If these gauges capture a large amount of emissions it stands to give BadgerDAO significant permanent voting power in AURA.
First, how is it a bad thing?
I’m missing the point where having another DAO holding some voting power in an ecosystem is a bad thing. I also don’t get what’s wrong with another DAO getting some amount of voting power by building products on top of said ecosystem.
Second, please define significant.
Or rather, perhaps I should rephrase it as:
What amount of voting power do you consider harmful being at BadgerDAO disposal as it relates to the graviAURA product, and why?
Because the cap on that is 10% if 100% of veBAL is under AURA control, and 100% of AURA is locked as graviAURA.
Even then, if BadgerDAO decides to spend half of its voting fee on bootstrapping new graviAURA pools, it would become 5%.
If it’s 50% veBAL locked in AURA and 50% AURA locked in graviAURA pools, then it’s 2.5% and 1.25% respectively.
Does this look like a threat, and if so, what kind of threat is that?
What is the worst case scenario?
That some % of emissions go to a pool that earns less fees? Well, how does it compare to the other pools that are considered legitimate, like the bb-a-Stablecoin pool?
Besides, the most likely scenario to occur if the ecosystem gauges were added and the pools attracted any significant amount of liquidity, is that Badger/WBTC pool’s share of BAL emissions would drop, because more AURA would be voting for other pools, by design.
The same thing would happen if pools like USDT-USDC-DAI/graviAURA, renBTC-WBTC/graviAURA, and WBTC/ETH/graviAURA attracted meaningful liquidity.
If that were to happen, it would likely mean that Badger’s share of emissions would keep dropping, but also that the total value of emissions to distribute in the ecosystem would increase. Since if there is a large graviAURA paired pool out there, it implies that the AURA in the pool had to find its way there somehow. And it has to stay there to get its share of emissions.
From where I stand, the self-voting pools make it mathematically impossible for the BadgerDAO influence that is related to the adoption of the graviAURA pools to “eat” a significant permanent share of BAL and AURA emissions, because all the significant voting weight would be directed elsewhere.
And more to the topic at hand, I believe the sheer amount of value that the Balancer ecosystem would be able to distribute would grow with the proposed ecosystem liquidity pools getting traction. Because it is an emissions-based ecosystem, and the value of tokens emitted is derived from the price/demand and the liquidity of these tokens.