To my reckoning, a considerable amount of friction arises from the fact that currently the ten-month vesting period is only triggered by the act of claiming itself, rather than by one’s actual participation in the rewarding activity.
This effectively requires users to either claim on a semi-regular basis—at a non-trivial cost per interaction—or else to leave their rightfully-earned SOV on the table until such time as it actually becomes economically-viable to do so, which then further delays the onset of that vesting process.
Thus, the ten-month vesting schedule effectively imposes a ‘cliff’ on only non-whale holders, inversely proportional to their individual selling power; or else continually forces the liquidation of their rBTC via exorbitant transaction fees which must then be recouped—by immediately offloading SOV, either for rBTC or XUSD, at an increasingly lopsided price whose downtrend is only liable to accelerate as a result of said aforementioned, artificial and asymmetric selling-pressure. Indeed: the very mechanism designed to safeguard SOV’s price, through this particular implementation, perversely incentivises selling SOV.
To those low-time-preferenced lenders and liquidity-providers whose intention (as mine) has always been to simply re-stake their SOV at every available opportunity, being penalised in this fashion for actions which ultimately promote not only the health of SOV but also the prosperity of Sovryn entire—as already implicit in the very existence of such vesting schedule—seems fundamentally and self-evidently misaligned to the long-term interests of the protocol.
I therefore tentatively submit a twofold (if by no means comprehensive) remedy:-
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Allow users at the instant of claiming SOV to choose between either a ‘passive’ vesting contract of shorter (say, five months’—or even, as per @Martin_Adriaan, zero) duration, or else an ‘active’ staking contract of minimum twelve months’ duration but subject to slashing—albeit still, for its relative simplicity, substantially cheaper to initialise;
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Once per month: allow all ‘non-dust’ protocol rewards to be instantly converted to SOV and then automatically re-staked for another twelve months, at no cost to the user.
Of course, I’m no armchair-economist, fintech-analyst nor blockchain-specialist and so the above critique and its proposed solution may [will, inevitably] lack rigour: I accordingly invite others of greater technical and fiscal acumen (@Light; @dseroy, perhaps) to either confirm or dismantle my underlying assumptions with all due diligence and despatch.