Mango Markets <> Serum - Grant Proposal

[Klossie]

Proposal: Introducing a trading rewards program that is run by the Mango Markets team for margin trading through Mango Markets directly onto Serum Orderbooks.

As a quick overview: Mango (a Solana based single, open-sourced, venue to lend, borrow, swap, and leverage-trade crypto assets through a powerful risk engine) offers margin trading on top of Serum spot markets for 14 pairs with SOL/USDC being the most popular. To date $12.53 billion dollars of spot Serum SOL/USDC volume has been traded through Mango Markets. Mango rebates the GUI rebate to users passing the value on directly to traders, therefore taking no revenue from spot volumes.

The Mango team has spent the last 6 months working on developing the most liquid perpetual markets in the Solana ecosystem, which at times has matched liquidity on FTX. The investment into this has benefitted Mango in terms of high value market makers from the CEX space who have onboarded onto Solana and have ensured that retail users are able to have similar liquidity when compared to centralised venues. This liquidity is highly correlated with Solana TPS.

As part of running a maker based program, we have implemented the following with a very efficient Liquidity Counsel (Single digit user DAO) to complete the payment part of the program (a layer to prevent wash trading volumes from being incentivised via reviewing all trades). We have also invested a lot into mechanics for trading competitions and have a team that has CEX experience running these comps.

Some of the details with respect to spreads & data for Mango Markets (on the perps side), FTX & Serum spot can be seen on: https://mangolorians.com/

We have spent the last month building a spot leaderboard which should be live in the following two weeks which makes this proposal plug and play, with the final point being a grant from Serum to fund trials through the end of Mango V3 (and Serum V3). Getting us ready for Mango V4 & Serum V4 launch. For reference the Mango DAO contributed $500k USDC towards a pool for liquidity that is currently live.

One of the key aims is to ensure that new orderbook based spot & perps on other protocols do not outperform / outshine Serum & by association Mango too. We believe that this is the perfect timing to get this going and start cooking up some interesting trading competitions, liquidity improvement and a spark for volume (be it DAO vs DAO, Solana Korea Community vs Solana Germany Community, Team A vs Team B, Mango’s Market makers focusing on Serum books etc).

The ask also involves Mango’s DAO taking a cut for running this 8 week trial (getting ready for V4), we believe a 20% cut of a 500k SRM grant covers the people costs of organizing and running the whole trial program with a larger follow up grant once we’ve narrowed down the formula that works for Serum markets (we would like to use the 100k to vote on further liquidity emissions in the upcoming veSRM system). We also want to clarify that the majority of Serum’s volume comes through Mango and we’d like to build upon this, whilst noting that Mango doesn’t take a cut on any of this volume and always passes the GUI rebate back directly to the users - the follow up grant should account for this for V4.

SRM will all go towards Spot (Serum based) orderbook incentives for the following pairs (available on Mango):

• SOL/USDC
• MSOL/USDC
• BTC/USDC
• ETH/USDC
• SRM/USDC
• RAY/USDC
• FTT/USDC
• AVAX/USDC
• BNB/USDC
• USDT/USDC
• GMT/USDC
• MNGO/USDC
• COPE/USDC

Spot maker / taker pool structure:

PNL competitions:

• Top 3 prizes for top 3 PNL within certain groups, potentially differentiated by NFTs on wallets
• Top 10 prizes for top 10 PNL within certain groups,not differentiated by NFTs on wallets but rather all wallets trading on Serum through Mango

Maker & Taker Program Reward Distribution Methodology:

What is currently live for Liquidity on Mango Perptuals with a $500k USDC pool (At the peak liquidity was on par with FTX for SOL-USD perps):

Proposal :

Distribution

• 8 weeks duration

• 400K SRM trading rewards grant to traders on Serum spot via Mango

• 100K SRM grant to mango dao for voting (Mango would use the 100k to vote on further liquidity emissions in the upcoming veSRM system)

[ccrado (C)]

Hey, we’re one of the more active traders on Mango with >$10mm daily trading volume (perps and spot combined).

The proposal looks promising and we’d definitely take part. The LP program for perps on Mango has worked out very well and has attracted lots of liquidity - partly due to us as we massively increased our making volume.
Currently we’re a net-taker on the spot market but with the right incentives we’d be increasing our making volume.

[tomatosss]

Good to see that serum is starting to promote more efficient liquidity other than Atrix. As one of the largest marketmaker and taker on Serum i would be happy to participate. /Tomatosss

[MJP]

hi all, sorry for the delay in replying I have been away

There is a lot written here and a lot of lines to read between. I will keep it short, as frankly the organic community here while small and awesome, does not have the voting capacity to outweight the large holders who vote on what they want to happen. Not a serum specific issue, its common in DAOS.

Mango is a project that has executed extrememly impressively

If Mango wants 100k SRM for veSRM purposes it shoudl buy it, no need to get a grant. It has a massive treasury. if it doesnt want to buy it, then a token swap? but honestly, just buy it. its kind of embarassing asking for a handout.

Do I think a trading competition rewarding spot, not perp, activity is a good use of funds? not really. the only real winners will be the market makers, as we can see from the posts above. Mango persists with the SRM fee bypass mechanic, meaning fees from any increased trading activity are as low as they could possibley be from all of mango. ho hum, its too late to undo now.

does SRM spot books need more liqudiity coming through a Mango funnel paying the lowest fees?

does 500k move the needle?? not really, but that doesnt mean SRM should be issued with low regard for where its going

My summary: probably better to wait until AAOB V4 is up and running and MAngo moves to spot and Perps off the Serum CLOB to wash aways its liquidity struggles it has had since inception.

Sorry if I am wrong or missed anything

[Crypto_notte]

Hello, this is an overall interesting proposal and I think it is a good way for Mango to drive additional volume on its platform and as well on Serum CLOB.

However, the proposal currenlty lacks a mechanism to assess its effectiveness

What are the KPI to assess whether the SRM grant is successful? Is the idea to increase volume from existing traders? Is it to drive more users? More liquidity and tighter spreads?

Once this is clearly answered happy to initiate a vote.

[waterquarks]

Hi all,

Regarding KPIs: the effectiveness of this grant would be measured by monitoring active traders, volumes + liquidity & spreads before, during and after the trading rewards program. The necessary data infrastructure is already set up and public for all to see:

• https://mangolorians.com/volumes monitors active traders and volumes, aggregated by different dimensions
• https://mangolorians.com/orderbooks monitors depth and spreads of all Serum orderbooks supported by Mango

Snapshot of the spreads dashboard for Serum markets present in Mango

We expect considerable upticks in all the aforementioned categories: volume, users & liquidity, but aim primarily to these incentives giving existing Mango traders, both retail and institutional, the push needed to build out spot trading. In our experience, they will remain long after the trial.

[MJP]

given the recent post about altering the SRM liquidity mining strategy, for what its worth, little im sure, the above is a no from me until Team SRM and Friends get the new veSRM, volume incentives and fee reduction tokens in place.

Ironically Mango will get free trades from these tokens, but has the least to gain vs non MSRMS holders/projects who do not bypass.

[Yuhan (Yuhan Fang)]

In our experience, they will remain long after the trial.

Thanks for sharing this. Do you have some examples of previous incentive programs you’ve run? If you have a date range the incentive program was active for, a brief description of what the incentive was, and which markets the incentive program covered, I would love to dig into the data using mangolorians.

[Klossie]

Hey Yuhan, we started the MangoMM program on the 25th of April and it was running until the 20th of June - see here for description & design MM pool forum discussion (Bear in mind Solana was extremely unstable during this period, notable mango addresses that joined for the program:

• 4rm5QCgFPm4d37MCawNypngV4qPWv4D5tw57KE2qUcLE

• DUp1NPypVm32hniFLY7KqCRtNQ6dM7ipQbTfuXh48gDt

4rm currently represents 40% of liquidity at the top of the book.

What you can do is take a look how liquidity evolved during the program (at points where fixed spreads & volume based rewards were active & Solana was functioning normally, you’ll see that liquidity at touch up to $50k/side was on par with FTX perps). We also reduced MNGO rewards by over 80% during this time.

We also ran a backstop program - which was favored by another set of MM’s who weren’t keen on quoting the top of book.

[Klossie]

Hey MJP,

On your points - Mango can purchase SRM for voting, definitely not asking for a handout rather think of it as compensation for building all of this out & bridging our relationships over to spot - with the intention to use it to participate in votes going forward rather than i.e. sell.

We already run competitions on perp, and believe this is directly transferable to spot - with all fees going to SRM (mango not taking a cut on fees) so we believe this is definitely in the interest of Serum.

Re more liquidity at lowest fees, more liquidity is always better - Serum is competing against more and more onchain OBs on different chains, this tends to be the main selling point / attraction for takers. 400k over 8 weeks should move the needle - as it has with Mango perps - totally against over paying, we have a very good understanding of the costs to quote, the risks and the existing programs available in the market on all exchanges and plan to match these.

Re V4 - we intend to figure out what works best and have MM’s and takers ready with strategies by incentivizing activity and development now, so that we can plug and play on V4.

[Crypto_notte]

Proposal is up for voting Realms

[hipo]

Hi all,
I’m founder of CellFi.io, a liquidity layer protocol on CLOB. We run grid trading strategy and make market making available to retail users. The protocol works on Serum, Mango, and Zeta.
From our point of view, current CLOB has much lower tx vol and spread than centralized exchanges. An incentive program & grant will greatly help the market makers and traders build a better trading environment together. Market makers are waiting for more retail traders to onboard and traders are waiting for market makers to bring more accurate price and smaller spread. A dex initiated grant program can definitely kick off this cycle and induce positive feedback loop.