- Co-creator of Ethereum moves attention from investors to token PICKLE.
- Pickle.finance’s governance model is designed to prevent voting power imbalances.
Ethereum ‘s new rising star on the DeFi sector is called PICKLE, after the vegetable. In a space where the rise and fall of tokens named after food is part of everyday trading, PICKLE has managed to attract the attention of important members of the crypto community. Part of the DeFi pickle.finance protocol, Vitalik Buterin praised its governance model.
In the past, Buterin has shown reservations about the current state of the Ethereum DeFi sector and its sustainability. However, PICKLE has features that have made it different from other “food-tokens”, such as SUSHI, HOTDOG, KIMCHI, among others. The co-creator of Ethereum stated the following after the launch of pickle.finance’s new governance model on September 13:
Nice! How do you determine individual identities to prevent individuals from splitting their funds into many accounts to avoid being square-rooted?
After the interaction PICKLE got increased attention from investors. In less than a day, the price of PICKLE increased to a high of from 4,45$ to $85.24. At the same time, the volume of trade with PICKLE shot up from $800,000 to $53 million, according to Coingecko data. Since then the token has seen a drop in price, but has recovered during the last 24 hours to stand at $75 with a 54.9% gain.
Source: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pickle-finance/usd#panel
What makes PICKLE different from other tokens on Ethereum DeFi?
The pickle.finance protocol rewards its users for providing liquidity in stablecoin pools. However, users who receive the most profit are those with funds in a liquidity pool that trade a stablecoin with a price lower than the asset they are pegged to. The opposite is true for liquidity pools with stablecoins traded above the asset to which they are pegged.
In other words, a liquidity pool that trades the USDT/ETH pair, will receive more rewards if the stablecoins has a price below the dollar (USD). Pickle.finance currently allows users to provide liquidity in the following pools for the pairs: USDT/ETH, suSD/ETH, USDC/ETH, DAI/ETH. In that way, the protocol creates incentives to decrease volatility in stablecoins and, according to its website, bring them closer to the price of the asset they are pegged to.
Additionally, the protocol has a governance model based on a quadratic voting system. Unlike other governance models, this means that votes at pickle.finane are not counted nominally, but rather the square root of each account is calculated when voting. By doing this, the protocol attempts to prevent whales from getting “too much influence” when voting for a proposal. Through their Twitter account, the team behind the protocol states the following:
For example, the following two situations have the same amount of voting power:
1. A whale casting 100 votes.
2. 10 regular people, each casting 1 vote.This gives more power to ideas that can garner a large number of people’s attention.
However, the protocol has yet to design a mechanism to identify users and prevent whales from circumventing the design of the governance model. For now, it will serve as a means to “slow them down”.