@BalancerLabs yield farming has been gamed. @DegenSpartan has a pretty good take on this.

My take here is that the last few weeks have really shown how impressively @synthetix_io have handled their rewards schemes. 1/ https://twitter.com/DegenSpartan/status/1275950421131923456

but quickly back to Balancer, @SBF_Alameda has a good thread about how things have gone down. Don't hate the player, hate the game... 2/ https://twitter.com/SBF_Alameda/status/1275927625572036608?s=20

Many people have pointed out that much of this recent liquidity mining is ripe for gaming and in many ways the the rewards are not long term incentive aligned. Incentive alignment is one of the reasons the @synthetix_io liquidity schemes that have been so successful. 3/

Synthetix has been doing liquidity mining for a year now, Paying out users who stake $SNX to mint synths. But there are big differences here compared to the newer projects doing this. 4/

Staking SNX to mint synths is a key part of the system and stakers assume both risk and reward for staking. There was a chicken and egg problem at the beginning where the rewards from the exchange weren't enough to attract stakers, and without stakers the system didn't work 5/

So the team decided to pay minters with inflation rewards for contributing. This allowed the supply side of the equation to be bootstrapped while the team continued working on the project and slowly building the demand side. (the demand side still isn't there yet) 6/

There were speed bumps and system was gamed for a bit before it could be fixed. But the incentives kept the stakers around and the whole experience built community. 7/

The team realized that rewards could extend beyond just incentivizing minters, but also help maintain pegs of synthetic assets like sETH, sUSD, and sBTC. Some incentive schemes were more successful that others, but all of them had clear scopes. 8/

I hope that other teams in the space look at the way the @synthetix_io team has structured their incentive schemes and think hard about how they can align incentives for early users, solve problems that couldn't be solved otherwise, and increase adoption. 9/

There is still a middle ground between "A token for everything" and "tokens are useless. Looking forward, I for one hope that @UniswapProtocol doesn't release a token unless the really feel it can improve the way that the protocol works. 10/

Apologies if I butchered any history here. It's still a greenfield space and all the experimentation is a lot of fun to see. /done