[ARFC] Merit - A New Aave-Alignment User Reward System

While not everything has been laid out yet due to lack of maturity, Merit is seen by the ACI as the first step of the Aave DAO redistributing its net profits long term and not as a single isolated event.

there’s an upgrade to the safety module that is currently being worked on that is also a prime candidate to receive protocol profits.

The truth about optimizers is they’re neither innovative nor real optimization.

They just sacrifice all revenue (zero reserveFactor or fee) and subsidy by distributing a shitcoin (a16z funded so expect UNI-like tokenomics) for no economic value add creation, just destruction. it’s not economically sustainable for any actor involved.

Under Merit this Non-sense is revealed, as optimizers factually are now underperforming just using Aave.

We expect this fact to be unclear until the first period Merit airdrop then extremely well understood immediately after.

This was allowed to grow because actors on DAO payroll but actually working against it, like Gauntlet, refused to increase the wETH optimal ratio % and wanted recently to increase wETH RF to make Aave even less competitive, Fortunately, DAO governance allowed protocol increased efficiency, that makes these optimizers benefits at best negligible.

Aave invented Ethlend, which is the design behind the optimizers, so some service providers are fully capable of building an optimizer, but it’s a net negative, so we don’t think this should be a point of focus.

for the Blue protocol, it’s more a MakerDAO & Compound V3 competitor than an Aave one, they participate in ecosystem diversity and while I wouldn’t call that innovation (maybe innovation by abstraction at best) there’s no particular reason for the DAO for any hostility,

Merit migratoors boosters are simply an incentives program. Like a mobile carrier giving you a good deal if you switch to them instead of current one.

regarding rewarded actions;

It all boils down to “Borrow wETH” and “Borrow GHO.” Maybe it would remove proposal complexity to bring the nature of collaterals into the “booster/diluter” layers.

to put it simply, we have a GHO budget & a wETH budget, and two actions towards allocating these budgets. the boosters diluters are defined by collateral nature & added bonus user behaviour.

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