General musings around the token economics of a new project & safety

General Discussion
#1

Has anyone considered rewarding zero, or very little, governance tokens for the first XX days of a DeFi project’s operation?

Smart contract risk is perhaps at its highest when a project moves from private testing to live on chain, so why not reduce incentives at this point for safety?

A specific advantage of what I’m suggesting is that by stopping people aping into your project (before it’s battle tested) then it’s likely the battle testers will be loyal/helpful community members. These core contributors will probably be happier in cooperating in finding/fixing bugs.

Perhaps you could call it an open bug bounty period. Reward testing with offering ‘worker tokens’ in payment or as a bounty?

Then after these XX days distribution of governance tokens could begin their distribution schedule.

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#2

Completely agree…see it happen far too often where projects launch and only then come across risks/bugs. Rewarding less (or nothing) for the first few weeks certainly makes sense in my opinion and it’ll stop hordes of people all diving in at the same time…it’s likely safer to have a gradual launch (maybe similar to what was done for the CPS; I took part in the testing myself). Also, if a DeFi project is massively hyped up, they may not be fully prepared for such high volume coming through.

I was actually happy to see Balanced announce a delay. Maybe happy isn’t the right word here but I certainly saw it as a positive delay. The last thing we need is one of the most eagerly anticipated DeFi apps on ICON to have any issues/risks in the first few days of launch. It’d negatively impact the project as well as the ICON brand. I’m just using Balanced here as an example, I’m sure they’ll be well prepared :slight_smile:

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