkPool platform once Chainlink staking goes live. Initial estimates indicate that 1 linkLPLA will allow a user to stake 0.4 LINK, but these limits will progressively increase as LINK collateral demand grows.

Community and Communication

Official announcements are made via the official Twitter [23] account and Medium [24] page. LinkPool has an active community presence on Telegram (two channels: one official channel [25] and an unofficial group [26]) and Reddit [27], as well as a Discourse Forum [28]. LinkPool also operates official channels related to Chainlink Market (Twitter [29]; Telegram [30]). The team’s activity on Github [31] is also frequent with new updates. The development team and advisors [32] are presented on the official website. Jonny Huxtable is the Co-founder and technical lead of the company. LinkPool can be reached at contact@linkpool.io.

Token Security

LPL presents no apparent security concerns that would prohibit a whitelisted status. LPL does not have an elastic supply or rebase mechanism. LinkPool contracts do not have permissions that grant administrators unrestricted mint/burn capabilities.

Available Audits

On March 11, 2020, LinkPool stated that [33] “Audits have been performed, including an audit by Audits.dev, Thomas Hodges’ Smart Contract auditing project. Additional audits will be announced as time goes on.” (Thomas Hodges is a Lead Integration Engineer at Chainlink Labs.)

Market and Trading Data

• LPL price at the time of posting is $X.XX.
• All-time high: $22.24 (27 March 2021)
• All-time low: $4.38 (26 March 2021)
• 100,000,000 maximum supply.
• LPL is currently trading on Bancor, Uniswap, and Bilaxy.
• The 24-hour spot volumes between Bancor and Uniswap have historically ranged from $603,096 to $4,630,516.
• Since 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.