Introduce a Native Bribing Layer for TINY Gauge Voting

Proposal Discussion
1

Summary

This proposal introduces a native bribing layer within the Tinyman ecosystem that allows protocols, DAOs, and token projects to offer incentives to TINY Power voters in exchange for directing emissions to specific liquidity pools.

The aim is to enhance the existing gauge system by enabling a transparent, competitive marketplace for vote incentives—similar to vote markets in other ecosystems, but purpose-built for Tinyman on Algorand.

Motivation

The TINY Power gauge system already gives token holders influence over liquidity incentives. However, it currently lacks a mechanism for:

  • Encouraging new protocols to launch and deepen liquidity on Tinyman

  • Allowing TINY Power holders to extract more value from their participation

  • Facilitating healthy competition between pools seeking TINY emissions.

In ecosystems like Curve and Balancer, the introduction of bribing layers has led to:

  • Increased protocol-owned liquidity

  • DAO-to-DAO collaboration

  • More active participation in emissions governance.

Creating a native Tinyman bribe market would allow any token project or DAO to incentivize gauge voters, while increasing TINY staking and long-term protocol engagement.

Design Overview (MVP Scope)

Key Components:

Bribe Submission Portal: Allows projects to submit bribes for upcoming gauge epochs and link them to specific pools.

Bribe Claiming System: After the epoch ends, voters who allocated TINY Power to the incentivized pool can claim proportional rewards.

Transparency Dashboard: Displays bribe offers, vote allocations, and reward estimates in real time.

Initial Supported Bribe Tokens:

  • TINY

  • Algorand-native ASAs (such as xUSD, gALGO, DEFLY, FOLKS)

Security and Fairness

  • Bribes are distributed based on actual vote weight used in a given epoch.

  • Bribe funds are escrowed in a smart contract to ensure voters can safely claim rewards.

  • The bribe system does not interfere with gauge outcomes—votes are still counted normally and emissions are distributed as usual. Bribes function as an additional reward layer.

Benefits

This proposal benefits multiple stakeholders across the Tinyman and broader Algorand ecosystem:

TINY Power holders gain an additional source of rewards by participating in governance, making their vote allocations more valuable.

Emerging projects and token communities gain a straightforward way to attract liquidity and visibility by offering targeted bribes, even without deep liquidity of their own.

Tinyman as a protocol stands to increase TINY staking participation, deepen liquidity across more pools, and drive more active engagement in gauge voting.

The Algorand DeFi ecosystem benefits from more aligned incentives between protocols, stronger DAO-to-DAO coordination, and more composable liquidity strategies overall.

Open Questions for the Community

  • Do you support the introduction of a native bribing layer for TINY gauge voting? Why or why not?

  • Do you think this would increase engagement and deepen liquidity across the protocol?

  • Which tokens should be allowed as bribes?

  • Should a minimum TINY Power threshold be required to claim bribes?

  • Should bribes be claimable manually, or distributed automatically after each epoch?

  • Would projects prefer to use TINY or their own tokens for bribing?

Let’s make Tinyman the most dynamic and strategically composable liquidity layer on Algorand.