Making YFI more interesting for smaller investors to gov staking it

Glad see the moves to improve the website, brand and rewards for staking YFI. I believe also we should get more people committed to stake and vote. To be as democratic as possible.

I believe the actual token price and amount might scare new smaller investors and therefore it will make gov staking something for larger investors (also elitist). We need more community involved in the staking. My idea was to do something similar to DOT, for example by multiplying the number of tokens by 1000 (and dividing the price by 1000). Total tokens would be then 30m and price about $13.

as example, I just saw a guy that bought $110 in YFI at Unisawp, he got 0.008 YFI. Psychologically speaking, I’m not sure that this guy would stake any of his bag. If we had the x1000 rule, he would get like 8YFI and would probably think in staking some tokens to be able to vote and get rewards.

what do you think?

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Essentially a stock split.
I certainly prefer this idea to the previous calls for minting into oblivion. The reason however that I’d vote against this is that it kills the YFI BTC memes and all the future memes that come. There is tremendous marketing value in this. It keeps people talking and engaged.

It worked for BTC in the early days. No one is going to perform a split on BTC any time soon.

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well, you can do a x10 by now and run again to catch BTC. Once you catch it you do a x10 again and so on.

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This has been discussed extensively previously here, and the community was against it 2:1.

Most like the “heavy” nature of YFI, and realistically I don’t think this is going to happen– you can go back to the previous page for all of the arguments against.

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A YFI split would be great for the market cap and bring thousands of new people in, but ultimately it’s a distraction.

We spend days and weeks getting that ready, we’ll get passed by one or two of the other protocols all doing interesting things.

Right now it’s time to build!

Also I’ve been talking to tons of people with smaller holdings like .008 and they are staked in governance and they UNDERSTAND what we’re trying to accomplish.

Let’s go!

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ty for the link. anyway, I believe this is a topic that will be revisited many times in the future

Definitely opposed

You can buy a fraction of a YFI, just like you can buy a fraction of a BTC

Next target is BRK-A!

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Visually demonstrating the potential gains of fractional ownership is something definitely worth persuing though!

“Small bags; big returns” etc

I can’t imagine it being difficult to ship this. It’s not a distraction and will make YFI way more psychologically accessible to folks who didn’t farm a ton early on…who seem to be the majority against.

The only arguments I got from the last thread were:

  1. People like that it feels heavy and significant…who cares?
  2. A governance token should feel heavy and significant…why?

Neither of these reasons will help grow the community and price.

While price is one way to feel heavy and significant, quantity is another.

Regardless, I don’t understand the need for a governance token to “feel” heavy and significant. Who is buying expensive governance tokens because they are heavy and significant?

Psychologically, a lower price:

  1. makes some people feel like it can run up higher
  2. makes people feel like they actually own a more significant portion of yfi even if it’s really the exact same share of YFI

You have the same value whether the price is low or high, but one of these will drive your value up more IMO…and it’s the cheaper price.

My guess is the nays are largely folks who got in early and have the luxury of wanting to feel like they have a heavy and expensive coin…not the long tail of new investors. We shouldn’t optimize for how the large bag holders want to feel.

Adding this as it more clearly explains what i think:
“I do think price is one lever in marketing…just like brand, memes, influencers tweeting, that can draw attention to the token and make more novice investors curious about something they may completely overlook given a higher price point.”

So it is your thought that a token split is good for governance because it

And we expect that adding people who are so easily tricked in financial matters will improve governance?

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The reason people want a smaller price is not to improve governance…not sure how you got that from my post. Nor did I say that we should trick people.

I prefer the no split take because of the inherent “IQ test” when considering the purchase of YFI.

Similar to what @LapisLime suggested, high price might entice people to read about yearn finance before jumping the gun and blindly buying because “I can buy so many” . Instead of appeasing the masses to make it psychologically easier to buy, I’d rather the chance of attracting a subset of people who may understand yearn finance’s ecosystem (and why the token is expensive) because there may be a higher likelihood that this subset of people would contribute meaningfully to the yearn’s ecosystem

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While I do think smaller holders are important, I would argue a bigger issue for them is that the governance rewards are still relatively low if you’re not holding several YFI or more.

Realistically, what we can do now to help smaller investors is to allow delegation of votes– this would allow smaller users to participate in governance but not spend gas, which I know is a major complaint of smaller holders (I’m right on the border of what I would consider a small holder and I definitely don’t vote on all proposals for this reason).

I do think it’s important to make YFI more attractive to smaller-scale yield farmers and investors– but ultimately I believe our main function as a governance body should be on improving yearn (increasing TVL, improving dev capacity, adding vaults, etc) for now instead of trying to increase the value of YFI. YFI is meant to govern the yearn protocol, and improvements to the yearn protocol should drive increased value of YFI organically– but I think it’s just a distraction to actively try and pump the value of YFI for now

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I don’t think price will be the deciding factor for attracting anyone who would meaningfully contribute to the governance of the token.

I do think price is one lever in marketing…just like brand, memes, influencers tweeting, that can draw attention to the token and make more novice investors curious about something they may completely overlook given a higher price point.

One way to attract attention to Yearn is to attract attention to YFI. I suspect many people are learning about Yearn because they are looking to invest in YFI.

The build it and they will come mentality is a very dangerous, engineer centric approach. The best companies in the world build and market…both are required to be world class.

I don’t think it’ll be the deciding factor for attracting that subset people either but it could a barrier for those on the opposite end of the spectrum

If marketing was your main concern (even though proper marketing I’m sure is still a long way from now), the higher price point I think is an advantage. I don’t know why but some people sort by price and yearn will be up there. “More expensive than BTC”, “1 YFI = 1 BRK. A”, etc

Anything is up in the air though, splitting could happen in the future if gov wants it but I’m sure it’s not a priority when there a ton of other things to address right now

Proper marketing is not a long way from now…it’s already happening. It happened with the way we launched, it’s happening on twitter with influencers today, it happens every time someone lands on the site…it happens when there is or isn’t confusion between YFI, YFIII, yearn, ygov, etc, it happens every time someone says few understand. There is a lot to marketing. cc @learnyearn :slight_smile: https://twitter.com/learn2yearn

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100% opposed. It attracts the wrong people by attracting the wrong mindset. Catering to the psychology of buyers is a nonsensical argument no matter which way you slice it. The protocol and its earning potential should be the deciding factors, not where the decimal is placed.

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Then it shouldn’t matter if we lower the price.