Ok this topic is ridiculous and this will be my last post unless I see some actual well thought through logic for a why. As literally everyone else has posted, there is no good reason why. I’m going to take @Bmc137 's list as it actually summarises your points well:
First off, simply claiming protocol x did it is not a reason. It’s just a campaign they did. For example, uniswap had only a very short period of liquidity mining. By your reasoning we should simply follow what Uniswap did and we’ll be the top 1? It’s just not the case, there’s nuances to it all. Compound has a completely different use case and set of users.
Not to mention for both protocols they are based in the US and were most likely required to be decentralised by nature when launching a token (this is just a guess having been in the space + talked to lawyers and parties who are familiar). So you really can’t take an event and just say “they did it for early users”.
Secondly, early users are the reasons balancer exists today - this is true. However based on previous analysis ran I would actually argue the following:
- Balancer captured an enormous amount of liquidity through its LM program which enabled lower slippage
- The design of Balancer meant that there were a large majority of pools with similar tokens and a lot of fragmented liquidity
- The real reason Balancer exists now is due to arbitrageurs who arb all of this volume. If you dive into the data you can see this
Next point around trashing early users - this is just silly. Early users who provided liquidity were amply rewarded through liquidity mining programs. Early users who traded were not rewarded. But given they were making money doing arbitrage why would we reward them? What benefit to token holders does it have?
On airdrop as an advertisement - sure it’s an advertisement. Just the dumbest one in mind. You will have an infinite cost per acquisition as no new users will join for a retro-active airdrop so all you’re creating is a branding campaign. Which would be great if people didn’t know about Balancer, but people do know about Balancer and it’s considered a blue chip defi. Additionally, if we want to have branding campaigns there are much more cost efficient mechanisms to reach our cost per mille (cost per 1000 impressions) such as sponsoring podcasts, newsletters etc (of which I believe the team are already doing)
I like the thought around what you’re trying to do but the proposal is a bit ridiculous with the numbers thrown around being ridiculous as well. I would vote no for any proposal at this stage as well as publically encourage all members of the community to do so as well.