Antero

★ Announcing MVI Grants ★ We are excited to share an update on the MVI Grants program – five stellar teams have been selected by the grants committee @artofkot, @brettpalatiello, @eliasimos. Why are we funding this research? Since the proposal to reduce the ETH issuance was suggested, the Ethereum community has been actively discussing its monetary policy. When considering issuance reduction, there is a trade-off for the network between the amount of ETH spent on rewards and how decentralized its validator set is. In particular, one of the main downside risks of reducing issuance is the potential concentration of staked ETH, especially in the view of the upcoming ETF launch. There are also a variety of other risks and factors associated with issuance reduction: margin compression, the resulting pressures on certain market segments, as well as increasing barriers for innovation. These factors touch the core values of Ethereum: decentralization and censorship resistance. Hence we believe that an evaluation of these risks is needed, in the form of a deep analysis of how the issuance curve change could affect the validator set composition. Scope: (1) Profiling different actors within the staking economy, via interviews and field research, to uncover key data points such as preferences, frictions, supply curves, elasticities, costs, etc. (2) Gathering, studying and deducing the data above using the historical Beacon Chain and DeFi data sets. (3) Building out theoretical models, taking into account the data above. (4) Studying equilibriums & limits, doing simulations, and ultimately understanding & evaluating the risks of how changing issuance may affect the staking ratio & the validator set. ↯ 5 grants teams that we have funded ↯ Cryptecon: Matthias Hafner @MatthiasHafner1, Juan Beccuti @BqJuancho, Thunj Chantramonklasri @tchantramonk, Nicolas Oderbolz, Nicolas Greber, Beatrix Marosvölgyi – economists, mechanism designers and modelers from the cryptecon.org crypto research group. Scope focus: (2-4) 20 squares: Philipp Zahn @philipp_m_zahn, Wenxuan Deng @dengwx11, Fabrizio Genovese @fabgenovese, Daniele Palombi @dpl0a – mathematicians, economists and modelers from the 20squares.xyz crypto research firm. Scope focus: (2-4) Franklin DAO: Vivian Zhu @vivzhuu, Otakar Korinek @OtakarKorinek – members of the research committee at franklindao.xyz, a DAO formed by students out of UPenn. Scope focus: (1) K. Kulkarni @ks_kulk – crypto researcher, finishing CS PhD at Berkeley, working with Gauntlet. Scope focus: (3-4) A. Eloranta @antsae_ & S. Helminen @0xSanteri – crypto researchers, worked with Flashbots and Token Terminal. Scope focus: (2) Read the full announcement at cyber.fund/content/mvi-gr…