Haven’t read everything in detail yet, but do favor a referral program. In fact I proposed such a thing back in October 2021: Referral rewards
In my proposal I suggested sharing 20% to 40% of the protocol fee on a daily basis, I think that’s far safer than a percentage of the value of staked ETH in Swise. Safer because such a percentage cannot exceed what the protocol gains from staking.
Also paying a percentage of the protocol fee, a referrer could accrue rETH2, just like stakers do. There’d be no need for us to part with Swise, although we could provide an option to make the claim in Swise.
Currently staking returns about 4% annually. The protocol fee is going to be around 0.4% annually, if we pay out 1% as referrer it will take the protocol 2.5 years to earn that back via protocol fees.
I don’t think we should pay so much. In my opinion it should be less than 50% of the protocol fee, so that we gain from it as well.