I am very suspicious of this proposal for several reasons.
I see the call is for an uncapped gauge? What would you be using as voting incentives? Looking at the chart of the NFTe token, I would assume it could not be with that token?
That chart is especially painful for me as a participant in the NFTe vested “presale”. The wound was created after a series of very interesting transactions took place on chain that seemed to indicate the NFTe team were doing similar questionable things as their affiliates and “advisors” at L2DAO however the teams appeared nearly indistinguishable. The situation created quite a commotion over in the OP governance token house forum. There was so much activity surrounding the questionable events in both the discord channels and several forum posts, a complete investigative report was created, to which NFTe did respond.
…there are several more yet less comprehensive threads on this topic.
LFGrow which is an extension of NFTe in sorts, ended up with 27,500 OP tokens that were originally from OP grant funds. Some time ago those tokens were spent for nothing to show. When asked about this, I believe Weston’s official response was something along the lines that the accusation levied against them somehow hindered them from shipping product. I don’t see how this is logical and justifies the tokens being expended but last time I checked LFGrow is still a 404 website and essentially vaporware.
The wound was made deeper when I investigated the NFTe docs and found nothing referencing the tokenomics. One had to scour their discord to find an image of the tokenomics breakdown and on it was absolutely NO allocation for a vested “presale.” 50k usd value was raised from a single community alone, idk how much more they raised elsewhere, but the situation seems similar to LFGrow and all those vested tokens are essentially worthless now. This “presale” seemed rather shady to me at best and I felt I was duped.
The whole incident later followed them over to Arbitrum governance discussions asking for NFTe to be excluded from the airdrops. There was always focus on ambiguity with the Msigs and who the actual signers were, some possibly being repeat signers. Im not here to hash that all up again and anyone interested can go read all of these things however I noticed one commenter who I do not recognize (probably duped from another community) as saying they are also an investor. More importantly, they pointed out some very interesting bridging and swapping performed by NFTe team.
This was all very intriguing as I started to investigate the NFTe arbitrum Msig. Not only does it sit at a minority 3/7, but I noticed two things. The first being that none of those signer wallets are claimed in the NFTe docs. We don’t know who the signers are. The second being that one of the signer wallets was participating in some further interesting trading strategies perhaps similar to what that user in the Arbitrum forum had pointed out. This was the use of single side depositing into uni V3, swapping around on uniV3 and other DEXs, then withdrawing from uni V3 and repeating. This is something I have seen many times before, it certainly raises some questions when examining the token flows, and it never looks above board imo.
If I recall correctly, it was these specific incidents that led to the Ramses team asking for NFTe to give back the partner veNFT they were granted. If memory serves me correctly, the veNFT was indeed returned.
I recall even further back that NFTe was trying to start a pool on OP over at BeetX. Again if memory serves me correctly, there were some single side deposits into that pool by the NFTe team, using NFTe tokens which was affectively selling them. The response to this was purely, they didn’t know that’s how it worked. Then after that…the pool was pretty much dead.
I am torn here. I would like to support all my fellow baggies who are down big on NFTe from that questionable “presale”. However I do not want that to happen at the expense of the Balancer user base.
We have seen other projects on Arbitrum and other chains, several of them recently, do exactly what NFTe was doing on Ramses. Providing large incentives with printed tokens, and then soon after, “interesting” transactions take place and well, one can look at the liquidity depth of those pairs on DexScreener.
I feel I was duped, I feel communities were duped, I feel Ramses’ users were duped, I feel like there was an attempt to dupe Beetx users, and I do not want the Balancer users to be duped.
Perhaps disclosure of the Msig signers with an increase to 4/7 followed by the allowance of a capped gauge would be more appropriate to generate some track record and data that can be used as KPIs. Once there is more data available and the team starts delivering on returning value to the project and token, a discussion could then take place to allow an uncapped gauge. Considering the history of this project and token, I think that would be reasonable to all parties involved.