Plenty Network’s PLY Token: Refreshing Tezos DeFi

Plenty Network

As announced earlier this year, Plenty DeFi and Wrap Protocol will merge into a one-stop DeFi network: Plenty Network (currently on ghostnet and simultaneously undergoing an external audit). 

The current governance tokens from both Plenty DeFi and Wrap Protocol will merge into one governance token: PLY.

PLENTY and WRAP holders can exchange their tokens for PLY at a predefined ratio, see here for more details.  

Additionally, it will soon be possible to earn PLY by supplying liquidity in the new Plenty AMM (DEX) by staking LP tokens. 

Nothing new you’d say at first glance, but there’s more to PLY than meets the eye. 

PLY

In most DEX designs, supplying liquidity for a token pair allows you to earn a percentage of trading fees.

Additionally, other rewards can often be earned by staking liquidity provider tokens (LP tokens which you get as a “receipt” for providing a certain amount of liquidity).

Staking Rewards are provided by the DEX protocol itself, or by DeFi projects that want to increase liquidity of a specific trading pair. 

In the new Plenty DEX, it works slightly differently. You can stake your LP tokens and earn PLY tokens, but you only earn trading fees if you actively use your PLY to vote.

To be able to vote, you need to lock your PLY tokens for a certain period. Voting happens every week. 

By voting you can increase the amount of PLY tokens that you can earn by providing liquidity to a certain trading pair. The Plenty protocol directs PLY tokens to gauges (staking pools), which belong to specific trading pairs.

Initially, all gauges for each trading pair distribute the same amount of PLY tokens per week. But voting can increase the amount of PLY tokens that a certain gauge will distribute in the following week.

This way the amount of PLY rewards that are distributed per trading pair is determined democratically. 

Value through utility

Basically, if all liquidity providers have the same proportional amount of PLY tokens (and lock them for voting), then PLY distribution should be distributed proportionally to liquidity providers:

If a trading pair has a lot of liquidity providers, they would jointly have a lot of PLY and thus voting power, which they would use to vote for their own gauge, which then would distribute more PLY.

Trading pairs with less liquidity and thus less liquidity providers, and thus less PLY, would have less voting power and end up with less PLY to be distributed by their gauge.

Since the bigger trading pair has a bigger group of liquidity providers that will take a cut of the bigger amount of PLY emission, they will not necessarily earn more PLY than the smaller group.

Since that group will have less liquidity providers that take a cut from their smaller total amount of PLY emission. That way a proportional distribution is achieved.

But if people start buying more PLY to increase their voting power, they can increase their voting power and direct that to the gauge of their liking. And thus tilt the scales of PLY emission to their advantage. 

This way PLY has actual value through utility. PLY could just become an interesting token in the Tezos DeFi scene.

Voting

To be able to vote, users need to lock their PLY tokens. By locking PLY tokens, you receive vePLY tokens. vePLY gives you voting rights. The longer you lock your PLY, the more voting power you have. 

– Six months lock: 1 PLY – 0.125 vote

– Two years lock: 1 PLY = o.5 vote

– Four years lock: 1 PLY = 1 vote

An interesting feature is the fact that a vePLY token is an NFT and can be traded on OBJKT.com. This way your value remains liquid even though you locked your PLY tokens.

Boosting

By adding your vePLY NFT to your LP token that you stake (which will be done by a transaction I assume), you will boost your PLY earnings.

This means that you increase your staking rate and earn at a higher rate than users that have not attached a vePLY NFT to their staked LP tokens.

You can earn up to 2.5 x more PLY that way. By what factor your earning rate increases depends on other factors:

“All gauges have different boosting requirements, meaning some pools are easier to boost than others. It depends on how much others have locked and how much the liquidity gauge has”. 

Bribes

If a DeFi protocol wants to increase the liquidity of the token(s) that are part of their ecosystem, Plenty DEX offers the possibility to “Bribe” users to do so. Anyone can add Bribes to a trading pair of their choosing.

This simply means that the specific gauge that is connected to a trading pair, is filled with extra tokens that are deposited by the Briber. These tokens are distributed to the people that have voted for that gauge in that specific epoch.

So by adding a bribe to the gauge, an extra incentive to vote for that trading pair is added, which increases the chances that more people vote, which increases the amount of PLY liquidity providers can earn.

That should attract more liquidity providers and increase liquidity.

Who earns what?

– Liquidity providers can earn PLY by staking their LP tokens.

– vePLY holders that vote earn trading fees and can earn bribes if there are any deposited to the trading pair they vote for.

– If you do both, you earn all of the above. 

Locker inflation protection

If you lock your PLY for a long period (by creating vePLY NFT’s to be able to vote), additional PLY will be entering the market by PLY emission through gauges during the lockup period.

This means that inflation should be a factor to consider. Plenty Network has added this factor to the equation of their ecosystem by adding a Locker Inflation Protection mechanism. 

“Anytime the circulating supply increases through inflation, a proportional increase will be attributed to vePLY holders. This makes the value proposition of locking very attractive as your lock does not get diluted by new PLY emissions.

As vePLY NFTs can be traded, a different user from the one who created the vote lock in the first place can hold them to benefit.”

PLY distribution

The total supply of PLY is capped at 1 billion tokens, from which 400 million PLY is allocated for the existing PLENTY and WRAP holders. 400 million PLY will be distributed via staking and dilution protection of locked PLY.

150 million PLY is reserved for the current and future members of Plenty’s core team. And the leftover 50 million PLY is reserved for airdrops, marketing and partnerships with existing Tezos protocols, more details here.  

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