AP-23 - Liquidity Incentives for Aura / Balancer Gauges on Hidden Hand / Paladin

Summary: Establish an ongoing budget for voting market incentives in order to increase OHM pair liquidity and accumulate additional strategic assets. This will be capped at $400,000 every two weeks.

Background: TAP-15 permitted Olympus DAO to explore the use of incentives as a means to boost voting power to its LP Gauges. Starting the week of March 6th, 2023, Olympus Treasury committed $100,000 USDC to its OHM/ETH Pool located on AURA as a pilot.

The results of these efforts were favorable and resulted in the pool seeing between 10-14% vAPR over the epoch.

As part of the strategic vision outlined in the recent Treasury RFC, we plan to keep the AURA and use it to increase our market share within the AURA Ecosystem. This will also be used to further vote the gauges that tactically align with our proposed policy. The other rewards will preferably be managed through OTC offers to further increase our AURA position and Balancer Gauge Weight (This is subject to a cap of 5% of veBAL Voting Power).

Proposal: The Treasury Team requests community approval of a per epoch (Two Week) budget, not to exceed $400,000, for use in Hidden Hand / Paladin incentivized markets. This will serve as a means of efficiently increasing our $AURA and $BAL ownership over time while simultaneously receiving high emissions towards our OHM pools.

The list of potential assets used to incentivize will include:

OHM (Preferred) USDC DAI FRAX OHM utilized will either come from OHM already owned by the Treasury or minted specifically for this purpose. Proceeds will be managed to ensure the process is accretive (even in the case of new OHM entering circulating supply).

For example:

For the 3/6/23 AURA/HH Epoch, 88k net incentives yielded 1.55m votes. These votes produced approximately $123,000 estimated incremental yield. Therefore, this was accretive to Treasury and favorably impacted Liquid Backing.

Additionally, this is consistent with our goals of accumulating increased governance power in the Balancer ecosystem.

This budget will exist for the remainder 2023, at which time the budget will be re-evaluated for size and scope.