Introducing Votemarket v2

Stake DAO
3 min readNov 20, 2024

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Stake DAO is proud to announce the release of a new version of its vote-incentive marketplace, Votemarket v2.

Votemarket v2 represents the culmination of the innovation cycle that occurred in the past few years in the vote and liquidity incentive markets, offering unprecedented user flexibility while maintaining its core principles of on-chain execution and permissionless architecture. Moreover, it extends beyond traditional vote incentives to become a comprehensive platform where protocols can implement sophisticated liquidity incentivization strategies, including vote incentives, liquidity mining, and point-based incentive systems.

Votemarket, in its current form, is already one of the best existing solutions for voting incentivisation, being the only fully on-chain platform still standing. However, the limitations of its current model, in particular the need to claim every week, and the impossibility of depositing vote-incentives targetting users voting through an off-chain vote, were obstacles to deepening further the penetration of Votemarket in the overall vote incentive market. Votemarket v2 brings a whole new infrastructure that solves these issues and brings new possibilities to incentivisers and voters, while keeping its core principle of being fully on-chain and decentralised.

To put it in a nutshell, the main features brought by Votemarket v2 are the following.

1. Multi-week reward distribution

With Votemarket v2, voters will not need to claim their rewards every week anymore, hence reducing gas costs and attention requirement. To achieve this while keeping an on-chain architecture was quite a challenge given the fact that Votemarket aims at being an agnostic infrastructure that can be used for many protocols, including those which use a gauge controller contract that does not store historical data (like Curve, Balancer, etc.). The solution explored by Votemarket v2 involves bridging the heavy calculations on a Layer 2 so that gas costs stay limited. This is done in a seamless manner for voters who hardly notice that they need to initiate claim transactions on L2, despite the rewards being deposited and distributed on Mainnet.

Note that users will still incur gas fees when participating in on-chain voting and claiming rewards. These costs may vary based on network activity.

2. Full vote supply coverage

With Votemarket v2, it is now possible to incentivise simultaneously direct voters who locked their governance tokens, and voters who go through the governance token of a wrapper (such as vlCVX or vlAURA, for example). This should significantly increase the incentiviser experience as it should end the endless monitoring of efficiencies across various platforms.

3. Fallback strategies

Votemarket v2 allows the incentiviser to choose how the unspent incentives of their campaign are going to be distributed. A typical strategy could be to use the unspent amount to deposit direct incentives into the targeted pool. This feature makes Votemarket v2 a very good place to deposit any kind of incentives, as it should always be more interesting to benefit from the incentive multiplier effect of vote incentives.

4. Point incentives

Votemarket v2 is able to create vote-incentive campaigns even for off-chain points systems. With its cross-chain factory, it can tokenise an allocation of points and distribute it in an on-chain manner.

Note: The regulatory landscape for DeFi and decentralized vote-incentive platforms is still developing in many jurisdictions. Stake DAO is committed to ongoing compliance efforts and encourages users to stay informed about regulatory changes that may affect their participation. Users should be aware that interacting with off-chain or cross-chain systems may introduce additional compliance and security considerations

More information regarding Votemarket v2 can be found in Stake DAO’s documentation and in the Votemarket v2 whitepaper.

Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Users should understand that participating in decentralized finance (DeFi) carries financial risks, including potential loss of funds. Please conduct your own due diligence before participating.

Please also note that Votemarket v2 is designed as a tool to enable decentralized voting and liquidity incentives. The platform does not guarantee financial returns, and users participate at their own discretion.

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