Community Call Summary — July 1, 2021

6 min readJul 3, 2021

Bancor hosts weekly community calls with core contributors every week in Bancor’s Telegram voice chat.

This week, Mark hosted the call with input from Yudi and Nate. Here is a summary of the updates from that call.

Ecosystem Update (0:30)

Immediately following the community call, Bitwise added BNT to its DeFi Index:

We are in the midst of re-positioning the Bancor brand to more effectively spread awareness. From new messaging to new designs, collateral and growth programs, our goal is to make Bancor easier to understand and to better communicate our unique value proposition across key channels to target customer segments within DeFi and beyond.
Anyone interested in joining a marketing focus group aimed at co-creating and executing on Bancor’s go-to-market strategy, please contact @NateHindman on Telegram.
We’re eager to get the community’s feedback, and want to make sure the DAO is behind our new brand.

We’re making great progress on the V3 contracts.
Even with all that’s happening in the AMM space, no one has produced anything similar to Bancor V3.
We’re confident we will have the best LP product of any protocol like us and continue building a moat around Bancor’s unique offering.
We’re working on a mechanism that will allow LPs to migrate their liquidity from v2.1 to V3 without needing their vBNT.
This is will remove friction in the migration process for users who have swapped their vBNT into other tokens.

Even as the market continues to trend downwards, we‘ve seen usage on the network increasing, with steady growth in the number of unique LPs and traders.

Viewing protocols stats like volume in terms of USD can be misleading since the USD value of most tokens has dropped significantly.
For more reliable indicators, check Dune metrics in ETH or BTC terms (toggle in the left-hand corner):

vBNT burning, which is directly correlated with volume on the network, is picking up, with over 550,000 vBNT burned to date.

We’re seeing more and more whitelist proposals directly from token teams, as well as their respective DAOs investing their treasury in Bancor pools. One such example is the BarnBridge DAO, which is providing its treasury tokens to the BOND pool.
As of late, some pools standout in terms of performance. The following APR metrics only include earnings from swap fees and do not include APR from BNT rewards: ENJ (13.34% APR), SNX (6% APR), AMP (13+% APR), ROOK (12%+ APR), BOND (10+% APR), AXS (30+% APR), LQTY (30+% APR)
Communities where we need your help spreading the word about Bancor: FARM, GTC, AAVE, MKR, BAT, SNX, HOT, GRT. Hop in their channels when appropriate and educate them on Bancor!

Bithumb listed BNT, which will bring more attention to Bancor in Asia.
Korpi published another killer article on Bancor — this one comparing profits from staking on Bancor vs. Uniswap:

Amadeo Brands produced a video on Bancor, describing it as “the easiest way to stake your tokens”:

The community did a temperature check on Snapshot regarding which L2 Bancor should launch V3 on first — Abritrum was the clear winner (73%), with Polygon coming in second (24%).
Whitelists that have passed this week include: RUNE, PERP, NEXO, UNN, ANKR.
We need your help getting the word out in these communities! Hop in their channels and let them know there is a new yield opportunity available on their token on bancor.network.
The ROOK co-investment passed — this is the first time we’ve had to pass a 40% quorum for a co-investment.
There is a proposal to use multiple choice voting for liquidity mining campaigns and other purposes like determining the level of co-investment. We are also looking at Snapshot’s quadratic voting function.

Q: Can you discuss BNT inflation?

Mark: There is a common misconception in the community that Bancor is paying out large amounts of IL compensation and this is causing the BNT supply to inflate. This is not true. In fact, the cost of IL compensation (blue) is tiny:

The majority of new BNT supply is a result of BNT co-investments made by the protocol.
This protocol-owned BNT is eventually burned when LPs withdraw, or when BNT users stake in a pool and replace it. In addition, protocol-owned BNT can only leave Bancor pools and enter the open market temporarily when BNT is rising in price, and is bought back by the protocol whenever the BNT price is falling.
Since Coingecko and CMC count protocol-owned BNT as one in the same, the circulating supply they show is overstated by about 60%. (See Korpi’s post on this)

Q: What’s the value capture of the BNT token (48:20)

Mark: BNT is a “make money” token . It is is productive asset that generates yield when you stake it in the protocol.
We believe the demand for the token will be commensurate with the yields you can get on it.
Nate: Bancor is uniquely positioned to capture value for BNT holders. Since BNT exists in every pool, BNT holders get 50% of total fees, either directly from staking BNT or indirectly via vBNT and BNT burning. This is in contrast to Sushi, where SUSHI holders get around 16% of fees, and Uniswap, where UNI holders get 0% of fees.
This design benefits BNT holders as trade volume rises (burning more vBNT) and Bancor V3 diversifies the protocol’s business lines.
Nate: We want to turn BNT into the premier productive asset.

Q: When will CoinGecko or CMC reflect the true cicrulating supply of BNT? (51:41)

The queries are too heavy for these sites currently, but Bancor V3 will simplify our insurance contracts so that Coingecko and CMC ingest BNT supply data that does not count protocol-owned BNT as circulating supply.

Q: Why doesn’t Bancor participate in more hackathons? (57:30)

Yudi: We’ve participated in many hackathons over the years and haven’t gotten a huge amount of value from them, but that doesn’t mean we won’t participate in them in the future.
In general, we tend to prefer to work directly with teams and issue grants for specific needs.
The Bancor V3 contracts will be significantly easier for devs to integrate with and build on, so we are excited for this to attract more external teams and developers.
If you want to build something on Bancor, we are very approachable in our Dev chat and encourage you to reach out.

Q: How do you view liquidity mining rewards to stablecoin pools?

Mark: There are certain token communities that are particularly well-suited for our offering. Harvest Finance or BarnBridge are examples. We’re seeing high levels of interest from these communities.
Stablecoin LPs are different, but may be motivated by something else besides BNT rewards, and we’re thinking hard on this.
Tyler: I was excited to hear to Nate drop the joint-liquidity mining news — that will create a super interesting relationship between Bancor and third-party token communities.

Q: Will Bancor V3 be a totally new architecture for the protocol?

Yudi: This is the biggest and most exciting upgrade we’ve done.
V3 is expanding on the things we learned from Bancor V2.1.
V2.1 launch was more of a test. Now that the system has proven itself, V3 can be released with more reach and more marketing impact. We can safely say V3 is a overhaul in many ways, both on the product, tech and marketing.