Updates on the plan above. It’s not the easy win that was described, as the gas oracle used for rewards is actually set at 150gwei. Updating the proposal and bringing in other ways of saving with the incentivized calls:
Pinger incentive updates
The system rewards module is explained here in detail.
The treasury currently contains 183k RAI, but has been contracting in recent months. The usage of the treasury is increasing due to competition between keepers, and calls that were previously done by Reflexer’s team’s bots only when necessary, are now performed as often as they are incentivized.
- The spike on ~8/15 is due to several liquidations taking place.
With the current spending, if no liquidations happen in the system the runway for the automated calls is approximately 8 months.
To make the system fully sustainable from stability fees alone, at the current global debt, the incentives for pinger calls would have to be reduced by ~90%.
I will describe below several actions that together can reduce the treasury consumption considerably. The goal is to discuss with the community, and implement the ones that become the consensus.
1. Adjust gas price oracle to 100 gwei.
Rewards are auto adjusted, but in the absence of a reliable gas price twap feed, we use a fixed gas price, currently set at 150gwei.
After EIP 1559, gas price peaks last shorter, and price goes back to normal quickly. Brief peaks over the gas price set in the oracle do not affect the system negatively.
The rewards for popping debt on the accounting engine are profitable up to a gas price of 130gwei, and do not present risk to the system if delayed.
The increasing rewards are profitable for callers up to 400gwei gas price. This includes several critical calls (relayRate on the rate setter relayer, updateResult on the ETH OSM for example). This only becomes a problem to the system if the gas price is sustained above 200gwei for long periods. For some of the calls, there are external incentives that will make participants call them even if unprofitable (calling updateResult on the OSM to liquidate a SAFE, for example).
2. Adjust ETH OSM’s gas amount for execution
Below a breakdown of rewards paid per contract/call (last two months):
Average and sum of rewards paid per contract:
The Rate setter, RAI TWAP and ETH OSM together comprise 98% of the treasury consumption. They are both the most expensive and the most frequent calls that are incentivized.
Proposal #2 comprises adjusting the gas amount for execution of the ETH OSM updatePrice() call to 180k from 265k. 180k gas is the actual value, and the change will result in 30% saving on all calls updating the OSM (That comprise over 75% of the rewarded calls).
3. Change RAI TWAP to longer period. Use Uni V3 TWAP (RAI-ETH, ETH-USDC?)
Currently the RAI TWAP is updated every 8 hours (and returns a 24h twap), increasing the window to 1 day would reduce the number of calls by two thirds, resulting in a twap of 3 days.
Another alternative would be to use the Uni V3 native TWAP. Since it does not require a pinger it would result in 14% savings.
Conclusion
I believe all the proposals above should be implemented in the long run. From the 3 suggested the first two could be implemented right away, with low risk for the system. The both of them will result in ~50% savings.
#3 is riskier and could affect the controller, so it should be discussed properly before implementation.