ARC: Spark Lend Profit Share Proposal

Governance
10

At the moment it is clear that the latest movements of MakerDAO are deceptive regarding profit sharing while using it as some kind of fake “good partner” exposure.

Some arguments:

  • Due to the nature of their DAI reserve (allowing for borrowing DAI that gets minted on demand by the D3M mechanism), the main supplier (not only, but by design majority) of DAI is MakerDAO itself, meaning the whole yield goes to them as “profit”. This is in the order of 3% on notional, currently ~150-200m DAI, so ~6m.

  • MakerDAO chose to configure the Reserve Factor parameter of their Aave v3 instance (SparkLend) to 0% on DAI, which means that profit is 0 from it, and consequently, profit sharing is 0.

  • By organizational design, it is fairly clear that SparkLend is simply a subsidiary of MakerDAO to expand to different DeFi models, something completely legitimate. But in this case, they are using an accounting ruse to make a virtue of how much they contribute to partners and FOSS, while being factually false.
    At best, this is total marketing deception, at worse, this is just an orchestrated behavior from MakerDAO to trick the Aave DAO participants.

  • Let’s put things into perspective:

    • SparkLend is an instance of the Aave v3 software, using v3-core, v3-periphery and v3-deploy.
    • SparkLend benefits from all the FOSS (MIT by general rule) tools that the Aave DAO and its contributors continuously create in public, for example, via BGD.
    • SparkLend has also forked the Aave UI of Aave Companies.
    • Aave contributors (me included) have been always helpful when contacted by people of SparkLend, regarding technicalities of Aave, same as any other alternative instance.
    • The Aave DAO supported DAI from day 0, creating the biggest secondary market for DAI.
    • When D3M appeared, the Aave DAO implicitly supported it.
    • SparkLend presents arguments of “technicalities” making more complicated profit sharing. My argument: no substance, I know the Aave protocol a bit better than them, and the problem is lack of will.

  • The situation by itself is so ridiculous and “cheap” that shows the appreciation (lack of) that MakerDAO has for Aave: we are talking about maybe not even $1m yearly in profit sharing, in exchange for using the whole software of SparkLend + the growth to MakerDAO because of it. All of it is from completely new revenue to MakerDAO.

  • MakerDAO/SparkLend had no obligation to propose any profit sharing, compensation, or anything of the sort to Aave: they could do whatever they wanted with Aave’s software.
    However, they decided to do some commonly called “cloud-chasing”, associating themselves as some kind of “partners” of the Aave DAO doing profit sharing.
    It is simply disgusting and to be ashamed of.


Personally, I have interacted in the past with contributors to MakerDAO and they have always been exemplary. Also, I think MakerDAO has done a lot for the space with primitives surrounding SAI first, DAI now.
But this is not really the way to go.

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