Quick disclaimer: I work at Lido, so my opinions may be biased. I am not writing on behalf of Lido, though, and the following opinions are my own only. xASTRO represents ~15% of my portfolio.
Hey @Zorro, I disagree with this statement.
**TL;DR: On the contrary,
stLuna/bLuna, which is the same product, has the highest utility of any Luna liquid staking derivative on Terra.**
You see, stLuna is not a standalone product, it is one of two possible representations of Luna staked with Lido. Let me explain quickly: any Luna staked with Lido gets sent to a smart contract called “the Hub”, which delegates it to a whitelisted validator and mints one of two liquid staking token for the user: either bLuna or stLuna.
Because they both represent the same staked Luna, albeit with different reward handling systems (one swaps rewards for UST, the other auto-compounds them), they are freely and losslessly interchangeable at the smart contract level. stLuna is simply burned to mint an equivalent value of bLuna, or vice-versa, with no slippage nor trading fee. You can test it out for yourself here: https://terra.lido.fi/convert.
Because stLuna and bLuna are fundamentally the same thing, represented differently, the utility of both has to be taken into account: they can be provided in Astroport, Terraswap, Loop, Anchor, Nexus, Edge, Mars, Apollo, etc… without ever having to do a swap.
Astro rewards are paid out to LPs, not to traders. They incentivize liquidity, not volume, at least not directly. Also, “people want[ing] to get exposure to” something is aka organic demand, isn’t it?
Making the mistake twice is not the same as fixing a mistake.
If the Astroport community thinks that it is overpaying for stLuna - Luna liquidity, then the proper way to solve the problem is to pass a governance proposal to reduce the pool’s reward allocation.
I think that would be fairer.
Anyway, as I said previously, as long as the parameters are sensible, I’m 100% in favor of dual incentives for the LunaX - Luna pool on Astroport.