Two seemingly unrelated pieces of background:
1: There is a large supply of unallocated incentive TRU. There is ongoing debate on whether some of it should be burned.
2: People frequently ‘burn’ TRU by accident. So far, as is the default in the crypto world, those folks have just been out of luck.
So I’m not sure of the exact details, but I propose that we use unallocated incentive TRU to partially reimburse people who accidentally burn their TRU. Effectively, whenever someone burns by accident, we would shoulder some of the burn. The unfortunate person who actually did the burn comes out happy (or rather, less sad - we would not be reimbursing them fully), and yet it arguably costs us nothing if we wanted to burn some tokens anyway.
If we completely ignore perception/optics for a moment, I think this is simply a moral thing to do. People are accidentally losing their money, and while it is true that it’s “their own problem” and crypto comes with no guardrails, that doesn’t mean it’s actually a good thing that people are losing their money. And assuming token burns are good for the protocol, then these poor fools who do so by accident are actually providing us a service; their actions have positive externalities. We’d simply now be allowing them to charge the protocol something for the service they’re providing - giving them a way to capture some (but not all) of the externalities they produced. Again, we are allowed to grab all these externalities for free (and that’s how everyone else does it), but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Now for meta-level stuff - perception, optics, precedent: …I’m not sure. I definitely have an instinctual “sounds like a dangerous precedent”, but I can’t really justify it. And for people who don’t yet know what’s going on, it might look bad for the incentive pool to be doing transfers to random-looking individual users. But there are surely optics upsides too. For one thing, to the extent that others agree with the object-level “it’s the right thing to do”, we then get the optics boost for doing the right thing. Also we probably get some positive attention simply for doing something that hasn’t (as far as I know) been done before. Ultimately, I don’t want to put too much weight here anyway; if we believe it’s the right thing overall and the right thing for the protocol, then I’d expect everything else to follow eventually.
Here’s a first draft at concrete implementation details; I’m not attached to any of these specifics but just wanted to give an idea of how it could work:
1- We allocate some amount of TRU (2mm?) from the unallocated incentives to a new ‘Guardrails Pool’
2- We whitelist certain specific transaction types that count as burning TRU. For example,
- actually calling burn() on your TRU
- sending your TRU to the TRU contract address
3- Someone who has accidentally burned TRU in one of these ways alerts us of this fact (google form? forum?), providing a tx hash.
4- We (the company?) review the tx, then send the address which originated the tx 50% as much TRU, paid from the Guardrails Pool. (There would also be a minimum deduction to cover the cost of our gas and our review time. So sufficiently small burns would end up reimbursed at a lower rate or not at all.)
The goal is to make this not gameable in any way - you can’t get a reimbursement without first losing significantly more than you will get back. Or if someone believes that burning their tokens one-for-one with incentive tokens will be more than compensated by the rising price of their remaining tokens, then… go ahead and try gaming it like that? I won’t join in but will happily accept the price boost.
