• What is this proposal about?
  • We’re doing a soft relaunch of Alien Base. The farming DEX model is dead, and we’re cutting it loose to focus entirely on Epsilon Router (our meta-aggregator) and Mothership (a protocol for hedged LP strategies that actually makes sense for passive capital). This proposal covers everything needed to make the pivot real, and do it right the first time to avoid changing things down the line.
• Why is a token migration necessary?
  • The current ALB contract has no burn function and no native governance. We need the burn function specifically because our entire new funding model relies on debt being repaid and tokens being destroyed. A 1:1 migration is the cleanest path that preserves token listings and keeps things simple. It also allows us to cleanly increase the supply cap instead of coming up with workarounds, sub-tokens and other complex solutions that confuse newcomers.
• Why does the supply cap need to increase?
  • The short answer is that we’re collectively out of tokens, and the truth is that we never had enough reserved anyway. We’re pretty much at the end of our original emission schedule, and the token simply isn’t worth enough to maintain current development and functioning. The current 1M ALB/month allowance covers only a fraction of recurring expenses, and the DAO reserves are fairly low for long-term sustainability, especially if we need to stake the reserves to collect protocol revenue. Expanding the supply is necessary to complete the transformation from farming token to powerhouse DeFi protocol.
• Why do we need to mint more tokens? Shouldn’t we be sustainable already?
  • The majority of emissions happened earlier on, at much lower prices and when the path forward was less obvious. Our tokenomics made it difficult to accumulate significant treasury reserves during the good times, and most of the expenses for developing complex new protocols fell during the somewhat worse times in 2025. Since October, ALB fell by ~80%, which was difficult to imagine just a few months prior. The best and only thing we can do right now is to adapt and fix the issues that led us here.
• Who’s to say we won’t need to do this again in a few years?
  • Avoiding this is the whole reason why AIP-5 is this long and complex. The debt-based developer funding model helps us be more proactive and store more when things are going well. The POL does the same thing at a protocol level. Had we done this in 2024, we’d probably have a ~$20M treasury by now. It would be crazy to just expand the supply and ask for extra funding without addressing the issues that led us here in the first place.
• What’s wrong with the halving model?
  • In principle, it makes sense as a way to handle farming rewards sustainably. The problem is that farming is just the wrong model for a DEX to use, it’s a subsidy to mercenaries. Any ALB emitted for farming rewards is basically an ALB wasted. It’s like having a bucket with holes and gradually covering half of them to make it “sustainable.” The ideal move is to cover all the holes immediately, even if it’s difficult and painful at the beginning.
• So what replaces farming?
  • Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL). Instead of renting liquidity we’ll never keep, we accumulate a treasury the DAO owns outright. It provides baseline depth for ALB pools, can be deployed into blue chip pairs or partner projects, and generates yield that gets burned and supports the DEX. It compounds over time rather than evaporating the moment rewards drop.
• Can’t we invent new ways of making farming more sustainable?
  • We’ve thought about this for a while. Any solution we can come up with is effectively a very complex product where you might as well not use the token (e.g. IL insurance, risk tranching). POL is the only way to use ALB to retain value in the protocol. These solutions can be done later on, but it’s an independent issue from broader tokenomics.
• Isn’t it dangerous to ditch farming completely? What if we fail to attract sufficient volume?
  • In our proposal, we account for this by doing a short farming transition period. We can monitor the situation as it unfolds, and the DAO retains the right to incentivize pools with its own reserves. In general though, the market response to farming rewards has been very weak post 10/10, so the POL model can quickly improve the situation.
• Isn’t the price too low right now to be spending it on POL?
  • We definitely don’t want to exhaust everything right now, but we’ve got to start from somewhere. The model we proposed is extremely flexible and allows minting more during highs and returning debt during lows. The POL is a stabilizing factor for ALB price. This rationale already slowed down some of the accumulation dictated by AIP-4. Since then, the price only worsened — this type of behavior is a trap.
• Why are you doubling the supply instead of making a more conservative increase?
  • We were working with a more conservative option at first, but realized that we need the flexibility of the larger cap, primarily to have enough tokens for strategic funding, listings, market making, and other partner deals. The base plan only allocates an extra ~200M ALB (plus esALB dilution protection) — the rest is strictly supervised by governance and only minted if truly needed and justified.
• Why are you bundling this with a governance reform?
  • We’ve seen many market signals that unstable governance scares people off and creates issues down the line. It forces the team to waste time in politics for getting funding and taking radical actions necessary to grow the protocol. Our protocol is small, and making major changes is easier during these periods. It’s much better for it to be a one and done deal, than to struggle with governance when there is more to lose from chaos. The governance reform is a structured compromise to have more decision-making power without completely leaving the community and DAO outside of the loop.
• Why are you proposing govALB?
  • Because we deeply believe that the people with most to lose should be the ones having the most say. EsALB was always designed as a soft lock to prevent fat-fingered sales and not give platform revenue to mercenaries. As a proper governance tool, it’s too short-term. The slow multi-year release of govALB is absolutely a feature of properly incentivizing people for the long term — neutralizing both hostile buyers and short-termist investors looking for the first good exit available.
• What’s the alternative to passing this?
  • We can continue with the halvings, and have the protocol slowly descend to zero. For us, AIP-5 is the only way where both the team, the community and the protocol at large can move forward and achieve a lasting legacy. We’ve considered other types of proposals that were less comprehensive, but we chose to implement a more complex plan that we won’t need to alter down the line.
• Will migrating the ALB contract cause a taxable event?
  • A 1:1 migration should not trigger a taxable event, comparable to a stock split. esALB swaps handled within the contract are likely the cleanest from a tax perspective. For liquid ALB, it depends on how the interaction is structured (burn/claim, airdrop, etc.). Please consult your own tax advisor for your specific situation.
• Will govALB supplant esALB or be in addition to it?
  • It is an addition, not a replacement. esALB remains the primary governance and staking mechanism for most holders. govALB is a separate, optional layer for those who want deeper long-term governance participation.
• Is the APR framing correct: today 80-300% mostly inflation, future 5-40% mostly fees?
  • High risk and high yield vaults will remain, but they will be purely fee-based. The primary goal of AIP-5 is to keep all emissions “in house”. Either to develop the protocol or to accumulate capital that stays with the DAO. However, we are broadly moving away from inflation-driven yield toward real fee-based returns.
• Is the current model on its last legs?
  • Squeezing it more is possible but very high risk. The halving model was designed to carefully manage farming, not to run a complex DeFi protocol with it. This is how Alien Base would have launched if we knew then what we know now.
• Will this be a full public vote?
  • Yes. This will go to a full DAO vote. The community will have the opportunity to review, discuss, and vote before anything is implemented.