Hi, very interesting proposal! We noticed some questions around the differences between the two systems and wanted to give our input on this:
- Range-Based Incentives - while this is close to our fees/token0/token1 approach, it is a very cool feature that we’ve also been working on for several months and are currently refining to enable it to scale to pools with thousands of swaps and LPs. It will come out for both UniswapV3 and V4 in the coming months. The small twist we’re adding is that we will follow the tick and enable you to simply incentivize +x% -y% of the active tick to make management easier.
- KPI-Based Incentives - This feature prevents overpaying for liquidity but eliminates high APRs at campaign launch that can bring in a lot of new LPs. Some protocols mitigate this by creating smaller initial campaigns and adding new ones on top to further boost APR without extra cost, as fees are proportional to distributed tokens. It’s also quite hard to implement on concentrated liquidity pools (as you could technically have a TVL of $10M with 0$ in range), we’ve been thinking about how to implement this as well!
- Treasury Reimbursements & Recovery - Merkl contracts were recently upgraded, allowing campaign creators to recover unclaimed funds as soon as 30 days post-campaign (though we recommend waiting a year). By the way, this upgrade also comes with the ability to override campaign configuration while a campaign is active.
- Simplified Setup - this is a core Merkl feature and has been available since we launched, it supports safe and transaction builder payload generation as well.
- Fees
- While we can’t offer our system for free due to sustainability concerns, we understand Metrom’s approach as a market share strategy. Our model is straightforward:
- We take a percentage of distributed tokens
- Higher distribution volume leads to lower fees
- Uniswap naturally has a significant discount, likely to decrease with UniswapV4’s release
- The approach of charging 10% on saved tokens is interesting but we prefer not to base our fees on campaign performance, as both Merkl and Metrom are technical tools enabling teams to run incentives on complex systems. Campaign “success” isn’t fully under our control and shouldn’t correlate with our fees. However, we strive to maximize campaign distribution through our user base and distribution partnerships.
- While we can’t offer our system for free due to sustainability concerns, we understand Metrom’s approach as a market share strategy. Our model is straightforward:
A few other differentiating factors that are useful to keep in mind when choosing the solution:
- Reward forwarding - Merkl automatically detects ALMs such as Beefy, Steer or Gamma and is able to forward the rewards earned by the vaults back to the original users. This makes concentrated liquidity incentives much more accessible to less advanced DeFi users and fosters competition between the ALMs to create the most efficient strategy to maximise their users returns.
- Distribution - Merkl is a popular venue for farmers as we display hundreds of farming opportunities on over 30 EVM chains. On top of this, all the data displayed in our frontend is available in our API for free, this led tens of protocols to directly integrate Merkl rewards and claims in the frontend, further increasing distribution. For example, as soon as Uniswap creates a campaign on one of their pools, the APR will natively show on Beefy, Gamma, Ichi etc. We’re even seeing companies develop AI agents to dynamically create Merkl campaigns.
- Battle tested - we’ve distributed over $90M to over a million users across 30 EVM chains on over 70 different protocols. Scaling to such a userbase has been a real challenge with many learnings/sacrificed weekends along the way.
- Fixed APR (coming soon) - Fixed APR campaigns will enable incentivizors to pay users a fixed APR (or points) on the range incentivized, up until a max TVL where the budget is not enough to last until the end of the campaign, forcing the APR to diminish. This would not make sense in our current setup as you would not want to distribute more incentives for inefficient liquidity (this would enable users to create very wide positions and get more rewards when they’re actually not improving liquidity depth around the tick). In practice this is very similar to the KPI based incentives, gg Metrom for beating us to it!
While we feel like Metrom has been quite heavily inspired by our system and our UI/UX we’re happy to see new players in the space as this will push us to build an even better system in the future!