[GIP-269] Adjustment to Incentive Budget allocation

Summary

This proposal aims to adjust and clarify several parameters of the original Permissionless upgrade proposal. The main reasons for this update are:

• Feedback received from multiple curators regarding the initial design;
• The actual migration schedule, which turned out to be non-simultaneous across asset types — with ETH pools active for nearly a month, while stable pools have only just launched.

Key Adjustments

1. Postpone distribution depending on Permissionless TVL & revenue streams As mentioned above, pools for different assets launched at different times. Therefore, launching distribution based on TVL and revenue (Time-weighted TVL, Revenue-Focused budget from original proposal looks premature. We propose postponing it until January 1, 2026, while maintaining the previously announced figures for the current 1.5 months: 12M GEAR for the wstETH pool, 8.5M GEAR for the WETH pool, and 9.5M GEAR for stable pools.

2. New Curator Incentive Mechanism The initial proposal assumes a mechanism for determining allocations based on the size of the curated pool and its revenue. However, at the pool's launch, its TVL and revenue are 0, so this mechanism is unsuitable—an initial incentive for bootstrapping liquidity is required. To cover such cases the original proposal had an unallocated portion. We propose using it as follows:

• For the first month after a new pool or curator launch, liquidity providers will receive fixed-rate rewards of 10 GEAR per day per $1,000 in liquidity.This corresponds ~1% in GEAR rewards.
• The total budget for this mechanism is capped at 2,000,000 GEAR (per pool)

This ensures that early participants in new curator pools are adequately incentivized without distorting overall token distribution.

3. Removal of “TVL Achieved Bonus” The idea behind this clause was to motivate curators to add assets more quickly. However, after discussing it with curators, we see that this clause could be used to extract GEAR incentives from the DAO by adding random assets. Overall, based on our communications with curators, we haven't seen much interest in this mechanic, and as we see, curators are currently working quite quickly to add assets. Therefore, it seems logical to remove this clause, thereby simplifying operational complexity.

4. Removal of “Frontend Onboarding Rule” The frontend onboarding reward rule is also removed, as it is no longer relevant and did not receive strong support from curators.

Rationale

The proposed changes align incentive distribution with the actual rollout timeline of migration pools and incorporate curator feedback to simplify the framework and prevent gaming. The update preserves stability until the end of 2025 while keeping flexibility for new curator launches.

Voting and execution

Due to the fact that the incentives in the Ethereum pool expire in 2 days, it is proposed to start the distribution of rewards as soon as a positive quorum is reached, with the possibility of rolling back if the opposite side wins by the end of the vote.