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Research Notes

This folder collects deeper dives and working notes used to ground the solution reviews in evidence.

Outflows + retention

Delegation exits, dormancy proxies, retention curves, and post-withdraw destination classification.

Reflexivity + yield extraction

LPT inflation rewards, reward withdrawals, and how delta-neutral staking can create structural sell pressure.

L1 follow-up for bridge-outs

Tracks where the Arbitrum bridge-out recipients route LPT on Ethereum L1 (contracts vs EOAs vs known DEX routers).

L1 second hop (exchange routing)

Follows the biggest L1 EOA destinations one hop further; surfaces labeled exchange endpoints (best-effort).

Extraction timing traces (L2→L1→exchange)

Links WithdrawStake → L2 bridge-out → L1 escrow receipt → tight-window exchange routing (best-effort; 1 intermediate hop).

Buy pressure proxies (exchange outflows → bonders)

Buy-side proxy: labeled CEX outflows on L1 and whether recipients bridge + bond on Arbitrum (best-effort).

Rewards claimed vs stake withdrawn (time series)

Monthly/yearly totals of LPT rewards claimed vs stake withdrawn via WithdrawStake.

Extraction fingerprints (on-chain proxies)

Top-50 “cashout-heavy” wallets: rewards claimed vs withdrawn, post-withdraw routing, and whether they remain bonded.

DePIN benchmark: Filecoin vs Livepeer

Filecoin’s lock/burn primitives (on-chain) contrasted with Livepeer’s extraction proxies.

Incentives + tokenomics

Design patterns to grow small delegators without enabling easy sybil farming.

Outflows by size band

Who exits (by count vs LPT) and whether each size band is growing via new delegators per year.

Cross-protocol experiments

What worked (and what backfired) in crypto incentive design, with takeaways for Livepeer.

  • research/livepeer-delegator-incentives.md: tokenomics/program design ideas + constraints.
  • research/livepeer-delegator-outflows-research.md: on-chain outflow + sybil-cashout hypothesis research.
  • research/delegator-outflows-by-size-band.md: outflows segmented by delegator size + new delegators per year by size.
  • research/delegate-525419ff-top-unbonders.md: delegate profile — top unbonders + claimed vs WithdrawStake cashout.
  • research/eth-l1-wallet-86abf78a-origin.md: L1 origin trace — bond deposits, withdraws, and LPT transfer counterparties.
  • research/cross-protocol-tokenomics-experiments.md: precedent patterns (worked vs failed) and what to copy/avoid.

These were imported from the main workspace repo and should be edited/maintained here going forward.