[RFC-3] XEN-POP stake pool & partnership

[BRMbm]

Summary

XEN Crypto is a new protocol (launch date 8 October, 2022) carefully designed to fulfil the 1st principles of blockchain: decentralisation, transparency, immutability, counterparty risk resistance, peer-to-peer value exchange and self-custody.

The XEN community of ‘Xenians’ is growing rapidly, and it is expected that multiple use cases for XEN tokens will emerge once tokens are minted by the community after launch.

This proposal is to create a XEN-POP staking pool to incentivise Xenians to stake their XEN tokens, receive POP rewards and become active in the Popcorn DAO.

The united XEN-POP community will then generate even more positive global impact by combining blockchain first principles with a DeFi protocol that creates noble yield.

Why Popcorn should partner with XEN Crypto

(1) Popcorn’s mission and values align perfectly with the fundamentals of XEN:

• Popcorn’s decentralized technology drives the future towards a more inclusive and transparent financial system, and contributes to social impact organisations working in areas of education, environment and open source.

• XEN is launching with zero supply (no premint or founders allocation etc) and is free to mint, with users paying the gas costs. In contrast to Bitcoin, ANYONE anywhere in the world with a mobile device, a digital wallet and an internet connection can mint XEN tokens and receive minimum 2% APY. This is inclusive and it potentially increases opportunity for people in economies with limited opportunities.

(2) XEN + Popcorn communities will create bigger impact together

Popcorn is a DeFi protocol with sophisticated DeFi products that have social impact hard-coded into each transaction without any additional cost to the user. It is governed by an active DAO and is ranked in the Top 40 DAOs tracked by deepDAO.io

The XEN Crypto protocol is an ERC-20 token built on Ethereum that incentivizes users to mint, claim and stake XEN tokens according to time and participation amplifiers.

There are currently no markets for XEN and limited use cases.

This will change extremely rapidly: it is expected that the community will create trading pairs on DEXs soon after XEN tokens are minted from 8 October onwards. This will create:

• further demand for XEN tokens
• additional utility
• a huge increase in Xenians (currently 4,600 members in the official XEN Crypto Telegram group)

PROPOSAL: Create XEN-POP staking pool to onboard Xenians into Popcorn

To bring the XEN + Popcorn communities together we should create a XEN-POP staking pool:

• XEN holders stake their XEN tokens via Popcorn dApp popcorndao.finance for standard staking term of 12 weeks

• Xenians receive X% APY in POP tokens (eg 10% APY)

• Xenians can then restake their POP to receive even more POP, and also receive vlPOP governance tokens to vote on PopcornDAO proposals.

“POP-XENians” can therefore create a positive feedback loop by generating their own proposals that further benefit the XEN community and others that benefit from the XEN mission.

It is a win-win-win for first principles blockchain and yield that counts.

Next steps
Please discuss ideas here, on Discord or on Telegram.
Please share with XEN Crypto community to get their input.
@krychek and Core team to confirm any tech requirements to implement
Snapshot vote if discussion is positive.

With thanks to @Scorpio for kicking off this discussion.

Keep poppin!

[krychek]

I support this proposal, but given the price of XEN will be extremely volatile once LP’s are created and the fact that it’s inflationary, we will have to get creative in terms of calculating emissions. It can be done.

[Muxty]

It is a good move by Pop and making more POP for holders through XEN but hope the volatility of XEN wouldn’t affect POP?

[Ellar]

This is a better move for Pop, but other strategies should be set aside to avoid any form of uncertainties or misplacement

[Cardo]

Xen has great potential to capitalize on. On the plus side, there’s a huge user base to absorb. And who knows how big the project can get; that is a pro and con on its own. On the negative side, as Michael mentioned, calculating emissions in the early stages can be tricky due to Xen’s volatility and inflationary nature.

We can start with XEN/POP LP staking pool, and sometime in the not-too-distant future, add a XEN staking pool.

[ToBe]

The XEN protocol seems to be an interesting project especially regarding the novel approach for distributing the token (I read the paper yesterday and I’ll give it a try myself :)). However, I wasn’t able to finde proper applications of XEN tokens in the whitepaper - it all focuses on minting tokens with that newly designed distribution schema. This is nice for a technical PoC but I can’t see this grow into a vibrant product or brand?! Anyway, people interested in novel (and supposedly more fair) distribution approaches might also be interested in “doing good with crypto” which means attracting/converting XEN people into POPCORN people could work well

I suggest to limit the amount of POP distributed to XEN holders/stakers in such a way that they can explore the POP protocol but without creating a financial incentive - we already have enough sell pressure. Maybe a simple airdrop to XEN holders after timeframe X would be sufficient marketing-wise.

[BRMbm]

Good points: there’s definitely potential strong alignment with similar “doing good with crypto” community, and the community will likely create myriad use cases.

Your airdrop idea is interesting. One action for us could be to review the impact of the recent POPdrop of 114,00 POP to other DAOs via PIP-4 to see how many recipients redeemed their 25 POP each. A lot of those holders may not be aware of the airdrop and will not liquidate their POP.

With XEN, perhaps we should require positive action by the XEN holders, get the XEN community talking about the new POP use case and ensure XEN holders actively stake their XEN to receive POP.

[BRMbm]

Tokenomic Option

• Stake XEN
• Receive POP rewards
• Restake POP rewards and receive vlPOP
• Initiate Popcorn governance or beneficiary proposal and/or vote in snapshot
• POP airdrop to all snapshot voters over a defined period (eg snapshots done over next 120 days, to allow long XEN minters to claim their XEN after the initial 100 day minting period)

Benefits

• Xenians onboarded to PopcornDAO
• Increased DAO activity
• Increased social impact
• More uptake of 3X and Butter once word spreads that we are able to increase donations to beneficiaries through product fees

We would then need proposal approval for:

• X qty POP for XEN-POP staking pool
• setting an exchange rate for XEN denominated in USD, then calculating the what the POP equivalent would be in dollar terms to set the APY (from @krychek)
• Y qty POP for Popcorn snapshot airdrop

Thoughts?

[umq]

Thank you for your thoughtful input as always, ToBe. How would you consider the potential of legitimate use cases developing for XEN? This could very well be possible from the vibrant XEN community and this proposal would put Popcorn ahead of the curve with that outcome. With that in mind, I’m currently in favor of the proposal as it stands so long as there is a strategy to mitigate the price impact from emissions.

[BRMbm]

Final questions before summarising the proposal with a vote option:

Timing: when to launch?

XEN tokens will appear on DEXs as early as this Sunday however many XEN holders will take the full 100 days to mint their tokens to receive bigger amplifier - and then long term stake to get 20% APY

Price action will likely be volatile with low XEN supply initially, with a bump at day 100 (mid January) as XEN tokens are minted at term and traded instead of staked due to emerging use cases (eg our XEN-POP staking pool)

POP allocation

Do we need approval via the proposal for a definite amount of POP to be allocated to the stake pool?

Stake pool calcs

• We estimate XEN market cap in USD following XEN launch (eg number of users interacting with the protocol, estimate of mint term and total supply over 100 days)

• Target 1,000 XEN stakers

• Calculate XEN-POP APY based on approved qty of POP via item 2 above.

@krychek please shout with comments and anything else we haven’t considered

[krychek]

The problem with airdrops is that many people will be creating more than 1 address. There is no way to determine a fair airdrop.

The staking pool can be interpreted as a strategic favor, one that not only onboards many enthusiastic members of the XEN community to PopcornDAO, but also teaches them how to do DeFi.

We can also calculate a supply in POP rewards that sufficiently prevents significant sell pressure and apply the same 10% claim, 90% vest on staking rewards.

[Scorpio]

Growth at XEN even before launch is phenomenal! Took us pretty much a year to reach 8,000 members on Telegram, XEN will be there in less than a month!!

If POP can safely connect and support the XEN adoption mission through partnering on Staking as second adoption use case behind their ecommerce store, think it’s understandable how this can benefit our DeFi Giving goals!