Not sure about this one. I understand the motivation, but if we want to decentralize sooner, attract investors, encourage LPs to hold onto the BAL rewards, etc., I think there may be better ways to do it.
What we want to encourage is pools that have a broad appeal and uses across DeFi (e.g. ETH/WBTC, ETH/DAI, renBTC/USDC, etc.). Something like this: Proposal for a complete change in BAL distribution. I expect this Liquidity Staking proposal will end up creating massive BAL pools and will suck up liquidity from other pools that are more useful in DeFi. Unless it’s efficient to trade through a intermediary token such as BAL (similar to what Bancor does), I think this is going to be counterproductive to increasing trade volumes.
Right now, BAL pools are only useful to people who trade BAL which is either owners of the protocol and yield farmers, and I expect that this will make it easier for yield farmers to sell their tokens and will just attract more of them.
If we want to increase speed of decentralization we could increase the weekly rewards and shorten the distribution period. If the concern is people selling their tokens, I think making BAL tokens yield-generating either through a dividend or by enabling it as collateral in a lending platform (like CREAM has done: https://app.cream.finance/) will encourage people to hold on to their tokens. What yearn does from a delegated vault perspective with Link and YFI is also interesting as it maintains a baseline level of demand for those tokens.
Have we thought about getting the BAL token into the flipsidecryto app (e.g. https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/cooperative/compound)? It could yield some interesting insights.