Quest has become Paladin’s main revenue source, and we believe it is important to capitalize on it in order to grow the DAO’s revenue. Initially, Warlord was a community led project known as the SisterDAO led by Dydymoon. As times passed the core team realized that manual management of strategies would be both impossible to scale, and create additional legal risk for contributors working on it. To limit these problems, Mithras Labs built a new dapp automating everything into smart contracts.
This approach enables the current iteration to both scale aggressively, add no overhead, and create additional feedback loops with Quest while creating a new revenue verticals that we baptized Warlord.
Warlord is the first vote incentive index. Technically speaking, it is a wrapper that can be minted by providing either CVX or AURA. The underlying tokens are locked and delegated to paladin-voter.eth to optimize the vote incentives they can claim.
The optimized vote incentive yield will be redistributed to WAR stakers as yield as ETH with a 5% fee directed to Paladin. CVX & AURA are automatically pounded into more WAR for stakers and cvxCRV, cvxFXS and auraBAL are staked for additional revenue.
WAR can be redeemed for the underlying with a queue system of up to 16 weeks. Upon redeem holders will pay a 0.5% rage quit fee and claim CVX, AURA, cvxCRV, cvxFXS and auraBAL.
Note: the DAO can also utilize Warlord with its own strategic assets. Some preliminary steps have been taken to prepare this through a dedicated token-locked multi-sig and will be extended in a PGM posted simultaneously in the forums.
Thanks for the introduction and glad to finally start this discussion
While the Warlord infrastructure looks very cool, it’s not automating everything as only supporting vlTokens (CVX & AURA strategies), which is why I’d describe the Warlord ecosystem as composed of two main components:
- The Warlord committee & multisigs holdings strategic assets:
There are currently two multisigs managed by the Warlord committee: The 1st is on Mainnet & handing the vlCVX, vlAURA, auraBAL, st-yCRV & veAPW strategies. The 2nd is on Polygon & managing the veTETU strategy.
The Warlord committee manages the positions (i.e: claiming & transfer or compound the yield, delegate for assets supported to the Paladin delegator, vote for assets not supported, and could also manage quest creations in the future)
Members of the Warlord committee can also contribute with liquidity improvement and Paladin ecosystem related consulting.
The funds deposited on these multisigs are managed with the goals to grow and optimize the strategic assets holdings over time. Also, their management allows flexibility such as adding veTokens and testing new strategies.
However, these multisigs requires some additional management because not all assets are supported by the delegator for now.
Most importantly, the multisigs & committee are independent from the second component: the Warlord infrastructure.
- The Warlord Infrastructure:
This component can be split into several categories described above in the Mithras post (breakdown below). The infrastructure represents automated strategies focused on vlTokens, improving the Paladin delegator influence by allowing vlTokens holders to deposit and receive the first vote incentives index: the WAR token.
At release, to mint WAR users would need to deposit CVX or AURA with a WAR mint cap to be determined for each vlToken. Any other vlToken deemed strategic can later be added by Paladin governance.
WAR would be backed by the vlTokens held with the system designed to automatically accumulate strategic assets while supporting its ecosystem. The CVX and AURA deposited to mint WAR would instantly be locked into vlCVX and vlAURA delegated to Paladin-voter to optimize voting incentives from Quest and other platforms, and generate the native yield from the vlTokens.
The WAR token could be staked for stkWAR receiving yield generated by the strategic assets held in Warlord.
These are the main points that will require more considerations imo.
While the initial idea was to use Warlord to automatize the strategic treasury management, my goal was also to create a treasury and backing value of the Paladin ecosystem always increasing as always locked so not redeemable, which makes governance attacks much complex to not say impossible. Mithras Labs suggested a few changes, however I think the following topics needs further discussion:
Redeem module: Ability to burn WAR redeem strategic assets in Warlord
Redeem fee: If redeem module, discuss the fee paid by users burning WAR
Strategic treasury deposit discussion to bootstrap Warlord and mint WAR
WAR allocation if treasury mint (held on Warlord Msigs or distributed)
Profitability threshold to enable enable WAR & treasury distribution
Strategic assets yield management on Warlord Msigs
I’ll mostly discuss the points 1 & 2 here as part of the Warlord design, the points 3 to 6 will be discussed in the upcoming PGM , but i’ll start introducing my point below.
If the goal is to deposit treasury funds in the Warlord infra, then i’m fully against the redeemability. Users looking for long term vote incentives exposure could still be interested even if locked forever, but it would for sure reduce the interest for most users outside of the DAO.
Alternatively, I get the point of attracting small holders and growing the Paladin delegator influence and i’m aligned with this that, but in this case I believe the DAO should not deposit assets until the share deposited & so redeemable is not seriously impacting the strategic voting power which can still be optimized by the committee in the meantime.
Even if the redeem is implemented and if the DAO is not depositing funds, i’m not supporting such a low exit fee. Warlord depositors would enjoy an effortless management of their assets but would also impact the Paladin delegator influence by redeeming underlying, so 0,5% exit fee should be increased imo.
The 5% perf fee is fine I guess, most protocol on mainnet related to autocompounding is higher afaik (Beefy, Concentrator, Stake, Yearn etc). Only Llama airforce seems below with 2%. However the exit fee should be high enough to be dissuasive imo, even if part of it could be redirected to users still in Warlord.
To resume, several options should be considered here:
Either consider using the infra for the DAO treasury and remove the redeem module
Or, short term: Keep managing the DAO strategic voting power by the committee, to ship the Warlord infra asap (with a potential exit fee increase)
Mid term: Fork the Warlord infra by removing WAR mint & redeem modules, dedicated to the Paladin treasury which protects from governance attacks and automatize part of the management.
About points 3 & 4, If the DAO vote to mint WAR even with a redeem and small exit fee (which would be quite dangerous tbh), the Warlord multisig would receive WAR by depositing strategic assets.
Considering the current state of the treasury, I believe that doing a treasury airdrop is not the best solution, so the WAR should be held on the Committee multisig (and could be airdropped retroactively once the redeem would not seriously impact the strategic voting power anymore.)
Point 5 & 6 will be discussed in the associated PGM as regular treasury management topics.
Might be good to clarity a few points and add more details on the technical side:
Is there any voting power associated to the WAR, or is it only destined to be minted/redeemed and potentially staked for generated yield ?
How are managed the harvests ? Can anyone call a function to execute the claims ?
How are managed the swaps ? I guess managed by the committee ?
How are managed the gas costs ?
Which multisig will be admin of the infrastructure contracts ?
Will the Warlord infra require any audit(s) ? If yes, is it handled by Mithras Labs or to be paid by the Paladin DAO ?
Also, could be good to breakdown the technical implementations (required in PIP), is there other components ?
Warlord Deposit Module
Warlord Lock Module
Warlord Redeem Module
Reward Compounder
WAR token contract
WAR staking contract
Please correct me if i’m missing something @Kogaroshi
Looking forward to discuss and clarify this points, and very excited to see Warlord move forward !
Just to be clear, there is no “Warlord Committee”, members of the Community MS have been doing these tasks. The only thing that is targeted and mentioned in this proposal is “the Warlord infrastructure”.
The WAR cap is dependant on total supply of AURA & CVX.
This is basically non-sensical as we’re offering the deployment of a new dapp and you are talking about treasury management. Please keep this discussion for PGM-30. We’re here to discuss whether or not Warlord should be deployed under the Paladin brand, not anything else.
Let’s talk about the two features that seem to disturb you:
The Redeem module: it is essential to have a way out if we wish to attract a wider audience. If you want a perma-locker, StakeDAO, Convex and many others already offer perfectly viable products that don’t make sense to compete with.
Redeem fee: Again, this product is meant to scale, if the fee is too high, then it will prevent users from going in, since they know the exit penalty is abusive. We can increase it, but I advise to be extremely careful on this parameter
The voting power will be delegated to an active ambassador from Paladin (election TBD);
Harvests, Swaps, and gas costs are taken care of by Mithras Labs through paladin-voter.eth as it is not feasible to do delegation management in a decentralized fashion;
The admin of the contracts is currently a Mithras Labs multi-sig, like other Paladin dapps. A switch is expected once Paladin moves to on-chain governance.
No audits planned in the current setup, but the DAO is free to vote for one.
Sorry for the delay of my answer, I’ll try to tackled all the points discussed here.
On the subject of the Warlord product:
The current product we are building, and that we call Warlord, is not the strategy the Paladin DAO applies to its strategic assets, and should not be considered as the same. It’s a product made for vlTokens, and solely focused on the tokens, to bring a new system allowing to aggregate revenue steams from vlCVX & vlAURA (& potentially later other vlTokens) in a single token, the WAR token. Discussing here of the treasury management is off topic, as it’s unrelated to this post discussion.
On the Warlord system:
The WAR token is not designed to have governance power.
The admisnhip infrastructure contracts will, at release, be given to the Paladin Core team MSig, allowing us to react quickly in case of an unexpected behavior or in case a bug/exploit should occur. This adminship will later be transfered, following the whishes of the DAO (after a Proposal related to it is presented & accepted through a vote).
Concerning the harvest costs & potential swap costs, as Figue stated, they will at first be paid by Mithras Labs, and later we can discuss & vote on a share of the fees received form Warlord to cover those expenses.
Currently no audit has been booked for Warlord, but this is a DAO matter, and we should decide if we want one before release.
Specifically on the Redeem Module (will also cover questions raised in Treasury Management #5):
There is a mistake in the original post, which is my fault, the redeem fee is not 0.5% but 5%. After researches and simulations, we found it to be a good compromise, which would not either frighten potential depositors in Warlord. We can of course discuss here of another value for this redeem fee.
But for the Warlord system to work correctly, and be able to attract external depositors, i believe this Redeem Module is necessary, and removing it would only hurt the potential of the product.
Concerning the asked technical implementations, these were not given yet as we’re still testing all the contracts, and making all the fixed to propose the best version we can. Once everything is wrapped up, we’ll be able to provide a full description of the behavior of each contract.
I would like to remind that Warlord is not meant to only be a system used internally for the Paladin DAO, but also to attract external depositors (which would allow, via to the delegation of vlCVX & vlAURA voting power to the Paladin Delegation address, to increase the weight of Paladin in the voting ecosystem). The current Warlord system we presented was designed to fit both to the dAO need, but also to the current ecosystem.
Excited to see more information come out about Warlord!
Deploying a new dApp that will generate more revenues for the DAO while also helping the overall process to scale sounds like the way to go. But I also realise that I don’t have a detailed understanding of how all these pieces fit together, so personally I would just abstain from voting.
Not sure if this is the right place for these more generic questions about the dApp (if not, happy to raise them elsewhere).
Warlord started as a community led effort by dydymoon, but in the end, is it built by the Paladin core team?
If so, will the code be covered by the business license? Would it make sense to delay deployment until it is?
if I deposit AURA and mint WAR, I assume it is equivalent to buying into a basket of AURA and CVX (and potentially more vlTokens in the future), is that correct?
Is there any target weights for Aura & CVX, or is that entirely driven by users deposits (and withdrawals)? I could mint WAR from a pure holding of CVX, but could potentially end up with 90% exposure to Aura and only 10% of CVX if that’s the ratio of assets backing Warlord?
When burning the token to redeem underlying assets, do I have the choice between getting only AURA, only CVX, a combination of both, or is it the ratio simply based on the current holdings as at the time of the redemption?
Is there any plan to incentivise liquidity on WAR? If not, why would anyone hold WAR rather than staking it (stkWAR)?
I see why WAR will not have governance power, but i think it could also scare off potential users. What if I deposit my Aura/CVX tokens when the initial redemption fee is set to 0.5% (or 5%), and then the Paladin DAO later decides to bump it up to 10 or 20%? (especially since the burn/redemption could take up to 16 weeks)
Based on my limited understanding of Warlord at the moment, I’m not sure I would rush to mint WAR just yet, given the 5% fees on the collected voting incentives + the 5% exit fee. I am leaning more towards the simple delegation of locked tokens to the existing Paladin-voter.eth address and claiming the USDC proceeds.
I disagree here, it’s not because both multisigs currently have the same signers (as it was setup this way & as no one required to be removed from the Locked Tokens Msig) that it will always stay the same.
I know that only the infrastructure is described, but that’s why I explained the difference with the multisig & committee (signers) as more context was definitely needed.
It should not only discuss the brand but also design & technical points.
I basically forced to merge both topics considering what was suggested in the article published.
I’m only against the redeem (and increasing the fees) if the goal is to use the Warlord infrastructure for the Paladin DAO strategic treasury as mentioned in the article because it would force to change the strategies and create risks as described here and in PGM-30.
Having trouble to follow here, is there voting power associated or not ?
The Warlord infrastructure will implement the same vlToken strategies than the Paladin DAO treasury, and the locked tokens multisigs have been called Warlord Msigs several times, which is why I explained the difference between both.
Ok good to know, so both redeem fee and perf fee are 5% ?
Looking forward to it, but why not wait until it’s finished to publish the proposal ? Seems complicated to vote on a new dapp implementation if the community does not properly understand it i guess
This is basically the problem here, you seem to affirm that the Warlord infra will be used by both the Paladin DAO & external users. While I fully agree on the external users side (the added specifications were helpful thanks) but I don’t on the DAO side, which will be discussed in PGM-30.
While my initial goal of Warlord was to grow the Paladin treasury without any possibility to redeem the backing (and in the long term, generate revenues only from what’s earned by the strategic assets in it), the changes suggested by Mithras Labs turned it from a tool to a fully new product, which is great and will be useful for small holders, but it’s not fitting the DAO needs at all, especially with the distribution suggestions.
But even without, the Paladin strategic treasury is not only composed of vlTokens positions which is why we still need the Multisig & Signer committee (which can be renamed it if you prefer) and we’re in the process of building and optimizing the treasury, which requires flexibility and no potential redeem of it.
Yes, as described in the post it was to deploy faster, reduce legal risks and simplify the design, however some significant changes were made by Mithras Labs which is why i’m trying to give some context.
I guess it will be covered yes, I’ll let Mithras answer the other question but I imagine the IP can be transferred to the association once ready if the deployment is before ?
There was no plan presented to incentivize the liquidity for now, but the DAO could decide to do it if necessary, however there is no incentives to hold rather than stake, except maybe for arbitrages redeem as you mentioned ?
Not sure to understand if there is associated voting power or not (as Mithras talked about delegation but maybe that’s on underlying assets governance power)
Good question, if no WAR gov power, maybe fees could not be changed once voted ?
That is correct. Now that the Licence and Association vote have both been passed, we can release them under BSL without any problem.
I think you are confusing what could be and what is. Currently, there is no Warlord MS. Just multiple treasury multisigs, one that happens to be specialised for veTokens.
It isn’t, please read Koga’s answer litterally just above yours.
Both are not mutually exclusive statements. We’re basically saying WAR will not have governance power, but that the underlying governance power will be managed by Paladin.
Full disclosure, I think 5% redeem fee is suicide for the product and that it should be under 2%.
No, again we have not mentioned this in this proposal. I think it is due to a significant and widening gap towards where we are trying to push Paladin and where you are. Our position is the following: build a governance protocol ecosystem. What you are, and keep refering to, is growing Paladin’s treasury of governance assets. You are free to build this, but this is not what we have been trying to achieve here.
Again, see above, I think this is just spreading thin and adding regulatory surface to be attacked on.
There’s a few really cool things that can be done, but I agree, it is way better to hold stkWAR.
100% agreed. To be fully clear, the intention is not to take user’s voting power for no reason, but create a delegate defeding their interests.
Hello there, I’m one of Warlord’s devs. Glald to be joining the governance forums!
I completely understand your cooncern here. To maximize the fairness of Warlord towards holders we’ve made the parameters to mint and burn war immutable. This way 1 WAR will always be backed by the same amount of CVX or AURA (assuming no fees are applied). However regarding the redeem fee since the product has not been battle-tested on the market I don’t think it would be wise to hardcode a fee. It’s not impossible to have a future iteration of Warlord with a fixed fee in the future, but fixing values and thresholds before deploying the contract might strongly impact the protocol’s attractiveness and success.
Technically there’s no need for target weights since the protocol doesn’t require a balance between assets as in liquidity pools for example. The market will be free to decide the exposure of Warlord to AURA and CVX.
In the current design you can freely choose the percentage of CVX and AURA you want to redeem.
To clarify on this point, Warlord does not give any governance power under any form. Howver the voting power of the underlying assets (vlCVX and vlAURA) will be delelgated, at least initially, to our delegation adddress, and its rewards will be redistributed to WAR stakers. In other words Warlord will become the place where you will be able to claim all the yield coming from the underlying vlAURA and vlCVX (more details on this coming soon) in addition to the voting incentives obtained from the delegation address.
little typo on option #2… is it 5% & 1% or 10% & 0.5%?
btw, is there not a risk of dividing the votes by giving too many options? What happens if for example the sum of votes allocated to the first 3 options is higher than Against, but Against is higher than each of the 3 choices that are in favor of the deployment?
Hey everyone ! Here to give you a quick update on the last Warlord dev updates before the release coming soon.
From all the reviews and feedback we received, there was 2 pain points that were raised :
the 1:1 ratio for minting regardless of the tokens
the possibility to redeem any token of your choice, leading to potential high imbalance between CVX & AURA amounts
We decided to change the Warlord design to address those points, so users are more comfortable using the product :
the ratios to mint WAR is gonna be specific to each token, to reflect the value of each token. We decided to apply the following ratios at release :
CVX 1:1 WAR
AURA 2:1 WAR
the redeem module does not allow to chose the weights of each tokens you desire to redeem. Instead, the weights are based on the current amounts of CVX & AURA locked by Warlord. If the TVL is split 60% CVX & 40% AURA, the weights used to redeem will also be 60/40.
With those change, we believe the protocol will be stronger, and imbalances between the 2 assets will be less important.
Even though it was discussed during some of the previous calls, I’m still having a hard time fully understanding how this will work. But i’m more of a visual person so i guess i’ll have to wait until it’s live to play around with it.
For example, why change the ratios to 1 and 2? Is it just based on the current price of the 2 tokens (approx 2$ for Aura and 4.6$ for CVX)? Could those ratios potentially be changed in the future in case of a large price variation of one token vs the other? or even to encourage depositing more of one underrepresented asset?
I think removing the ability to chose the weights when redeeming is a step in the right direction. But if I only hold Aura which currently yields a much better return than CVX (48% vs 27% on the palvoter address), if i mint WAR, i would effectively convert a portion of my Aura for a another token that is less interesting. And if a whale decides to mint a ton of WAR by only depositing CVX, it’s possible that a greater proportion of the underlying assets will become CVX. Will the return of the index not end up converging towards the lowest APR of the 2?
