WELL Asset Listing

I am pleased to present a proposal for the addition of WELL, Moonwell’s governance token, to the protocol’s expanding suite of Core lending markets. This proposal is a significant step toward further enhancing WELL’s utility and solidifying its role within the Moonwell ecosystem. With WELL’s robust DEX liquidity on Aerodrome, its circulating market capitalization of $200M, and the recent integration of a Chainlink price feed for WELL on Base, the foundation is set for a successful market listing. By enabling WELL as a core market, we aim to empower the community with new financial opportunities, stronger liquidity, and broader governance participation, driving the protocol’s growth and decentralization.

This proposal outlines key information about WELL, its unique utility, and the anticipated benefits of its inclusion in Moonwell’s Core markets. It also includes market risk assessments, decentralization metrics, and suggested safeguards against potential vulnerabilities. We encourage the community to carefully review this proposal and provide feedback to ensure this initiative aligns with Moonwell’s mission of making onchain finance simple, secure, and accessible to all.

General Information

Token: WELL

WELL is Moonwell’s governance token, distributed to users who actively engage in lending and borrowing. It enables holders to contribute to the protocol’s governance and security across Base, Optimism, and Moonbeam.

Key functionalities include:

  • Submitting and voting on onchain “Moonwell Improvement Proposals” (MIPs) to guide the protocol’s evolution.
  • Delegating voting power to trusted representatives to vote on their behalf.
  • Participating in offchain governance through Snapshot voting, ensuring diverse and inclusive decision-making.
  • Staking tokens in the Moonwell Safety Module on Base, Optimism, or Moonbeam. This staking mechanism enhances protocol security while offering rewards to stakers for their contribution to Moonwell’s overall stability.

Benefits to the Moonwell Community

  1. Expanded Utility for WELL: Activating a core lending market for WELL will introduce new use cases, aligning with community feedback to strengthen token utility.
  2. Enhanced Liquidity and Volume: A WELL lending market will drive liquidity growth across Base, solidifying the asset’s position within the broader DeFi ecosystem.
  3. Broader Token Distribution: By allowing WELL to be used as a borrowable and lendable asset, more users can acquire WELL through participation in the market. This wider distribution fosters a more decentralized governance structure, reducing the influence of concentrated token holders.
  4. Strengthened Governance Participation: Those who borrow or supply WELL are more likely to engage with governance to protect and enhance the protocol. This creates a feedback loop where market participants become active contributors to protocol evolution.

Resources and Socials

Moonwell Social Channels Metrics

  • Twitter: 44,400 followers
  • Discord: 8329 members
  • Telegram: 7966 members

Market Risk Assessment

Market Metrics

  • Market Cap: $200M
  • Minimum/Maximum Market Cap (Last 6 months): $72M (June 1st) / $325M (December 1st)
  • Circulating Supply: 3,046,702,305 WELL
  • Maximum Supply: 5,000,000,000 WELL
  • 30D Total Volume (CEX/DEX): $288,625,308
  • 24 Hour Trading Volume: $10.78M

Liquidity on Centralized Exchanges

  • Coinbase -2% Depth: $141,109
  • Bitrue -2% Depth: $14,002
  • Gate.io -2% Depth: $13,524
  • Kucoin -2% Depth: $6,241

Liquidity on Decentralized Exchanges:

  • Aerodrome (Base) -2%: $512,763
  • Aerodrome SlipStream -2%: $10,370
  • Uniswap V3 (Base): $5,801

Herfindahl Index: 0.03429

The Herfindahl Index quantifies token concentration among holders. A value of 0.03429 reflects low concentration risk for WELL, indicating that governance risks stemming from concentrated holdings are minimal. This value compares favorably to governance tokens in other DeFi protocols, supporting WELL’s decentralization.

Decentralization

  • Top 10 Holders
  • Token Contract: 0xA88594D404727625A9437C3f886C7643872296AE
  • Privileged Roles in Token Contract:
    • Multichain Governor:
      • Owns the Proxy Admin
      • Proxy Admin owns the xWELL token across all chains
      • There is ownership control by the Temporal Governor and Moonwell Artemis Timelock for managing WELL bridges, bridge rate limits, and pauses. The max rate limit is 10k tokens/second with a maximum pause duration of 30 days.
      • The Governor can be changed by Moonwell’s governance guardians/security council. In “break glass” emergencies, these parties can agree to roll back governance ownership to the previous Artemis Governor. The security council guardian operates under a 3/5 multisig.
  • Distribution/Top Holders: According to Bubblemaps.io the majority of the token is split
  • Blacklist Functionality: The WELL token contracts have no blacklist function.
  • Token Standard: xERC20
    • WELL conforms to the xERC20 standard which enables cross-chain fungibility. This allows WELL to be used as a governance token across all of Moonwell’s respective chains, Base, Optimism, and Moonbeam. It relies on bridge contracts with configurable rate limits to prevent over-minting in case of bridge compromise.

Economic Risks

If WELL is introduced as a borrowable asset, it may become vulnerable to governance attacks, wherein borrowed WELL could be utilized to advance malicious proposals. At current market prices, achieving the quorum of 100M WELL would require approximately $7.3M; however, recent governance activity indicates that most proposals surpass the 100M vote threshold. It is recommended that borrow caps be actively managed to ensure no user can borrow an amount exceeding the minimum quorum threshold.

Smart Contract Risks

  • Codebase and onchain activity:
    • Github Repo
    • Total transactions: 943,932
    • Age of token in days: 895 days
  • Security Posture: Moonwell has conducted a significant number of audits, a list of these audits may be found here. Additionally, the smart contract engineers take a proactive approach to security, testing all changes, and requiring testing, code reviews and audits before new smart contracts are added to the system.
  • Upgradability:
    • Is it upgradeable: Yes
    • Upgrade Process: Moonwell Governance can upgrade the contract if an onchain vote passes.

Oracle Assessment

Proposal Author Information

  • Name: 0xMims
  • Telegram: Mims0x
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter: 0xMims
  • Delegate Address: 0x657D07095b082BB71ebD93F549f407A97f49094F
  • Relationship with Token: I am a Moonwell community member and delegate.

Conclusion

The inclusion of WELL as a core lending market is an exciting opportunity for the Moonwell ecosystem. This proposal not only enhances WELL’s utility and governance potential but also reinforces the protocol’s commitment to decentralization, security, and innovation. By enabling WELL as a core market, we unlock new financial opportunities for the community, drive liquidity growth, and foster broader participation in Moonwell’s governance framework.

Your feedback and engagement are critical to the success of this initiative. Let’s work together to ensure this proposal aligns with Moonwell’s mission of making onchain finance simple, secure, and accessible for all. We invite you to review, discuss, and contribute to this proposal to shape the future of Moonwell and its ecosystem.

10 Likes

Hi @0xMims,

First of all thanks for this very detailed proposal, this is a very interesting proposal that will increase the utility of the well token, but one thing that I’m afraid is as soon as well is listed as an asset that we will be able to lend/borrow, a lot of users (including myself) will move the well that’s placed in the safety module to start lending it. If most of the users do that wouldn’t that be a danger for the protocol since the safety module is a crucial part of the moonwell protocol?

Wouldn’t be useful to also reward the users that have well staked in the safety module with the protocol fees to make sure that also a big part of the users still continue to use safety module instead of the proposed lending/borrow feature?

Thank you!

3 Likes

I also had the same concern and thought that’s why it has not been implemented, and it 100% makes sense as a reason not to do it. However, I am currently lending out my WELL on another defi protocol for more than the staking APR%, which means I am not staking at the moment anyway.

I think this issue is overcome by adding supply caps, as well as the borrow caps mentioned by @0xMims - if the supply cap was a small % of the total circulating supply and managed correctly, there wouldn’t even be the capacity for ‘everyone’ to supply on moonwell instead of staking.

3 Likes

Yes, like @lewisbroadhurst.base said, I think this can be solved by adding supply caps if needed, at the same time though, I think since the risk profiles of pursuing the staking module vs. supply collateral on the protocol are different (and it is not evidently clear that one is superior to another) it seems somewhat unlikely for a draining effect on the staking module, no?

3 Likes

Nice topic.

Well, i think the listing of the token for lending would bring more utility, more value to the protocol, so yes it would be great to achieve this idea in the near future.

This process coupled with supply caps that will gradually increase with the activity, will in my view, be sufficient to achieve this goal and keep a prudent approach for the protocol.

Imo, the issues of the well token, flowing from the staking module to the lending part, is a feature not an issue to the value of the token and the protocol.

If the well tokens fly away from the staking module, the apr from the emissions for the staked token will increase and so attract token holders, and if lending module of the well token is appealing, that will bring a positive value loop for the token, and less tokens in my view will be a selling pressure.

More activity and more value for the token will bring naturally also more TVL.

This idea needs to be taken in consideration and could bring a very welcomed evolution for the token imo.

3 Likes

Hey @0xMims - will you be submitting this to an onchain vote?

Gauntlet’s WELL Recommendation

Summary

We recommend onboarding WELL as collateral on Moonwell’s Base instance. For Optimism, we suggest delaying the listing of WELL until liquidity conditions improve.

Risk Parameter Recommendations

Base

Parameters Values
CF 65%
Supply Cap 75,000,000 (~$4.7M)
Borrow Cap 37,500,000 (~$2,3M)
Protocol Seize Share 3%

IR Recommendations

IR Parameters Recommended
Base 0
Kink 0.45
Multiplier 0.22
Jump Multiplier 3
Reserve Factor 0.25

Supporting Data

Volatility & Max DD

The maximum and minimum daily log returns for WELL are 21% and -22.93% respectively over the past 180 days. Given the volatility exhibited by WELL we recommend that Collateral Factor to align with that of AERO. We therefore recommend a CF of 65%

Supply and Borrow Caps

Borrow and supply caps are the primary parameter recommendations we can make to mitigate protocol risk when listing new assets. Gauntlet recommends setting the borrow and supply caps strategically with available liquidity on-chain. On Base, there is sufficient liquidity to trade upto 75M worth of WELL tokens with a slippage of 25% signalling a maximum cap setting of WELL tokens at this level. We recommend setting the borrow cap at 37.5M accordingly to adjust for kink level and provide sufficient buffer to prevent any governance exploits given the quorum requirements.

IR Parameter Specifications

WELL IR Curves

Utilization Borrow APR Supply APR
0% 0 0
45% 9.9% 3.3%
100% 174.4% 131.3%

We recommend an IR curve with a kink at 45% and borrow APR of 9.9% at kink.

3 Likes