Hi everyone,
As the author of this proposal, I would like to respond to the various concerns brought up by @ZenDragon, @solarcurve, and @Xeonus amongst others.
First, let me reiterate that I am just a Tetu community member, and aside from one programming bounty task about a year ago – subgraph maintenance, fun! – I have never been part of the core team or received any financial compensation from Tetu.
Thus, I will aim to focus my comments only on this specific proposal for the tetuQi-Qi gauge, and let the core team respond in their own right regarding the main tetuBal-20WETH-80BAL gauge. (aside from one minor point which I will make later.)
Additionally, this my first time creating a pool and interacting with the Balancer Protocol’s governance process, so I would appreciate a small bit of graciousness and understanding when it comes to assumptions of a specific strategy or motive on my behalf. I frankly did not expect this proposal to immediately go to a Snapshot vote - I figured that if I had done anything incorrectly when it came to contract deployment or choosing parameters, it could be discussed prior to a vote so that nobody feels rushed, or that I am trying to create a dangerous gauge.
Regarding the background and intent of this pool:
QiDao was one of the first DeFi communities that I was part of, and I have also known Belbix, the founder of Tetu, since back when he was the community tech lead at Harvest.Finance.
A few months ago, the price of tetuQi started to “de-peg” from the price of QI, a fact which was quickly noticed by both communities. The commonly accepted theory was that there was simply no more demand for $QI, as the staking yields had dropped nearly 5x since the launch of tetuQi. As someone who cares about both products, I offered my assistance to brainstorm some ways that we could help fix and restore faith in tetuQi.
More recenlty, I came to realize that a large reason for the de-peg was due to a large LP provider sitting in a classic x*y=k pool on TetuSwap. Despite the fact that a stable pool on Dystopia was highly incentivized, the liquidity provider had not made any transactions for over half a year, and the slight imbalance in liquidity was leading to a discounted price of $tetuQi, which then led users to sell their $tetuQi as they feared a bank run, and the cycle repeated over and over again… despite the fact that there was ample liquidity for any tetuQi holder (aside from the liquidity provider themself) to exit back to $QI.
Recently, I have personally been incentivizing the stable pool on Dystopia in order to attract more liquidity to help us combat the imbalanced liquidity in the TetuSwap pool, so that ideally we can re-peg tetuQi to Qi and keep the product working as designed.
Over the recent months, Tetu had been struggling as a platform with low TVL, low revenue, and limited resources to continue development. My motivation for this “project” was simply that as a holder of dxTETU and believer in the platform, I wanted us to avoid the negative optics of having one of our flagship products fail in this way. Essentially, I just didn’t like that we were getting ragged on all the time, and I saw an opportunity for a fix.
More recently, with developments with tetuBal and with the stagnation of the Dystopia platform, I saw an opportunity to move the tetuQi liquidity to a more established platform, and to direct some incentives to continue the initiative that I had started.
My personal goal is to ensure that tetuQi and Qi trade at near parity, and that any holder of $tetuQi will be able exit to $QI without a significant penalty if they wish. I am not personally accumulating more $QI tokens, nor am I concerned with Tetu having more governance power over their platform. In terms of USD, the tetuQi TVL is around 2.5% the size of tetuBal, and I believe that Tetu, with its limited resources, should be focused on tetuBal for the time being.
Regarding the “looper”:
The “looper” is something that was developed by a few members of the Tetu community when we realized that a large investor had incorrectly deposited funds into the tetuBal LP in a 1:1 ratio. The looper was not something that had been discussed with the Tetu team beforehand, so it cannot have been what they had in mind during pool creation. We have no intention of using this strategy for TetuQi, not least because we are currently working to re-peg the price, and there will likely be many users who will take the opportunity to exit back to $QI.
Regarding the amplification parameter for this pool:
When creating the pool, I figured that I wasn’t really in the position to be setting parameters, and so I would just copy the amplification parameter from the tetuBal-20WETH80BAL pool that Belbix had created, since after all, I am doing these tasks for the first time, and just trying to be of assistance to the platform. This was also before realizing that the amplification parameter for TetuBal was higher than necessary:
Of course, I was actually unable to create the pool with the same A parameter as the tetuBAL pool, so I just used the maximum that the contract would allow. It sounds like this is still seen as too high – so let me state that I am more than happy to discuss an appropriate parameter with any stakeholders, or just to let Balancer governance set the parameter that they feel is appropriate - as long as it’s not x*y=k 
Regarding the 2% gauge cap:
I believe this has already been addressed, but just for the sake of thoroughness: I followed SolarCurve’s instructions here which linked me to this GaugeFactory, which does not give a second parameter as an option for the create(recipient) function. It appears that the corrected gauge was deployed with an updated factory which I did not know about. Whoops, and thanks to whoever fixed it on my behalf.
Conclusion
Please let me know if there are still additional concerns to address, or if I have missed anything. My sincere apologies for the length of this post, I am striving for completeness and I appreciate the amount of time it takes to read all of this.
Thank you,
– adamb