ASR makes sense for Jupiter as it’s been designed for Jupiter. Jupiter is quickly morphing into a true ecosystem enabler, it already kinda was as a shared front end for the Solana DEX ecosystem.
Does that make sense for Drift? I don’t think so.
Balancer pioneered a proof of liquidity system when they launched 80-20 BAL/WETH LP tokens as veBAL (Berachain is just the latest iteration of this). It made sense as Balancer is a DEX. DEXes have LPs.
What is Drift at it’s core? It’s a lending provider (mostly perps leverage but also more traditional crypto lending).
Shouldn’t any staking program lean into this somehow? What ever token representation of the staking can be used to vote, that’s not complicated to do.
Just to be clear I’m not advocating for insurance fund staking. I think whilst that is better than simply locking up tokens it’s also hard to do (as Aave has shown).
Market Making is the kinda the game for Drift as the core function the protocol needs.
Could a DRIFT staking position just be Long on the DRIFT perps market? And instead of locking for time (something no one really likes) you get more governance power the more leverage you take out on that Long?
There’s something in that as goes funding rate as well but I’m not smart enough to articulate it.