PAUSED: Socket for Shannon economic R&D

Hello Pokt community,

This is my first interaction in the community, so let me briefly introduce myself.

I’m Ivor Jugo, and I’m leading the tokenomics department at MVP Workshop (a web3 R&D studio). Alongside my colleague, Alex Damjanovic, we’ve had the chance to work on various token use cases, ranging from network native tokens, DeFi, and governance to web2 enterprise tokenization.

Last week at the Istanbul DevConnect, we had the opportunity to meet part of the team in person and discussed with Dermot the opportunity to get involved in the project by tackling some of the Shannon upgrade economic topics for research. We agreed that opening a socket would be the best starting point for this. So here is the proposal:

  1. This socket is about the research and design of the mechanisms listed in the “Protocol, PNF, Community to review.”

Firstly, we’re going to benchmark several implementation solutions of tokens unstacking on other protocols. This will aid us in making better design decisions, which we will provide for the following mechanisms:

  • Application unstaking
  • Servicer unstaking
  • Portal unstaking
  • Watcher unstaking
  1. Type of Socket - Experiment/Initiative: $2K, paid and reviewed monthly, for the life of the experiment.
  2. We will work openly and self-report monthly. The work can be viewed in this Google Drive folder (Pokt Network socket resources - Google Drive) as it is being done.
  3. Wallet address - 0x07504f78f8Bae957B02De35726d4c7f55F93d1a5

We would appreciate hearing your thoughts and any guidelines on the topic. Nice to meet you all, and we’re genuinely excited about participating in this project.

Cheers!

4 Likes

Was great to meet last week and excited to see your work. This socket is now open.

3 Likes

Hey @Ivorano - I’ve opened a thread in our discord for this socket: Discord

Reminder that you’ll need to submit an update for last month and this month by Jan 3 (due to the holiday, typically it’s by the 1st) to keep the socket going.

Looking forward to the updates.

2 Likes

Hi everyone, apologies for the delayed response. As you can imagine, the holidays consumed most of our time in the previous weeks.

Let me first outline the efforts we made last month concerning this research, and then I’ll provide our conclusions and reasoning.

Parameters Redefinition

As mentioned in the initial comment, our task was to redefine and suggest the best values for the following four parameters:

  1. Application unstaking waiting time (currently: 2016 blocks or 21 days)
  2. Servicer unstaking waiting time (currently: 2016 blocks or 21 days)
  3. Portal (gateways) unstaking waiting time (to be defined)
  4. Watchers waiting time - being left for a later version of the protocol upgrade.

We started by listing all the pros and cons of implementing an unstaking waiting time in the protocol.

Pros:

  • Price Stability: Prevents large cascade selling events.
  • Network Security: Provides time to find new users to take over the unstakers’ responsibilities.
  • Prevents self-interested actors from frontrunning an impending default event and provides additional assurances to anyone with POKT exposure.
  • Dissuades arbitrageurs trying to stake/unstake quickly, helping to delay withdrawals and giving room to pause in times of crisis.

Cons:

  • The token could become less attractive to some investors.
  • A too-large waiting time compared to other protocols can make token staking look a bit shady.

The pros side is considerably longer, and this aligns with the observation that any relevant protocol out there didn’t enable an immediate unstaking of funds for the main protocol actors (validators, servicers, parachains, etc.).

So, we approached the problem in three main ways:

  1. Benchmark unstaking waiting time and solutions from different networks.
  2. Analyze historical data and simulate some future scenarios.
  3. Ask the actors from the community who need to wait those times how they feel about it.

Findings

Benchmarking:

As we all know, the POKT architecture involves various agents in the system, and the utility of the protocol token is quite unique. Therefore, we had to compare waiting times for other unstaking agents, mostly validators, in the known web3 networks. Here’s a summary:

Network Unstaking Waiting Time
Ethereum First come, first unstake.
Polkadot 28 days.
Polygon Approximately 2-4 days.
Avalanche 14 days.
Cosmos 21 days.
Solana Approximately 2-3 days.
Cardano Approximately 5 days.
Aptos 18-21 days.
Ankr 3-4 days.

POKT values (21 days) are in the upper range but still within standard ranges as on other platforms, providing no concrete reasoning to update any of those values.

Note: Regarding the Ethereum solution, it appears to be a good compromise between protocol security and user experience. Validators can unstake immediately if they are the first ones trying to unstake at the moment; otherwise, they have to wait in the queue. However, this solution has its tradeoffs on the implementation side.

Data Analysis:

Entering the data analysis and simulations phase, we were particularly intrigued by the prospect of drawing meaningful conclusions.

Utilizing the POKTSCAN API, we retrieved historical protocol data and identified instances of substantial unstaking, both exceeding 80 million POKT at specific points in time – on August 2022 and November 2023.

While it’s essential to acknowledge the limitation of deriving comprehensive conclusions from only two data points, a common factor in these cases was the notable price volatility preceding those dates. In Q2-Q3 2022, we witnessed a significant POKT price decrease correlated with the broader crypto market bearish trend. Conversely, in recent months, there has been a substantial increase in the POKT/USD value.

However, it also seems logical that significant shifts in the token price would influence various actors’ choices on when to unstake their tokens.

Regrettably, attempting to quantify an indicator representing the impact of price volatility on unstaking proved challenging and, at present, appears to be a formidable task. We genuinely believe that price movement is influenced by numerous factors, making such an endeavor seem somewhat futile.

Moreover, in a recent instance, we observed a substantial amount of funds being unstaked in the second week of December 2023. However, the prevailing market conditions swiftly absorbed the potential selling pressure it could have generated.

Simulations:

Our secondary approach involved simulating various scenarios to derive optimal outcomes through a parameter sweep. We considered the ideal amount of Staked POKT, primarily falling between 40% and 60% of the total supply, as a factor that could serves as a guiding principle upon which we can conduct various experiments. However, these values are contingent on other parameters yet to be defined during the Shannon update, such as staking amounts, burn mechanisms, treasury, etc. Consequently, experimenting with these values at this stage seemed premature.

Acknowledging the diligent efforts of the Blockscience team in developing the network’s digital twin model, we anticipate that its finalization will provide a more opportune moment to potentially leverage their work. This would enable anyone to validate various additional parameters in the system effectively.

Community Feedback:

Finally, the potential discouragement of new servicers, applications, or portals from joining the network due to extended waiting times appears to be the only appropriate consideration to verify. We attempted to find relevant comments or discussions in the community channels but couldn’t find anything substantial. We suggest opening this topic for current or future network users to express their preferences on whether the current values of unstaking waiting time should be:

  1. Shorter
  2. Longer
  3. Stay the same (21 days)

and provide reasons for your choice. We would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

Conclusion and Proposed Steps

In summary, we recommend the following course of action:

  1. Given the current uncertainty about the optimal approach for this socket, we propose closing it. We’ll continue to monitor the development of the cadcad PocketSimulationModel and consider potential collaboration once it’s finalized.

  2. Meanwhile, we intend to maintain the ongoing community discussion, providing a platform for diverse views on the topic.

Also, we wish everyone a happy new year! We are excited to further engage with the project and connect with community members in the coming months. Cheers!

3 Likes

great update guys! Thanks for all the work and excited to see it start back up again later.

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Echoing Ben here - thanks for your work on this, and looking forward to more when the timing is right.

We’ll pause/close this socket for now.

I think there’s plenty of opinions around Staking, and I’d recommend reaching out to NodeRunners and some of the larger stakers in the ecosystem. Especially with the recent price changes individuals are looking to unstake. You may find some good info in Telegram: Contact @poktoprice

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Hi @doctorrobinson, I haven’t come across that TG group before; I will definitely check it out. Thanks.

1 Like