We’ve always believed that empowering communities to create, participate and earn is the best way to build a sustainable protocol that not only stands the test of time but thrives in it. In this article, we’ll lay out some of the key dynamics in Project Symbiosis that empower the community through governance and entangle their interests with the interests of the protocol. 

Aligning Interests

One of the inherent dangers in any governance, be it your local political system, the board of directors in your favorite charity organization, or even veENTER, is when governance participants do not act in good faith and vote in accordance with what’s best for the project, but instead vote for what’s best for themselves. In broad strokes, we can deem acts like this corruption; and that's detrimental to any governance project. With this in mind, one of the core considerations when introducing governance to the enter ecosystem has been to create a structure that facilitates good faith participation and limits corruption.

We do this by firmly aligning the governance participants’ interests with the platform’s. This is largely done via proportional emissions, fee distribution, voting decay, and timelocks.

In the ve structure, participants stake $ENTER for veENTER as well as $ENTER emissions and marketplace fees to participate in governance. Participants are awarded veENTER based on two parameters: (i) their financial stake in the platform (i.e., their total amount of $ENTER locked) and (ii) the duration left on their timelock. Participants also receive $ENTER emissions and marketplace fees proportional to their stake. With these fundamentals in place, the bigger your financial stake is and the longer the timelock, the more influence you have in governance proposals.

In this structure, the investments of the governance participants are directly tied to the protocol's success. Voting for a successful protocol means voting for the success of your investment, and voting against the interests of the protocol, means voting against your own interests and diminishing your investment since it can result in a lower token price and less fee distribution. Moreover, the multipliers associated with longer lock-up periods ensure that committed, long-term holders will have more influence than short-term speculators, meaning that the die-hard believers of the protocol will be the ones to set the tone in governance proposals. As a result, the participants with the biggest stakes may have less influence than those with smaller stakes who are committed longer.

This is all well and good, but what are the interests of the protocol and, thereby, the governance participants?

Achieving a successful protocol through community empowerment

The primary interest of the protocol is to achieve critical mass in relation to volume. As a start, the protocol utilizes $ENTER emissions as a bootstrapping mechanism, and it’s possible to keep the protocol healthy and thriving like this for a time. It’s not sustainable in the long run, though, and at some point, a more significant part of the rewards should come from marketplace fees.

Governance participants have multiple avenues to explore to achieve critical mass in volume. One of the most straightforward ones is the emissions and fee distribution. There are multiple gauges that participants can decide to award emissions and fees.

One of those is the NFT Listing Pools, where users are incentivized to list their sought-after NFTs for close to the floor price to earn $ENTER emissions for the listing duration. By being the first protocol with a mechanic like this on the BNB Chain, we aim to become the go-to place for the most sought-after NFTs on the blockchain. It’s up to each and every governance participant to decide which NFT collection they believe will attract the most volume to the protocol and vote accordingly. 

Participants in governance can also choose to reward other behaviors that strengthen the protocol. The NFTART-BNB Farm deepens the NFTART token's liquidity and eases trading while limiting price volatility. The NFTART Single Staking Pool decreases sell pressure on the token and facilitates positive price development. The veENTER gauge, where participants lock up their $ENTER tokens for veENTER, encourages governance participation and limits sell pressure on the $ENTER token to promote positive price development.  

Governance participants also hold the proverbial keys to the Community Treasury, which will make up a sizeable chunk of the initial supply of $ENTER and can be grown by the community by allocating fees to it. The community can spend the Community Treasury as they see fit, as long as they can successfully pass it as a governance proposal. The opportunities here are vast, and the community can fund their own marketing efforts, set up bug bounties, hire developers, secure partnerships and much more. 

If the community decides that the best way to promote the protocol is to rent a billboard in Times Square, they can do so. If they decide the best way to promote the $ENTER token is to list it on a specific exchange, they can do so. If they decide the best way to grow the protocol is to use the treasury to hire a crypto influencer to make a YouTube video about the protocol, they can do so. 

Overall, we aim to achieve a successful and thriving protocol by empowering the community through governance and aligning their interests with the protocol's. By fostering active community participation and providing clear avenues for the community to have a meaningful impact on the direction of the protocol, the project creates a solid framework where users can participate, vote, earn, and influence the protocol for years to come. 

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