Alex NorthBackground
- Circulating supply calculated on-chain affects miner collateral, higher supply = higher collateral requirements
- The “locked” calculation has multiple inputs: SAFTs, pledge collateral, vesting rewards, market collateral
- Built-in market is a tiny proportion
- Future markets may lock tokens, but be excluded from circulating supply calcs. Supply is actually lower than calculation, so pledge higher.
- What’s the working definition of “locked” and “supply” that we want?
Locked amounts
Miner pledge
- locked until date
- need to be able to unlock early, but only to burn as fees
- need to be able to postpone unlock of amounts per sector when extending
- miner actor would still need to track per-sector pledge amount and dates in queues
Miner rewards
- locked until date (in stages)
- need to unlock early as fees
Market pledge
- locked until date
- need to release early to pay as insurance to a different party
- this means they’re not really locked from supply!
Need some minimum duration that funds are locked for, else miner(s) could stack locked funds ahead of sealing, lower pledge, then unlock them.
Ideas
A built-in locked funds actor, that other markets and applications can lock funds into. The supply calculate does take this locked balance into account.
Why should an application or user use locked funds actor? Miners want it, as it reduces collateral. Miners pay bribes to contracts that lock funds? Creates a risk-free rate of return based on cost of capital reduction for pledge (probably pretty low).
But applications probably need to unlock funds at will, which is exploitable to manipulate supply.
Could we compute “locked” as backwards-looking?
Could we implement a minimum locking policy that applications can work around (e.g. maintaining an unlocked float, or passing on unlock delays to users).
Summary
- The need for markets to release locked funds from one part to pay to another means they’re not “locked” enough
- Thus recommend removing built-in market locked funds from circulating supply calculation
- Also reduce minimum locked to zero
- Unfortunate that we’ll then overestimate the circulating supply.
- A clear definition or policy for “locked” and “circulating” could allow us to implement a locked-funds actor that works.
This idea intersects a little with pledge token, and separating PoW from PoS rewards.