MIP79 - Credit Guild Acqui-hire

Governance
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MIP 79 – Credit Guild Acqui-hire

Hello Morpho Community. I’m Kirk Hutchison, AKA OneTrueKirk, the founder of the recently deprecated Ethereum Credit Guild, and a DeFi researcher and writer.

I am transitioning to work exclusively on the Morpho protocol and apply the expertise gained from Credit Guild to the Morpho protocol. I am writing to request an allocation of MORPHO tokens to the Credit Guild GUILD holders. A vesting agreement would be applied to these tokens.

About the Credit Guild

The Credit Guild was an oracle free lending protocol on Arbitrum with an optimistic governance model for onboarding and offboarding of loan terms. While a bit different to Morpho in that it was a set of pools with shared governance, the insights we developed into optimistic governance + checks and balances will be highly relevant in Morpho’s implementation of token governance, as well as our work on auction-based liquidation models and first loss capital staking.

I’m excited to put the work from Credit Guild into practice on future versions of the Morpho stack, or as add-ons and plugins to the current protocol where appropriate. Auction based liquidation models could readily be applied to the current protocol. While there is some tradeoff with time-to-liquidation, the possibility of greatly reduced borrower value leakage on liquidation could be a valuable tool to drive increased borrower adoption.

Another interesting idea is an opt-in first loss capital staking system, where vault curators could specify a share of fees to distribute to stakers, reducing the risk that the passive vault depositors will be exposed to bad debt. This can be seen as a fully generalized and composable version of the MakerDAO surplus buffer or the Aave safety module.

Milestones at Morpho

  1. Fostering a strong delegate community and ensuring a high delegation rate of MORPHO tokens
  2. Creating a state of the art governance system which is simple and robust for the long term, yet able to scalably support deployments on multiple chains, and avoid common pitfalls like treasury raids or failures to meet quorum
  3. Applying lessons and insights from the Credit Guild regarding oracle risk, pool governance, and liquidations to future versions of the Morpho stack

Request for MORPHO

I am requesting 175,969 MORPHO tokens for the GUILD holders. Of these tokens, half will be sent to the Credit Guild multisig for distribution to GUILD holders via airdrop, while the remainder will vest over one year to the Credit Guild multisig and be distributed quarterly until vesting is complete. The multisig address is 0xcBB83206698E8788F85EFbEeeCAd17e53366EBDf.

11 Likes
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Great to have @OneTrueKirk working on Morpho. If we can get the Credit Guild community join the Morpho one, even better.

(Steakhouse wasn’t involved at all in Credit Guild and never held GUILD token)

1 Like
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Welcome @OneTrueKirk! Really looking forward to working with you and having your governance and builder expertise in the Morpho ecosystem!

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Makes a lot of sense. Seems reasonable and worthwhile to me.

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We can vouch for Kirk’s acument here all the way back from being invovled in Volt Protocol governance days. Excited to see him be full time now at Morpho. This acqui-hire of Credit Guild into the Morpho ecosystem make sense, particularly in governance and liquidation models. By leveraging the exp gained from his time in optimistic governance and auction-based liquidations, this initiative should enhance Morpho’s offerings and reduce borrower value leakage, driving further adoption.

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The vote is now live!

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For years Kirk has pushed for constructive and public discourse to advance onchain lending. His perspective and critique have made Gauntlet better before we joined Morpho, and I’m confident he will continue to do the same here.