Reaper’s New veVELO Voting Vault
A new paradigm for veNFTs
Since the launch of Velodrome on Optimism, the Reaper team has been researching and developing an efficient and scalable auto-compounding solution for veVELO NFT holders that maximizes their returns from bribing whilst minimizing the risks inherent to pegged assets and market-making that come with typical Convex models.
Leveraging the knowledge we’ve gained maintaining our fBeets vault and our upcoming Magicat staking vault for SpookySwap, we decided to tread on the road less traveled, by figuring out how to create a system that uses NFTs as its atomic unit, as opposed to regular tokens.
Within this vault, you will be able to generate significant APY without giving away custody of your veVELO NFT. By granting operator rights to the vault, your veNFT will gain access to a fully automated voting optimizer and compounder capable of:
- Voting
- Claiming Rewards
- Growing your NFT’s position with more VELO
- Automatically extending the duration of your lock (if you choose to)
… and that’s really all the vault needs to do. Security is paramount in this design. Your NFT never leaves your wallet and you can opt-out at any time. Thus, you as a veVELO holder get to have your cake and eat it too!
Head over to our experimental testing ground Pain.Finance to give the veVELO vault a try while we polish off the front-end and analytics.
This post wouldn’t be complete without speaking of the stunning engineering work that went into the veVelo Voting Vault. Between 6 long code review sessions and subsequent iterations, a massive amount of research and testing, and over 1000 development hours, we like to think our system deserves a seat in the Solidity hall of fame.
The Voting Manager, or VM for short, is the main contract that’s responsible for interfacing with the user. After you grant the VM your voting rights, it will distribute voting power to our various voting strategies, which will maximize your bribes and trading fees each epoch.
The VM is a brand new type of vault, which manages behaviors by proxy instead of through active management of underlying assets. This allows us to give a ton of power to users without taking on any custody risks to the vault itself — it never holds any assets!
On the front end, you can grant or retract your voting rights to the VM on demand, which is a simple, low-cost operation.
The VM is responsible for distributing voting power to a series of Voting Strategies, each of which is designed to manage a chunk of the veNFTs under the VM’s management. If a strategy is full, the manager automatically deploys a new one.
These Voting Strategies are constantly receiving instructions from the VM, and their modularity allows us to manage everyone’s NFT with little gas or operational overhead. Additionally, though each strategy is a separate contract, their implementation can be upgraded in one go by the VM using ERC1967 proxies.
Both the VM and its strategies are secured by a timelock, 3/3 multisig, and the $OATH foundation, with each Byte Mason being under contract to provide the best service possible. Each transaction also requires approval from Tao on the Velodrome team, so you can rest easy knowing any modifications will be performed with users’ best interests in mind.
As a cherry on top, you can decide whether you’d like to re-lock your veVELO automatically or not. This will allow you to either maximize your voting power or let your lock expire. You can click on the Edit Lock button pictured above to enable or disable this feature at any time.
We hope you’ll consider using the veVelo Voting Vault to manage your interaction with the Velodrome ecosystem. It has the potential to save you hours of time and energy while maximizing veVELO income, all without taking your precious assets from you. This system sets a new standard for security and UX in the world of asset management, and Byte Masons are excited to see it grow alongside Velodrome for years to come.
