ARB and GEAR rewards: STIMMIES 💸
At Gearbox DAO, our aim is to be the leading onchain prime brokerage for the whole DeFi space. Our V3's modular architecture makes adding leverage opportunities faster and safer than ever. But to achieve broader adoption, providing these opportunities at scale is critical. Scaling on ETH mainnet only, though, can be hard with the gas fee & the higher borrow amounts being a bottleneck for users.
How does this onchain prime brokerage realize scale onchain then?
That's where we go and make friends with Layer 2s, starting with Arbitrum. L2s can become a significant unlock to grow the power of modular lending and composable leverage. To make this growth reality, we bring to you a $700K+ user rewards program on Arbitrum. Welcome to 💸STIMMIES💸.
What are STIMMIES? The TLDR of rewards
Gearbox DAO was awarded an Arbitrum LTIPP grant to bootstrap the adoption of composable leverage on Arbitrum L2. Gearbox DAO further matched this grant with 20M $GEAR tokens to create a user rewards program called STIMMIES. The allocation for the leverage side of STIMMIES is 250K ARB and 16M GEAR
A combined total of ~$330K in rewards
You earn STIMMIES by simply holding your position. Earning 25 STIMMIES per $10K in positional value every hour. The bigger the size, the higher are your hourly STIMMIES.
Playing around with referrals, liquidations, opening more Credit Accounts, and other general leverage sided actions can earn you additional STIMMIES too. Explore away!
Certain assets, though, come with a boost and yield more. Your STIMMIES can be cashed out to actual ARB and GEAR tokens every 2-3 weeks. This is also where STIMMIES are different from “points” and are closer to loyalty scores which reward users who repetitively use Gearbox. You earn these STIMMIES in 3 ways.
- Farming Points and LSTs: Farming on Gearbox refers to leverage opportunities where the primary mechanism of profiting is earning yield or getting points/tokens of other projects. All farms yield the same STIMMIES but Ethena's USDe for leveraged sats, Renzo's ezETH (live again with a 3X ezPoints boost!) for leveraged Eigen Layer points and ezPoints and Lido's stETH yield 2X the STIMMIES/hour. Your STIMMIES total amount depends on the length of your farm, the longer you hold the more STIMMIES you earn.
- Margin Trading on PURE: Gearbox PURE utilises Credit Accounts to enable leverage trading on DEXes. For Abritrum, this will enable users to leverage trade Arbitrum native assets (and more) on Camelot, Curve, Uniswap etc. By utilising different DEXes, PURE enables traders to tap into deep DEX liquidity without having to trade against LPs. Making for a fairer trading alternative to perps. You earn STIMMIES here by simply trading, your P&L and volume both play crucial roles to help you earn STIMMIES.
- Referrals: Apart from leverage, you can also earn STIMMIES by referring other users. The great part is that you don't just earn STIMMIES for the users you refer but also for the users your referred user refers further. No it's not multi level marketing, we stop at level 2. Generate your referral code on the PURE dApp. For using your code, the users you refer will earn an additional 350 STIMMIES as well.
The STIMMIES cycles
With payouts happening every 2-3 weeks, a new cycle of STIMMIES will kick off every 2-3 as well. While the leaderboard will show the overall STIMMIES you earn, it'll also start displaying the STIMMIES you have earned during the ongoing cycle. This will be enabled post cycle 1.
While 16M GEAR and 250K ARB will be paid out to leverage users, this will happen over 3 months or 5-6 likely cycles. The exact amount of GEAR and ARB to be distributed for a cycle as well as the strategy specific boosts will be determined by the grants initiative.
STIMMIES Bot for easier UX
To make keeping up with STIMMIES easier though, we have a bot that you can sign up to track how many STIMMIES you have earned and your position on the leaderboard through TG itself. Link your wallet(s) simply by submitting your addy to the STIMMIES bot. Click on the image to be redirected to it.
If leverage is not your thing, Gearbox also has a 400K ARB Passive Lending Liquidity Mining event taking place. Lend without IL, fee or lockups to earn ARB rewards above your supply APYs: https://app.gearbox.fi/pools
Earning STIMMIES: Farming & Points
Leveraged farming is Gearbox's oldest use case while leveraged points are our latest addition that helped catapult Gearbox to new TVL ATHs. They both, though, work similarly (And so does PURE). Gearbox credit accounts enable users to borrow upto 10X their capital and use them across DeFi protocols to increase efficiency and build leveraged DeFi.
When you take this to Ethena's assets, you get leveraged USDe and in turn leveraged Sats. When you use this leverage on stETH, get earn leveraged staking yields. And the same stands for any other asset/protocol Gearbox integrates.
And with the launch of STIMMIES, you won't just be able to earn these leveraged yields or points, but also additional $GEAR and $ARB rewards on top. While you'll earn STIMMIES for every farm you open. There are certain farms that'll yield boosted STIMMIES and boosted rewards. These include:
- stETH by Lido
- USDe by Ethena and
- ezETH by Renzo.
To earn these boosts, simply hold your position. You will receive additional STIMMIES every hour. For example, if a non boosted $10K position earns 25 STIMMIES every hour, boosted strats will earn you 50 STIMMIES/Hr with a 2X boost. Make sure you monitor your farms though. Leveraged farming doesn't require as active monitoring as leveraged trading but isn't completely passive either. Make sure you manage risk.
Opening a Farm/Points position
- Switch to Arbirtum Network and go to the Farm tab to open an stETH position or the Points tab to open a USDe or ezETH position. Access these from here: https://app.gearbox.fi/strategies/list
- Choose Your Leverage: Customise the position as per your risk tolerance. The page also displays the borrow rate, the liquidation price and more to help you take an informed decision. All these details are up to you, you decide all the parameters!
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Open position".
And Voila! You are all set. Multicall will now execute all the required transactions in one go, using account abstraction.
Earning STIMMIES: Margin Trading
Another way for you to earn STIMMIES and rewards through leverage is by using Gearbox PURE. Gearbox PURE utilises Credit Accounts to enable leverage trading on DEXes. For Abritrum, this will enable users to leverage trade Arbitrum native assets (and more) on Camelot, Curve and others.
Switch to Arbirtum Network and open a position to start earning STIMMIES for your trading actions: https://pure.gearbox.fi/trade.
You earn STIMMIES on PURE simply by trading. Holding the trade for longer enables you to earn additional STIMMIES every hour, but traders also receive additional STIMMIES depending on their realised P&L. Volume and P&L thus become the primary drivers to earn rewards for traders. Leverage different assets like $PENDLE, $ARB, $GMX and more natively on Arbitrum DEXes and earn STIMMIES.
PS: Attempts to inflate volume by wash trading or other activities will be monitored and are discouraged. STIMMIES granted for these activities will be deducted before rewards are disbursed and won't be eligible for rewards.
PURE has been designed to be an alternative for perp DEXes. By leverage trading on DEXes, PURE is able to tap into the deep liquidity and provide a smooth trading experience to users without having LPs trade against them. By using real spot assets, PURE also eliminates the issue of price wicks and only relies on spot price to make trading safer. You can read more about it below.
Referral
The final mechanism through which you can earn STIMMIES is by referring users aka their friends (do you have any?!). You earn STIMMIES not just on the first position your friend opens but on every subsequent position they open as well. And that's not all, if your friend further refers someone, you again earn more STIMMIES from that referral and the positions they open. Multi level STIMMIES.
The number of STIMMIES you earn will depend on the overall volume of the users you refer. The number of users you refer and volume you bring thus determines your overall STIMMIES. To make it easier for you to onboard a user, 350 additional STIMMIES will be awarded to every user who opens at least one position using your referral code.
How to find your Referral link?
- Go to the PURE dApp, you'll see STIMMIES displayed on top. Click on the option.
- The pop up will show you the STIMMIES you have accumulated and the referral link to your wallet.
- Copy this link and use your social capital to earn STIMMIES.
STIMMIES Bot
Keeping track of STIMMIES updates and your not-points might get tough, which is why we are bringing you an easy to use UI through a Telegram bot. Simply submit your wallet address(es) to the bot and make tracking easier.
The bot will directly ping you everytime you earn STIMMIES as well as enable you to access the leaderboard on request. Any campaign related updates too will be shared through the bot apart from our socials.
As a sidenote/ToC, the goal of the campaign is to reward real users and making new users experience composable leverage. In case a user tries to game the system or inflate the points, the grants initiative holds the rights to nullify the points gained through gaming.
Gearbox Passive LM
If all the leverage sided stuff is not your thing, don't worry. There's another 400K ARB campaign already under way. Go to https://app.gearbox.fi/pools/ and the UI will show you the additional yield in ARB tokens that you can earn by supplying to the USDC and the ETH pool. As always, make sure you switch to Arbitrum to see these.
If you would like to join the DAO — just get involved on Discord. Discuss, research, lead and share. Call contributors out on their bullshit and collaborate on making things better. Here is how you can follow developments:
- Website: https://gearbox.fi/
- Farming dApp: https://app.gearbox.fi/
- PURE margin trading: https://pure.gearbox.fi/
- User Docs: https://docs.gearbox.finance/
- Developer Docs: https://dev.gearbox.fi/
- Github: https://github.com/Gearbox-protocol
- Telegram: https://t.me/GearboxProtocol
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/GearboxProtocol
- Snapshot page: https://snapshot.org/#/gearbox.eth
- And of course, Notion DAO monthly reports: