Allocate 1M of OGN rewards for 10 weeks to the OUSD Curve Pool?

As long discussed on our weekly community calls, I am a strong proponent of offering liquidity mining rewards to increase the circulating supply of OUSD and create a stronger long-term bull thesis for OGN as its governance token. Every single project on the DeFi Pulse leaderboard is offering some kind of incentives. We’ve made remarkable progress considering we haven’t offered any additional incentives, but now after concluding our latest round of security audits and protocol upgrades, we're ready to hit our inflection point.

For a stablecoin to be useful it must be ubiquitous. We are keenly aware of the fact that it’s still too difficult for most people to acquire OUSD or use it as their default cryptocurrency for all USD-denoted payments. Our growth plan is simple. First, we want to increase the circulating supply to 9-figures before the end of the year. This will make it easier for us to complete the listing process on several top centralized exchanges and get integrated into other DeFi protocols. As we get listed on more exchanges, it will become significantly easier for people to buy OUSD and start using it as their stablecoin of choice. This will create a virtuous cycle as liquidity begets liquidity. This increased demand for OUSD will also drive more awareness and interest in OGN as the governance token.

We’ve been working hard over the past few months to get OUSD supported by Curve. The OUSD+3crv pool is now live and liquidity providers are eligible to earn both CRV and OGN rewards. The exact percentage of CRV rewards that are distributed to the LPs in our pool is dependent on veCRV voters and how they choose to allocate those rewards. We can sway the vote by offering incentives to voters who support our pool. We intend to use roughly 1/4 of the rewards for bribes and the rest as rewards for liquidity providers.

This proposal requests an initial budget of up to 1M OGN / week for 10 weeks to be used for OGN incentives for liquidity providers and bribes. We expect to adjust the campaigns each week based on the results, while taking into consideration the competition from other projects. Measuring ROI of OUSD circulating supply per OGN spent will be a critical metric to ensure that we are getting the results that we want. For example, we may not offer any incentives for a given week and instead defer to another week if the competition is too high. We also expect to taper rewards down in weeks after getting our initial kickstart. Other weeks, we may use the maximum allotment if we believe that we are close to clearing certain milestones that will particularly help us with top exchange listings and DeFi integrations.

The community has previously expressed concern about yield farmers dumping their earned OGN and causing negative price pressure on our token. Obviously, this is something we want to avoid as well. This is a calculated short-term bet for long-term rewards. We believe this campaign will create long-term value for OGN holders. By running a short-term campaign with negligible price impact we can make OGN into a token governing hundreds of millions of dollars, reaching tens of thousands of more users. Our proposed weekly budget represents well under 1% of our weekly trading volume and 0.1% of the total circulating supply. It is not expected to have a noticeable impact on our token price. Unlike many new token launches, we have very deep liquidity and are using a much smaller percentage of our total supply to fund this campaign. We do NOT expect to offer OGN incentives in perpetuity. We’ve also decided to keep Origin Staking running for the time being until we see how this campaign performs.

We believe liquidity mining rewards on Curve will be an important tool in increasing the supply, liquidity, and usage of OUSD. This will also increase yields for OUSD holders and thus fees earned by OUSD, directly benefiting OGN holders. As a reminder, 10% of the yield generated by OUSD is used to buyback OGN on the open market. This campaign will also dramatically increase the visibility of OUSD and OGN in the DeFi ecosystem and lead to increased composability and more integrations.

I recognize this proposal may be controversial, but we believe this is the best path forward for OUSD and is in the best interests of all OGN holders. As always, we welcome debate in our #governance channel on Discord.