Epoch-less Predictability
The original design and principles for the Epoch system, as envisioned by André Cronje, are as follows:
Goal is to ensure a healthy equilibrium between voters and external bribers. Bribers are incentivized to get their bribes early in that week, as to attract early voters. They also benefit from bribing later, as to have more information on competing bribes. Voters face a similar dilemma, as voting too early means forgoing potentially lucrative bribes that come later, and voting too late means voting with a lower power. Note that this latter affect is especially pronounced for voters who have locked for shorter time periods (e.g. voters who have locked for weeks rather than months/years will experience larger differences in the bribes they receive from voting later vs. earlier in the epoch).
However, instead of fulfilling its original purpose, the epoch system has inadvertently become a hunting ground for savvy bot users who exploit it due to certain drawbacks that overshadow the advantages it provides:
User Fatigue: Users are required to vote in every epoch and risk missing out on bribes if they neglect to do so. This not only causes user fatigue but also consumes substantial gas.
Irreversibility: Once cast, a vote cannot be altered or withdrawn. In protocols with a high volume of votes, a single misguided click can potentially disrupt an entire week's plans, leading to severe and irreparable economic damage to the system.
Middleman Proliferation: Inefficiencies lead to the mass production of wrapper protocols, and the excessive fees of these middlemen significantly reduce the share that actual users get.
NFT Overhead: For the decay of the number of votes as the epoch progresses, the votes must exist as NFTs, and the vote/reward claim behavior must be repeated for each one, resulting in a serious waste of time and gas.
Partnership Blockers: Even if you have an important partnership or launchpad, if you don't make it to the start of the epoch, you'll always be delayed by a week, making it harder to partner efficiently and give everyone a chance to get noticed by properly distributing multiple partnerships.
Wasted Emissions: In the rapidly evolving crypto market, the inability to change one's stance for a week could lead to misdirected emissions, resulting in wastage. Immediate and reasonable rewards for bribing should be guaranteed so that the bribe-reward flywheel can roll reasonably and fairly.
Increased Development Workload: The core team is obliged to distribute votes and manage bribes weekly when they should be concentrating on development, hampering progress toward roadmap goals.
Unfair Distribution: There's a significant discrepancy in actual APR between those who locked up VC and voted at the epoch's onset and those who voted at the end.
In reality, the existence of epoch system places an enormous strain on the entire framework, leading to the undervaluation of VC tokens in the market far more than warranted.
Therefore, we addressed these issues logically by completely removing the Epoch system and introducing a predictable and continuous system.
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