Summary
In this proposal, we suggest to split off the Genesis Vault into a Vault independent from the DAO, allowing the team the flexibility to advertise it separately from the rest of StakeWise, in a potentially rebranded form. The proposal is to execute this change on both Ethereum and Gnosis Chain.
This change will help the team re-focus on attracting retail users to StakeWise, and further crystallize the StakeWise DAO mission as the developer & maintainer of the protocol functionality, as well as the driving force behind osETH adoption in DeFi.
The Genesis Vault becoming independent would have no impact on the current DAO revenue generation, but is intended to increase the revenue potential in the future. Meanwhile, making the promotion of the underlying Vaults tech & osETH/osGNO the singular focus of the DAO would allow StakeWise to create and push its own product category, highlighting the differentiation between itself and other LSTs.
Motivation
It has been just under a year since the launch of StakeWise V3, which introduced the most innovative staking stack in the market and created new growth avenues for our DAO.
Despite the surging popularity of LRTs, StakeWise sits at a 30% higher TVL figure today than it did a year ago - 124.5K ETH vs 94.5K ETH, locked across various Vaults in our protocol.
This growth shows no signs of stopping as our partners - Chorus One, Figment, MetaMask, DataNexus, StakingVerse, Serenita, SenseiNode, and others - continue to extensively use our product and sell it to their customers. Other than the SWISE token price, we’re enjoying a good momentum (more on the token in a separate post).
However, as always, this momentum can be improved.
While our third-party operators have worked to bring TVL into their Vaults, StakeWise’s messaging has focused on bringing users to stake in the Vaults Marketplace. Unfortunately, this messaging has yielded mixed results, as the amount of ETH deposited in Vaults by people landing on the Marketplace page remains low in comparison to direct flows into third-party Vaults and the osETH token via the Stake page.
To ensure that StakeWise has a better message to its retail users, we believe that the talk about liquid staking infra and the Marketplace should be supplemented by finding ways to promote the Genesis Vault specifically.
As it stands, there is no way to do this from the StakeWise account without stepping on our Marketplace partners’ toes.
To address this, we propose to split off the Genesis Vault on both Ethereum and Gnosis Chain as an independent Vault, to be managed, branded, and promoted by our node operating team.
This change may appear trivial - after all, the Genesis Vault has existed alongside other Vaults from the start - but we consider it important to have DAO permission to explore the direction for the Genesis Vault independently from the protocol. Importantly, we believe that splitting off this Vault from the rest of StakeWise can also reduce the conflict of interest between the protocol and the teams that build on top of it by removing any kind of preference that the protocol could have towards any Vaults.
We believe this change to be net-positive for the StakeWise DAO: making the Genesis Vault independent would allow our Treasury to continue earning osETH fees on the osETH balance in the Genesis Vault (just like it does now), while creating a channel for acquiring new TVL and growing osETH-related revenue when branded and advertised independently from StakeWise.
Splitting off the Genesis Vault also allows the StakeWise DAO to double down on the liquid staking infra mission, while having no horse in the race. This means continued sales of liquid staking capabilities to the node operators & organizations seeking whitelabel staking solutions, encouraging innovation on top of Vaults (e.g. restaking, new methods of rewards distribution, experimentation with MEV and infra, etc.), and driving home one simple narrative - that StakeWise is the only protocol capable of bringing liquidity and DeFi-enhanced yield to the ~4 million of natively staked ETH.
Specification
No technical changes are expected in connection with this proposal.
Considerations
If split off, we expect the Genesis Vault to receive the same treatment by the DAO as the rest of the Vaults in the protocol. In practice, this means being subject to the same terms & conditions for using the Vaults tech and any subsequent add-ons to it as the rest of the Vaults in our protocol.
The split-off should eliminate the conflict of interest between the Genesis Vault and the StakeWise protocol when promoting it alongside other operators in the Vault Marketplace.
From our perspective, the main point of contention is the continued migrations from StakeWise V2 to V3, where stake represented by sETH2 and rETH2 tokens is automatically transferred to the Genesis Vault. However, the amount remaining in V2 is rather small (6929.3613 ETH) and hence does not grant the Genesis Vault an unfair advantage over other Vaults in the Marketplace.
Discussion
As always, we welcome feedback, questions, and discussion about the proposed change - please share your thoughts on the proposal below.
Vote
Vote Yes or No in this proposal - the link to Snapshot is live.