I have been following this discussion for the last few days and after consideration decided to vote “No Change”.
There is a Velodrome pool with 200,000 USD liquidity in Optimism, yielding 50% APR in $VELO right now. For a 6 ETH HOP buy (10,000 USD) there is around 8% slippage, which is quite high.
Olympus Pro was created so that teams can sell their native tokens without the optics of “the team is dumping”. They sell them at a discount to people who then sell them in open market for a small profit or best case scenario (for token price) decide to hold them. I don’t think it’s a good fit to use in this case, where the tokens sold are not protocol native and the DAO does not “need” to lose that 10% discount.
Leaving aside the consideration of using or not using 30K ARB for this sort of proposal, I don’t see any reason why we should sell the ARB tokens at a discount. If what we need is protocol-owned liquidity, and we intend to bootstrap it by selling part of Hop’s ARB airdrop, then there are much better ways to do it that are more profitable for the DAO.
For a comparative example, HOP DAO could sell 15,000 ARB for 8.5 ETH (instead of 30,000 ARB for ETH/HOP LP) and then use those 8.5 ETH along with 250,000 HOP from its own treasury to create a pool in Uniswap v3 + Bunny, or even add it to the Velodrome one. This still is a 30,000 USD investment but the amount of liquidity that the DAO has at the end is greater because the Olympus Pro / Bond Protocol ARB sell at a 10% discount did not happen. There even is a lot of ARB liquidity not only in DeFi but also in centralized exchanges, so places to perform an operation like this are vast.
Regarding using or not using funds for this proposal is something that I also agree needs to be scrutinized. There is a normalization in DAOs where people just throw money everywhere and to everyone without thinking much, just because they can. I echo dybsy’s thinking: I’ve seen companies with a much larger market cap than Hop’s current one that have 20x the amount of scrutiny for a 10,000 USD investment from their money.
We also need to put the amount into perspective and not only analyze it nominally: HOP received 1.6M ARB, and 30,000 of this is short of 2%. If we add in the other tokens in HOP’s treasury, like OP, the relative % is even lower. This does not necessarily mean this proposal is reasonable, but I think that adding more objective information is helpful to decide.
Lastly, there is clearly an interest for some parties that the HOP token has more liquidity. If we were to know more about the people proposing this I think it would greatly benefit transparency.
For all of the above, I have voted “No Change” on the proposal.