A few things:
- The title of the proposal does not match its content.
No where in the text of the proposal does it say to turn on the taker fee. The text, in my opinion, only seems to be asking governance to reset the default fee level to 0.1%. Only in the title does it actually call for the taker fee to be turned on at 0.1%. As such I am confused about what exactly is being voted on here. It would be very helpful if the language could get cleaned up a bit.
- If the proposal is asking for the taker fee to be turned on, when is it asking for it to be turned on? You mention the subDAO would have 9 days to formulate models and monitoring. Does that mean the fee will be go live on Sunday, 10/8 (9 days from 9/29, when voting on the prop would be closed is 10/8) At what time? Shouldn’t it just go live on Monday, 10/9?
I would suggest that language be included in the proposal on what day the taker fee will go live. No one should have to be trying to guess what day this will go live.
I would also suggest that langue be added to this proposal to direct the subDAO to work with the necessary parties to ensure users are provided with at least seven (7) days advance notice of when the fee will go into effect. My expectation would be that this at a minimum would include an official blog post on the Osmosis blog that provides users with the date it will go into effect along with an explanation of how it works, screen shot examples, where the collected fees are going, and background info and contact information for the subDAO. A notification banner on the front end with a link to the blog post that replaces the current notification banner that reads “Osmosis Frontier has merged with app.osmosis.zone. You can now manage all your tokens in one place!” is also something I would like to see.
I also have the expectation that the subDAO will reach out to "content creators”, their fellow validators, and ecosystem chains/projects with tokens that are primarily found only on Osmosis (e.g. Quasar, Stride, Regen, OmniFlix, Stargaze, Gitopia, Nolus, etc.) to help get the word out on what day the taker fee will going into effect. With there being 7 members to the subDAO, this should be easily accomplished in 9 short day before the fee goes live and hopefully can lean on subDAO member @L1am-Stakecito great communication skills.
Overall, communication and transparency are of the utmost importance here and I hope become the watchwords of the subDAO. Speaking of which…
- I am very curious to see how the fee will be disclosed to users.
@JohnnyWyles perhaps you can shed some light on this and share some of the mock ups of what has been developed/designed so that we can all see how the fee will be disclosed to users when conducting a swap on the front end. Also, do you know if aligned alternative front ends (e.g. TFM, Calc.Fi, etc) are ready or will be ready to provide such disclosures about the cost of the fee on their front ends to their users?
The fee rate and the actual cost should be fully disclosed and made abundantly clear to the user when conducting a swap. This is more important to me than what the actual fee rate is. I strongly believe that the fee should not be “hidden” in a drop down option that users have to click to discover that it is there. The current interface which requires the user to click a button to be able to see what the swap fee is has long annoyed me as an unethical practice that needs to be changed. It may not violate the letter of any consumer protection laws, but it surely does violate the spirit of such laws.
I have commented about this a couple times in the past, and the implementation of the taker fee provides opportunity for Osmosis to remedy this very easily correctable flaw.
- In @JohnnyWyles X poll, once you exclude the respondents that chose “see results”, 47% that believe that the taker fee should be set at 0.05%, meaning that 53% felt that it should be 0.1% or higher.
If we all pretend that respondents were a statistically representative sample, because of the small sample size, you would have a likely margin of error of at least +/ -5%, which puts it at a statistical 50/50 split between those who believe that the fee rate should be 0.05% and 0.1% or higher.
If you add the respondents to @JohnnyWyles poll on this forum that he had posted in a different discussion thread, and assuming those respondents didn’t partake in his X poll (I know I only participated in his poll on here and not on X), you get the same 47/53 split. (The 9 person sample size of the poll conducted on here would easily have a margin of error of +/-10%, which would again make it a statistically 50/50 split. Even if you averaged the two polls you would get a 46/54 split, which is again is a statistically 50/50 split because of the +/-5% margin of error.
Just wanted to point that out. It does however also beg the question why the compromise position should be 0.1%, when the plurality of that participated in the polls were in favor of initially implementing a 0.05%, and statistically speaking, the community is evenly divided between a 0.05% fee and 0.1% or higher initial fee, particularly if turning it on across the board for all pools is for the subDAO to collect data to make adjustments.
Implementing a 0.1% fee across the board wastes a completely perfect opportunity for the subDAO to conduct a quasi-experimental difference in difference design study to estimate the CAUSAL effect the fee rates has on various outcomes of interest (e.g. volume, liquidity, users, prices, etc.) by turning the fee for different pools on at different times and at different rates. Evidence is always better than data. after all. It also shouldn’t be that difficult or time consuming for the subDAO to do an even more rigorous regression discontinuity design study or even an instrumental variable design study. I think liquidity incentives could be used as an instrument and am actually curious whether it would have a strong enough F statistic to be valid.
The subDAO also doesn’t even necessarily need to have the fee turned on to be able to have some data to start looking at gain some insight into how it may effect certain outcomes of interest. Just recently the multi-hop swap discount was turned off for at least a few days, the removal of liquidity incentives from low volume pools, the time when USDC.grav and USDT.grav were receiving liquidity incentives and enjoyed the benefits of the multi-hop discount, and the difference 0.15% swap fee for the USDT.grav pool compared to all other stablecoin/OSMO pools are all natural experiments that the subDAO could look at to gain an understanding of the effect the fee could have.
There are also very some relevant studies that I strongly believe allows us to guesstimate what the effect turning on the fee could have. In fact, the findings from a study published in May from researchers from Haas at Berkley, Sloan at MIT, and Wharton at Penn can be extrapolated to suggest that we should in the worst case scenario be prepared to see an 18% decline in the number of retail users on Osmosis and a 30% drop in retailer user volume. (See: Fee the People: Retail Investor Behavior and Trading Commission Fees)
- Monday, September 25th is Yom Kippur.
I would be grateful if you could delay posting any proposal on chain till Tuesday, September 26th.