blockworks.co
Ribbon DAO token holders have voted in favor of folding Ribbon Finance into the affiliated Aevo derivatives exchange, which launched its mainnet in June.
Under the proposal, the Ribbon Finance dapp will be moved under the Aevo domain, and Ribbon’s existing structured products will adopt Aevo’s visual identity.
The near-unanimous vote by 133 RBN token holders, which concluded Tuesday, also authorizes a 1:1 token conversion from RBN to a new AEVO token, yet to be launched.
According to the proposal, “Aevo will be converted into a DAO, allowing tokenholders to govern the options and perpetuals exchange, OTC, the existing structured products, and the Aevo L2 rollup itself.”
Blockworks Research analyst Ren Yu Kong called the proposal “a fantastic one for the RBN token and should greatly improve tokenomics, and “shininess” surrounding a new token.”
Ribbon currently runs 16 DeFi options vaults (DOVs) on Ethereum, with a share of revenues directed to RBN token holders who lock their tokens for a fixed period of time, and receive veRBN in return.
But the protocol has struggled to scale, prompting the team to pivot to Aevo, a non-custodial options and perpetual futures exchange built as a layer-2 rollup using the Optimism stack. This uses an off-chain order book familiar to traders on centralized exchanges.
Once enacted, veRBN can unlock their RBN tokens without penalty and migrate them, while vault revenue sharing will be stopped, pending a further proposal on AEVO tokenomics.
The protocol’s developers and investors all agreed to re-vest their own token allocations for an additional year as part of the process.
What’s in a name?
Most governance discussion on the project’s forum and Discord was favorable to the proposal, but some questioned the relative merits of the two brands.
“Aevo will get lost and confused with Aave and others,” wrote one community member on Discord. “Ribbon as a brand clearly stands out.”
The project’s community manager disagreed, calling the Ribbon brand a “limitation,” due to its “heavy baggage” — a reference to problems that emerged following the launch of the RBN token in 2021 after DeFi venture fund Divergence Ventures, a Ribbon investor, was found to have Sybil-attacked the airdrop.
“Ribbon is our history, let us not make it our burden,” the community manager said.