At risk of derailing this thread, I will respond. If needed, we can move comments out to a separate thread.
More structure in our plans for burning (both NSR and NBT) would be helpful as an iterative improvement. I know you have done some work on that and it is appreciated. I have some ideas I’d like to present but doing hasn’t quite bubbled to the top of my priority list yet. However, I don’t believe it is prudent to create NSR buy pressure by offering park rates. Doing so would increase demand for NuBits, which might allow us to use sale proceeds to purchase and burn NSR, but the approach isn’t sustainable.
The relatively even liquidity walls are telling us the market is absorbing the additional NuBits entering circulation as NuBits unpark. Parked NuBits reached a peak of approximately 105,000 NBT about two and half months ago. Now there are only ~34,000 NBT parked. This means NuBit demand is growing at a healthy pace. I hope to see all NuBits unparked in a month, which would demonstrate there is no need to spread parking out over time.
NuBits experienced a drop in demand in February and shortly thereafter as a result of the losses on exchanges and the loss of venues to trade NuBits at. As currency demand dropped, we saw park rates which ultimately reached 19%, followed by NSR sales paired with NBT burns. That is what the bottom of our economic cycle looks like. Demand began to increase from that bottom, which manifested as an end of park rates being offered, no more NSR sales and drop in the number of parked NuBits. If NuBit demand continues to rise as it has in the last couple of months (I’m not claiming it will as much as I’m just illustrating what the course of our economic cycle is), then we see demand for the 34,000 parked NuBits as they unpark over the next month. If new demand continues, we will see tier 4 buy side liquidity grow to a level where will want to use some of those funds for dividends or NSR buyback and burn.
So, park rates being zero is a sign of network health. Having funds available for dividends or share buyback would demonstrate even greater network health, but it is to be expected that as our economic cycle turns that we would first need to absorb NuBits that are unparking.
If NuBit demand continues to grow at the pace it has in the last couple of months, we will begin to have funds for dividends or share buyback in a couple of months. We can expect the NSR price will respond favourably to that scenario. We just need to continue to focus on ways to increase currency demand while limiting expenses. It is working.
I think shareholders are confused about the use of park rates and comments like yours are vital for general understanding of park rates.
Thank you
Of course using park rates to increase buy pressure is not sustainable if abused. However, a small amount of continuous inflation is very healthy for any economy and I really admire the foresight of Nu (and JL in particular of course) to integrate a feature like parking from the get go. We should be using it.
No doubt. I would not be here if I thought otherwise. I am just trying to talk about how it could work even better.
Our biggest economic issue right now is a low NSR price. JL made a post last month about how we have distributed a huge amount of dividends this year. That’s freakin fabulous. However, our NSR price is clearly suffering and has been since literally the day after the B&C blockchain snapshot (i.e. the actual moment of distribution). That our liquidity is balanced is, in my opinion, something like a white lie about our economic health. The NSR price is the betrayer of the truth.
By having 0% park rates we are saying Nu effectively has 0 debt. We should not raise park rates only when we reach the bottom of the economic cycle; we should have continuous park rates nearly all the time until we are actually at a state where we believe we have paid off all our debts. I realize the concept of ‘debt’ for Nu is hyper abstract, but one perspective is that Nu is in a rather rare position to pick and choose the interest rates on its loans from the community (this is the same perspective that sees all NBT in existence as liability).
By picking 0%, we are turning away people that are willing to loan us money at a reasonable rate. However, we do not currently have the infrastructure to conglomerate ‘loans’ that we get via park rates into our greater economic system. Therefore, I am currently voting 0%, despite my ideology.
Small point of consideration - NBT already have 1-3% inflation built in through the monetary policy decisions of the US Fed. Like you, I consider a small amount of inflation to be healthy, but I think we already have it included in our design with our USD peg.
With respect to park rates, I agree. So that is a scale that we use as an upper limit and take something like an order of magnitude less. With that in mind, maybe we should vote for %0.25 on most of the normal time frames?
Is there a way to calculate a realistic number for how much Nu inflates as a %/year with just this first year of data? Would it be consistent to use that number to find a good park rate to offer loans at?
I’m not an economist, so I’m having a really hard time expressing what I want to say here. We should pay some % that is a fraction of the amount we inflate to take out loans from the community to avoid our inflation. Like if NBT inflates by 10%/year, we should be able to safely offer 1% interest on loans.
That’s some seriously circular logic. If we don’t offer rates, that will cause no one to park, so eventually they will all unpark. That doesn’t indicate network health, that just indicates that we haven’t been offering park rates. We could offer 0 park rates while completely bankrupt and we would have no parked nubits, but that doesn’t mean we’re magically not bankrupt anymore. It just means we’re stupid for not letting parkers bail us out.
Surely there is some rate we would be willing to accept a loan at? 0 parked nubits is not a measure of health to me, it is a measure of sickness that we could not offer reasonable interest rates.
I just feel like we’re saying we have no use for money, and it seems very strange since that’s our whole business model.
With our way of dealing with things, I don’t think there will ever be a stable state of 0 parked NBT.
We have always raised rates to crazy levels every time there’s low liquidity; the worst part isn’t exactly the cost, but the fact that we only deal with park rates during emergencies of sorts, where there’s little space to experiment. There’s simply no way to get enough data and decide upon something milder than maximal crisis-handling measures.
I would agree to have a constant lower bound park rate and see how it goes. I suspect a low constant park rate has the following benefits:
Reduce sell pressure spikes
Which gives us a chance to review and reduce long term liquidity pool spending
More data and predictability on NBT movement within the chain
More predictability and consistency for users
All these increase the solvency of Nu so is win-win for us and users
The average park rate certainly has to be lower than USD inflation. I don’t have the expertise to give a concrete number, but perhaps we can look to the federal reserve interest rate which is 0.25% at the moment.
I was thinking that 0% would be desirable for Nu (looking healthy), but I came to the conclusion that a moderate parking rate all the time might even be better.
It could create some persistent degree of demand.
At a low rate it would cost less money annually than the liquidity providing monthly.
But I think this is too low to really provide an incentive to park:
I’m no financial expert, but offering parking interest in the range of 2 to 4 percent might be a better experiment than having parking rates spike in cases of “emergency” in which people are less willing to park than in times where Nu and the peg are not considered being in trouble.
@Cybnate, @cryptog do you want to join the discussion?
You as data feed provider play an important role for this discussion.
There have been lots of discussions about parking rates.
Let me add my current view to it.
I think an annual parking interest of
2% for a minimum parking duration of 1 month
3% for a minimum parking duration of 3 months
4% for a minimum parking duration of 6 months
are worth a try.
The interest rates are increasing the longer the NBT get parked, because people will consider it a risk parking the NBT longer and will require compensation for it - or they won’t park longer (except they assume the parking interest being lowered in the meantime; when the NBT unpark and need to be parked again to get another premium, the reward might be lower).
Anything less than 1 month is pretty much useless for Nu if the parking interest shall be used as a motivation to remove NBT from circulation for some time and monitor the effects.
The implied assumption is that Nu needs someone to park that long. I don’t see any reason Nu needs a park length longer than a month because the rate is revised every month or even in shorter period. If in January you find the buy side liquidity too low and want to increase park rate to have some part of the sell side NBT parked, why do you want the rate also high in February to June, knowing that the rate does fluctuate every month and it could well happen that just a month later the rate would need to be 0 and you could want every NBT out of parking? This makes no sense at all.
Nu is not a bank that can use deposited (parked) money for investment. There is no point mimicking bank interest rate behavior as a function of park length.
Nu is paying a compensation for people providing liquidity. This compensation can potentially be lowered if less NBT are available to hit the buy side, right?
I don’t get your logic if you are answering my post above. Let’s use the hypothetical scenario that buy side happens to be too low in January and too high in February to explain. So why, not being able to predict the future, should one in January set February’s rate?
Sorry for being confusing - it might be related to the fact that I’m confused as well.
I guess, I still don’t understand Nu’s NBT pegging situation properly.
NBT is being two-way pegged to USD.
I consider one of the directions more important than the other: the buy side. This alone might be reason for discussions. But I find Nu’s promise to always buy NBT back for 1 USD more important than anything else.
Offering parking rates reduces the amount of NBT that can hit the buy side and makes it easier for Nu to maintain the peg (on the buy side).
Each NBT that gets parked can’t be used to join a pool to get a compensation for putting funds on the sell side…
Paying park rates might just be cheaper for Nu.
And just like compensating liquidity providers, paying parking interest is supporting the peg.
Except for snap-shots there is no monitoring of the liquidity or liquidity trends.
I’d like to see a continuous monitoring of the liquidity (buy/sell side) and not only snap-shots.
I’d like to start playing with the park rate hoping to see a correlation between park rate and peg (buy side) health.
Either Nu starts moving NBT burns to a lower tier and helps the buy side of the peg this way or makes use of parking rates (and not only in panic situations).
That is all fine. The problem comes when, as it happens often, there is too much buy side some time later and you want every NBT coming out of parking and join the sell side. You don’t want the park rate now to complicate future’s situation. Don’t set rate longer than a month, unless you can see the future (a month anyway)
Setting the rate for 1 month doesn’t stop people from parking for longer than 1 month, does it?
They need to park for a minimum of 1 month if they want to get the “1 month interest” rate (which is calculated as annual rate), right?
Without liquid burn gateways and with the burn motion currently in place, I am against any use of park rates as a long-term loan. We do not have a proper economic tie between nbt and nsr and with the method of burn currently in place park rates would cause a share dilution instead of a buyback.
We should offer a small park rate at all times, but we can’t.
P.S. I was thinking more like dysconnect’s 0.25% at all time intervals longer than 10 days.
I think if the longest period of non-zero rate is 1 month and you park 2 months, you will get 0 interest. There have to be two non-zero periods to have a continuous range of period of non-zero rates.
Can someone confirm this?