[Passed] NuPool Grant Proposal 2

Yes. Sorry for being unclear.

Why? Even we disregard Hongkong, S Korea, and Chinaā€™s hitorical pegs that had a few persent floating spread and effectively lifted their domestic export sector, we can look at existing e-currencies such as PerfectMoney-USD, OKpay-USD, and even BTC-e-USD etc. They are traded on the market with 2-5% spread and are still regarded as USD by the users

It doesnā€™t matter what the nushareholders think the spread should be. It matters what the market and users think. We are given ourselves a very hard time and get ourselves into a corner by keeping such a small spread.

If I were a user iā€™d rather want to have a currency with wider spread but finacially very healthy than one with zero spread but questionable means.

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No problem at all.
Back to topic: Iā€™m not sure why anyone with no interest in Nu other than liquidity providing (we might attract this kind of PLPCs in the near future) would chose NSR over NBT then. As Jordan mentioned, those people are most likely to convert their coins as fast as they can into their desired countervalue.

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I fully second that!

I might be wrong, but I understand the peg that is promised to be kept by Nu to be the peg to the US Dollar and to nothing else.
I see no reason why Nu should offer the service of a derived peg for crypto currencies (for free for the customers, at expense of Nu) except for marketing purposes.

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There is no premium paid to them by some shareholders. Nothing hinders anyone from running large spread bots and to make profit from the spread. I just donā€™t see why these people should get an additional income from the shareholders.

Only short-term speculators and shareholders. Just like on a multipool which optionally pays out in BTC or in the alt coin. So far almost all of our liquidity comes from shareholders. For Nu shareholders its the same, since in both cases 5M NSR need to be printed to make the payout or to burn the NBT. However, it is much harder finding one person willing to make a grant that burns 10,000 NBT or more (it also involves trust), than just continuously paying out NSR to the users.

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This!
Trying to find someone would require proper incentives (attractive burn rate) making it in the end more costly.

I think this can only be achieved if PLPCs are compensated in NSR only. How would you encourage pool participants to chose NSR over NBT? Most of the funds might come from shareholders now, but that can change rapidly to a more profit orientated user base.

Those users donā€™t necessarily need to care about the pegging mechanisms behind Nu, as long as they trust it. They wouldnā€™t participate in an LPC operation otherwise.

Shareholders are not paying much for LPCā€™s income. Bulk of the fee is for compensating exchange rate volatility risk and exchange default risks. They are the bleeding spots.

edit to add:
By setting the spread to ~0, we make it impossible for the market to discover a self-sustainable spread that could even pay for the loss of abovementioned risks.

I donā€™t think the increased liquidity justifies the cost. Currently there are too many ways that Nu bleeds money. I agree it is a good idea to allow more flexible spreads.

Perhaps we can put more levels in tier 1 liquidity, so while we still have small but sizable buy and sell walls with low spread (with efforts to maintain), more liquidity can be placed at larger spreads. We can either do this explicitly or design a reward system that encourages more diverse spread levels.

I fully second that.
I don t see why Nu should continue to provide a stable crypto-currency for free to traders.
Nu has been doing it for more than 6 months. It was maybe justified from a marketing perspective but right now, because of that, Nu is a money losing business.

Right now, I feel that a trader should pay for the privilege of being able to use a stable crypto-currency.
And that is why the spread should be increased drastically.
As I pointed here, we can imagine that B&C could help a lot in that regard: since the costs would be much lower than centralized exchanges, LPCs would be able to take a significant portion of the the traditional exchange trade fees while being able to keeping a small spread and while leaving a significant portion to the shareholders.

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An improvement is already in the road map.

Once the parametric order book is available (expected for NuBot version 0.35) this will solve some of the financial problems providing liquidity creates.
If someone wants to buy large chunks from a parametric order book (instead of a wall), the price is floating for the benefit of Nu.

At the moment only increasing the spread of the walls can help mitigating the costs.

There have been discussions on flexible organic spread and using simple spread setting to generate income for Nu without disturbing the market

Ok, pardon my ignorance. As both a liquidity provider and shareholder I am willing to support increasing the spread, if there is a detailed plan I can agree with.

Volatility risks for liquidity providers may be somewhat lower and mildly offset by the spreads, but exchange default is still real. It is difficult to significantly reduce the interest rate, which is so far the most reasonable form of mitigation to exchange default. On the other hand, in terms of cutting costs, the increase in liquidity targets should be proportionate to the decrease of interests. There are conflicting objectives so itā€™s hard to decide upon a fair plan.

As a temporary fix, it is easier to support a change in the reward system in liquidity operations, partly to experiment the effects of a spread increase. For example, in NuPool the only way to bid for reward is to change your preferred interest rate. I think, once you reduce the desired interest rate, you should also be allowed to place orders at slightly higher spreads, which gives less volatility risk. We can see how the incentives of liquidity providers play out to support a higher spread and make it cheaper for shareholders.

My ignorance sensors didnā€™t tingle - so either they are broken, or thereā€™s no ignorance :wink:

My take is that the volatility risk can be mitigated by

  • bigger spreads (for now),
  • a parametric order book (with NuBot 0.35) and
  • maybe with funds in Tier 2 (fiat):

The exchange default risk could be dramatically reduced with ā€œB&C Exchangeā€. And with time-locked encryption the funds would be even safe if reputed signers disappeared in such big numbers that the deposits were locked.

@masterOfDisaster how do you feel about separating the buy and sell order prices such that the spread is changing and defined by the market. Coinbase.com does this kind of a thing. We could even just use their price feeds.

Sounds like a good plan!
Anything that allows providing liquidity at rates that are accepted by the market while saving Nu money (or even making Nu money!) is good for Nu :wink:

I imagine the spread to increase in times of high transaction volume - is this assumption valid?
Intuitively one could imagine that the srpead tightens in times of high transaction volumeā€¦

With an increasing spread it would be possible to make money in times of high transaction volumes to (partly or fully) compensate the volatility losses - by our experience times of high (BTC) volatility are those with the highest transaction volumes and this is likely to stay this way as long as NBT are mainly used for hedging at exchanges.
It could be an effective countermeasure for volatility risks!

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Not sure this will work well. people will just trade on the exchange where spread is tighter, assuming no friction between exchanges. If we are to experiment, we have to do it on the biggest exchange so liquidity doesnā€™t just flow to else where.

Itā€™s not an assumption. Increasing spread (usually asynmetrically) when market jumps is a widely used strategy by forex market makers to make money and to self-protect. LPCs should be allowed to do this.

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For all the pegged coins, in the last 24hr Nubit volume is $70k, bitUSD+bitCNY is $6k, coinoUSD + Tether are low two digits, according t o coinmarketcap.

I think for marketing / demonstration purposes it is enough to lead the runner-up by a factor of 10. Letā€™s spend rest of the marketing budget run good old ads etc. ( and reward the early adoptor PEGs)

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The OP has been updated with an modified proposal and voting has started.
The notable changes are the reduction in Target Liquidity (100k > 70k), amount requested (~10k > ~7k) and the reduction in fee (1,000 > 700).
These reductions were made to make the total spend on Liquidity for Nu ~10,000 NBT when the other liquidity sources are taken into account.

The details to vote for are:

BNUPooL5Q4THaAQV3gz3tuPuagVaiwtCaK
6,862

Thanks in advance for your votes.

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OK, its a lot of liquidity we will have with all the grants together, but this is a good experiment to see if this indeed also attracts the corresponding trading volume. I would have loved if you would have been a bit more specific on your planned documentation efforts and community outreaches, but I am convinced that you have a good concept in mind.

Sorry for playing the penny pincher now, but I also assume that the 138 NBT will be corrected by the true value in the next grant, right? :slight_smile: Because its an lower bound which already cannot be reached anymore, looking at the liquidity on bittrex over the last days.