Listing Fee Change

TLDR

Reduce listing fee to 0.5 STARS ($0.01).

Background

Stargaze Marketplace has had zero listing fees since launch. But since Stargaze also has zero gas, this functionality was abused to game new listing streams (such as Hubble).

Of course, Hubble and any future ranking site can add custom functionality to filter out repeated listings and unlistings. However this adds an additional burden on them, and could even cause future ranking sites to not include Stargaze. Since these listing transactions happen on-chain, they also add useless traffic to the network, and reduces accuracy of data, especially on third party sites and block explorers. Thus, solving this problem on the client-side turns in a game of whack-a-mole, which isn't scalable into the future as Stargaze gains more market share.

Earlier in January, a community member proposed adding a listing fee. This Common post was followed by proposal #107. The passing of this proposal added a 5 STARS ($0.13) listing fee.

Although this proposal passed with 99.92% YES votes, many in the community voiced concerns that the fee was excessive. Therefore, we are proposing a lower fee that will, in theory, still deter spam from happening at its previous volume while having less of an effect on normal users.

Proposed Solution

After extensive feedback from the community, and conversations on Discord and Twitter, we propose a listing fee reduction from 5 STARS to 0.5 STARS ($0.01). If STARS increases in price, then another proposal can update this fee, or a USD oracle can be used in the future to fix the fee to 1 cent USD.

We want Stargaze to be a minimally extractive protocol. It should charge just enough fees to be sustainable, not more than that. Note that currently all fees on Stargaze are Fair Burned, where 50% of fees are burned, and the other 50% are sent to stakers. The only exception is Stargaze Names, where 33% of fees go to the community pool. The Core Team doesn't earn any fees.

Read full discussion including alternative options on Commonwealth: https://commonwealth.im/stargaze/discussion/9774-listing-fee-change