Following the wind-down of Moonwell’s Moonriver deployment, the Moonwell Apollo Treasury is no longer required for its original purpose. As part of this transition and the broader deprecation of legacy Aera V2 vaults, approximately $250–312k USDC remains held in a Moonwell Apollo Treasury vault.
These funds were historically associated with Apollo / MFAM reserves and have since remained idle. This discussion seeks community input on the appropriate custody and high-level use of these funds before the vault is unwound. The objective here is to ensure transparency and establish a clear mandate prior to execution, with the intent to quickly to a Snapshot vote.
Background
Moonwell is in the process of deprecating Aera V2 vaults. One remaining Aera V2 vault contains USDC originally associated with the Apollo/Moonriver Treasury. While these funds are part of the Moonwell ecosystem, their origin warrants explicit governance direction, and, given the recent direction the protocol has taken in the deprecation of Moonriver, there is an opportunity to redistribute these funds elsewhere. As a result, it might be advantageous to open discussion and proceed to a snapshot vote on moving these funds into areas that are of higher priority: bad debt, incentives, etc. Ultimately, the goal of this discussion is to see communal clarity on what should be done with the funds from these vaults.
The following options are presented for community consideration. A snapshot vote reflecting these options would follow this discussion period. If any other users have additional ideas, please discuss them here.
Distribute funds to MFAM stakers
Returns value directly to historical Apollo stakeholders.
Transfer funds to Moonwell DAO custody to repay outstanding bad debt on the Base deployment
Improves protocol balance sheet health.
Uses funds in support of a current product in growth.
Transfer funds to Moonwell DAO custody for use in future liquidity incentive campaigns
Discussion Questions
Which of the above options best reflects appropriate stewardship of these funds?
Are there material considerations or risks not captured in the proposed options?
Do you believe there are options not being considered here?
Thanks for the post, @coolhorsegirl. I’m actually a rather large MFAM staker myself as I haven’t sold my founder allocation and I farmed a significant amount of it over the years on both Solarbeam and Moonwell. From a pure selfish perspective, as an MFAM holder I might like to see the rewards go to MFAM stakers.
However, that being said, I think it is in the best interest of the Moonwell DAO and protocol as a whole to redirect the funds to accelerate the repayment of the remaining bad debt on Base and OP mainnet. This is just my humble opinion, but it seems better for the long term health of the Moonwell protocol. I understand why many MFAM holders might feel differently though, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.
From my point of view, I am a big holder of Mfam and a staker. I believed in it, and we are at a huge loss. For me, it is logical that it was the Monriver market and connected with Mfam, so I think it is right to distribute it to Mfam stakers because we are at an absolute loss.
I think paying off bad debt should be priority number one. That said, having ETH main net campaign incentives will be important. So, why not allocate to all three. 250k bad debt, 34k MFAM, 25k incentives campaigns. I’ve never been an MFAM holder, but I would love them to stay in the Moonwell ecosystem.
Thanks for putting this forward @coolhorsegirl . I’m voting in favor of Option 2: transferring these funds to repay outstanding bad debt on Base.
The logic is straightforward: bad debt is a liability that weakens protocol credibility and limits growth potential. These idle funds can immediately strengthen the balance sheet and eliminate that drag.
While I understand the appeal of returning funds to MFAM stakers, that’s purely redistributive without protocol benefit. Option 2 puts capital to productive use and sets the right governance precedent for handling legacy treasury assets.
It’s fascinating that you weren’t investors in Mfam or providers on Moonriver, but you want our money from that network. That’s pretty selfish. Losses on the base can be made up by adding a market like Cardano, and it will also expand to Ethereum, and the losses can be paid for by new fees.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something. It reads as if the funds were initially placed in the vault by the contributor, not users. correct me if I am wrong.
This reserve was created, if I remember correctly, over years of operation (from launch ~2021–2022) from markets with various assets (mainly stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, FRAX, and it was voted on with MFAM TOKEN. ON THE MOONRIVER NETWORK
I agree that repaying the bad debt is important for long-term growth, but I’m not sure using the Aera Apollo Vault funds is the best way to do it, especially since they’ve always been tied to different deployments and tokens.
In my opinion, MFAM holders should receive some form of compensation. It wouldn’t be fair to those who trusted and invested in Moonwell Apollo from the beginning, or to those who earned tokens through liquidity incentives.
One possible approach would be to take a snapshot and allocate a percentage of the Aero Vault to each MFAM or stkMFAM, with a deadline to claim. After that deadline, any unclaimed USDC could be transferred to Moonwell’s Base treasury to help repay the debt.
Additionally, the treasury of movr, ksm & frax should also be distributed among the stkMfam holders… to end the Apollo project.
I would also like to see it, if the distribution were uncomplicated, e.g., opening a Mamo account for everyone and distributing it directly there…1k+ new users for mamo, also a good thing for Moonwell
Thanks everyone for the thoughtful discussion, I wanted to provide an update on next steps and clarify how this will proceed.
Due to technical issues with Snapshot execution for this vote, we will be moving forward with an on-chain proposal (MIP-R39) to ensure the decision can be finalized transparently. Regarding the proposal structure: because onchain proposals are executed as a single binary decision with for/against/abstain options, we reviewed the options raised in discussion and will be structuring the vote around allocating the remaining funds toward bad debt repayment rather than presenting multiple redistribution pathways.
This approach was chosen for several practical reasons: (1) calculating and distributing funds to MFAM holders is significantly more complex than initially anticipated. The Moonriver environment lacks the tooling needed for straightforward distribution, and determining accurate eligibility across historical stakers introduces operational risk and delay, (2) the allocation answers an existing protocol liability and strengthens the balance sheet of active deployments.
What do you mean by bad debt repayment? From Apollo Protocol or Moonwell (well)
If its for Apollo, thats fine, but I don’t understand why MFAM holders should have to pay for Moonwell’s bad debt… MFAM holders are giving up their last chance to minimize the huge loss.
Just yesterday, Moonwell tweeted how much revenue they make per week 130k$ and 220k$ since 1.1.
We talking about 300k in Aera Vault and maybe another 200k?? in protocol reserves from Frax, Movr, etc. for MFAM holders… that’s 2-3 months’ revenue from Moonwell. So why you want to use some of the Apollo reserves? It would have absolutely no impact on the bad debt, a drop in the ocean, and would only be painful for the Apollo community… because this is truly the last chance to minimize the loss.
And btw most would buy $well immediately if they received a payout anyway. that would be great for pa of $well and give a huge boost to the moonwell community.
btw when I asked if MFAM stakers were also eligible for the $MAMO airdrop, I was told that MFAM wasn’t in the same ecosystem as $Well, and therefore there was no airdrop. For this reason, there is also no reason to use the Apollo Treasury to pay the bad debt…
This is accurate, so why are we even discussing it if, according to opinions and logic, the money belongs to the Moonriver network? You’ll do it the way you want anyway, and you don’t care that you screwed MFAM over, just like you don’t care about our losses. The argument with Mamo from 0xrobinhood is very apt! So help us out by giving us the rest of Mamo according to the stake, that’s cool, right? Haha, it’s a dirty trick, but that’s common in crypto, a big di
Thank you very much. Maybe if I send the team how much FMAM I own, they could send $30,000 of their own money. Fuck you, thanks to MONEY, you’ve definitely made a lot of it. A bad investment in FMAM is my business, but taking money from this market and putting it elsewhere is a crime.
mfam apollo was always meant to be community first, since day 1…no vc, sales, team allocation etc
Unlike $well, mfam had no buybacks, and since the Anybridge exploit, we’ve only been given empty promises about a new bridge for over three years.
protocol revenue is used for buybacks, since there was no buyback, its just fair to distribute the full revenue to the mfam stakers…This is exactly the same way as with $well.
I don’t know why this needs a discussion, I would liked it much more if the Moonwell community had found a creative way to distribute it that would benefit Moonwell the most. like distribute it in $mamo from the memo treasury or buyback on the market etc…
That’s only fair like