I have the same concern, but this is an issue with the Futarchy model in general. It needs the flexibility of the market to capture many nuanced opinions in an easy to process way but… if we knew what made markets go up and down then we’d all be millionaires. So any Futarchy decision will always come with the caveat that it could’ve been not been because of the thing we were voting on.
But it is very cost effective to run. You offload a lot of effort to one chart.
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good feedback everyone; thanks.
I want to firstly call out @Proph3t 's point about the community wanting staking, as it’s a good point.
even if staking was mostly meaningless (i.e., you locked it up in a Streamflow or Jupiter lock and it just vested with no rewards) you’d still have people do it as it makes them feel more invested and aligned. that’s a perfectly fine reason to do staking.
However Sanctum undoubtedly want more than that from their staking so I want to pick up on a point by @fplee about returning value to the CLOUD token.
I think we can get distracted by that because it assumes that the CLOUD token is one of Sanctum’s products and I don’t think it is.
I think it’s a mechanism to further Sanctum’s core goal: Increase staked SOL with Sanctum (either by minting new LSTs or increasing usage of existing LSTs).
We know the value of staking SOL; it’s likely got PMF at this stage.
We can only really guess at the value of staked CLOUD… so let’s do that!
NOTE: I am very biased towards LP token staking. It's fairly common on EVM chains but not more widely. That's strange to me as I've not seen any governance token design better than the 80-20 voting LPs pioneered and refined by Balancer. They align stakers with the base need of every token that is tradable on the market: Stable liquidity.
I have never seen a single token staking use case that wouldn't have been better implemented by a staked LP token.
In the first two examples following I am assuming that sCOULD is a staked LP token.
- Partner Alignment: pretty simple one we see frequently across crypto. you get someone who you provide a service to, first stake a certain amount of your token to get access. Sometimes it’s for security and sometimes it’s for alignment. Most times it’s a bit of both. This would limit your votes to only those mostly heavily invested in Sanctum… and maybe that’s not as bad as you think.
- Fee Share: most commonly you see this in DEXs (think: veBAL, veCRV etc…) to enable voting on fee distribution to LPs, which then enables a more dynamic market for liquidity incentives (and in doing so creates a whole new market on top of the existing LP market). There’s a fee market vote play here for Sanctum. Not all LSTs, but I’m assuming at very least the Creator Coins all share the same set of validators so you could have sCLOUD vote on staking fee distribution each cycle and that would mean creator coins could then distribute bribes and simply have yet another excuse to post about their token to their community. All those DEX veTOKENs I listed above are used for liquidity voting AND governance voting and that works just fine. It does mean stakers may not be very active governance voters as the overwhelming focus will be on fee voting.
- Multi LST paired staking: this one is more left field. It involves pairing your CLOUD with one or more LSTs and locking the whole lot up. Not as a trading pair (i.e., an LP token) but as a multi-token lock. Why?
Well it aligns more closely with the core product: SOL staked with Sanctum. Whilst an LP token increases the base liquidity of COULD, it still doesn’t actually increase the staked SOL (unless you pair with an LST, and then you’re picking sides amongst the LSTs…who are your customers/partners). If you allow people to pair with ANY LST then you let people pick who they like best from the marketplace. You’d lock a set ratio dollar amount of CLOUD against a dollar amount of the LST at stake and then lock that for a certain time period. You make the ratio of CLOUD dollars to LST dollars quite high to incentivise more SOL staked to LSTs (e.g., you need $100 of LSTs to $1 of CLOUD) and to not drain too much of the liquidity on chain for CLOUD into these locks.
Because these aren’t a traded pair it doesn’t matter what price does, you can lock for a set sCLOUD amount and that maintains till you expire the lock.
You could still do fee voting with this system too, and arguably this would be better aligned with that.
It also creates a bit of game where you might want to buy and lock more CLOUD when prices are low to get more sCLOUD, and then unlock when CLOUD prices are high (kinda the inverse of LP token lock dynamics).
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I like the idea. This definitely incentivises long term holders and makes sure rewards go in the hands of holders who not only believe in sanctum but also taking out time to participate in governance by putting atleast 10 USDC. Capital commitment ensures earnestness.
LFG!!
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killer suggestions regarding alignment and equity!!! I have made these same points for a few weeks!
Definitely. ASR attract stakers and others to participate in governance. “Grow the Pie”
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So the longer your cloud are staked, the more reward you get?
But is there a time cap?
i agree. futarchy is new and there’s bound to be friction. though i was more curious about the system the team has planned to mitigate this friction, which they call “keynesian beauty contest”, where you have to play a game of guessing what others think about a proposal (expected) rather than focusing on what you think of a proposal yourself (real).
what i can imagine is having an isolated market for futarchy.
that way, we wouldn’t have signals mixed up. voters will have a clearer sense of how those who are aligned with sanctum in the long term feel about a specific proposal. once a proposal reaches a resolution, only then would buy/sell orders be reflected in the market.
this also allows the market to get a clearer sense of where sanctum and its participants are heading, and to align their behavior accordingly (or not, if they think otherwise). either way, the governance participants and non-participants can get clearer signals from each other with an isolated governance market.
- I feel like 60 days for staking lockup, especially in the world of web3, is too long. I am a JUP maxi and I’m ok with 30 days or less
- This next point addresses bullet points 2 and 3 → 100M cloud sounds attractive - Would love to see something quarterly or less. Would be awesome to instantly get ASR rewards after every vote, but then you would need to know how many votes there will be throughout the year (ahead of time) to figure out how much cloud gets distributed for each proposal. The awarded cloud, IMO, should be fully unlocked and up to the user to decide if they want to restake. We don’t wanna hold people hostage, and at the same time, kinda hard to game since there is an unstake period of 60 days currently (hope its less tho lol)
- My concern, and i dunno if this has been answered before because im new here…could the team expand on how they generate revenue etc? I know sanctum handles a lot of LSTs for the solana ecosystem. JUP for example, we know they rake in fees off perps, and fees elsewhere within their product line. Would love to see sanctum school us on the business/numbers side of things - as i think it’ll bring more value/clarity
keep up the good work team!
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100M cloud for the year since its 50M per 6 months - if anyone was confused by this
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just to clarify here
→ The proposal is only 50M for 6 months. If we want to continue it - there needs to be another proposal.
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icic thanks for the clarification!
If opponents of a proposal want to hold CLOUD for the long term, they are forced to sell unnecessarily, making it difficult for them to participate in governance. How is this issue addressed from that perspective?
The staking rewards proposed in CLOUD-1 for governance participation might be a potential solution to this issue.
Futarchy is very interesting, looking for the first vote.
and some questions i have.
Futarchy fundamentally only accepts Yes or No voting results? or will multiple options, including alternative proposals like the ones being discussed here, be available?
If the vote includes alternative proposals, the economic value of the votes will be dispersed. In that case, should there be a minimum CLOUD bet amount required for a vote to be considered valid?
Everything new is scary at the begin as people dont know exactly what will happen.
Im also not 100% sure about futarchy, but if understood this morning, I think in the long term the proposal will be certanly good for the project. Voting Yes, looks the most interesting option every proposal for $cloud price too if I understood correctly.
Anyway I think is great add ASR rewards, but also remember people joined Sanctum for Wonderland. Everyone loved that experience. So adding rewards could not be enough if we want the same volume as last year.
I also think 30 day lock up is good for new investors as they saw this on Jup and they are ok with it. Also giving different % for months staked could be encouraging as I do my own decision and its up to me.
I think could be very bullish if $Cloud stakers could also have some fees from LSTs( but need to be thinked well)
This will be game changer for the token price itself, giving everyone more reasons to stake it.
Combine futarchy governace with an extra utility for stakers could be really interesting
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After first fun vote, if the community parcipation/take up is low would be still try and impliment this ? if we do follow the same path would this still be the responsible course of action, a would we really be willing to put 50m tokens out there into a small number of wallets 
(looking at the other projects votes on metadao the number of parciptants is extremely low compared to the number of holders, we don’t know yet, we could buck that trend)
Also by introducing any ASR are we not effectively forcing holders to vote, so just becomes a form of exotic staking where just like other traditional governace people just simply take part for the rewards ?
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I’m willing to participate in this proposal!! It will be Sanctum’s ASR. My vote will be a huge YES!!!
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Hi everyone, I personally find 60 days lockup period too restrictive. Not sure if this is the type of approach that assumes non-loyal users and thus centers the solution around them, penalizing honest users. 30 days max I do find acceptable, but the question is if it’s really necessary. What if it’s like Drift where we deposit our collateral in order to use the platform? We would simply deposit our CLOUD without any lockup. Ofc withdrawing would impact ASR.
That brings me to a second point: Why sCLOUD and why USDC? Why cannot we have just CLOUD? Anything other than directly using the core token (CLOUD) makes it less transparent and less straight forward. Imagine I want to buy CLOUD to participate. I go from my home currency to EUR, then I exchange EUR to CLOUD, now I would still need to work with yet another token (sCLOUD) and the voting would be in USDC? Why not just CLOUD for everything? The communication is so much simpler: All you need is CLOUD.
Looking forward to the next iteration with hopefully many of the concerns/questions addressed 
.
L.
Here goes another idea of we can tackle $CLOUD stacking, encourage longer stacking and make world a better place. How about instead of forcing people to lock up tokens upfront, we let them stake their tokens and make stacking APR dynamic and growing over time. It would linearly grow the longer you keep your tokens stacked. We can add a JUPITER twist on it. If you don’t vote, your APR resets to the base level.
In my opinion this could motivate people to hold their $CLOUD and keep being active in the governance process as their incentives are directly tied to their participation rate.
There would also should be some symbolic lock up period like 2 weeks maybe to prevent excessive market fluctuations.
I am not crazy about current system where I have to buy more $CLOUD in order to vote in favour of the proposal or sell my precious $CLOUD if I don’t agree with something. If I don’t agree with my wife, we are not getting divorce instantly hehe I want to keep my $CLOUD and be able to influence it’s future by voting.
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Very interesting proposal! Staking CLOUD gie value to token
Sim, creio que seja uma excelente oportunidade para o projeto!
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