There are a good number of people who lease Hive Power to Precious for a great rate of return. Most of them are members of SGS and currently all of our lease agreements are on handshake deals. It works great most of the time, but sometimes it doesn’t. The basic terms of our leases are 13.5% APR paid weekly in advance with a minimum of 5000 Hive Power leased...though there is a little bit of assumed etiquette that goes along with this type of deal.
Firstly, our leases are managed manually by yours truly. We are a fairly small and niche community with a modest membership so it has never really been worth the extra development and support to try and automate the weekly payments or monitor the delegations. At SGS that is kind of our style because we’re typically generous by nature and like to foster goodwill. I believe that the handshake deals we make are a good, visible example of our communities culture.
However, there are times when one of our lessors decides they need to pull their lease and that is totally OK. This is where the etiquette comes in though. Most people will give us a heads up that they need to pull the lease and we co-ordinate the timing of the un-delegation and the final payment balance. Often there is someone waiting in the wings to lease fresh power to us so we can sometimes co-ordinate that too and keep a stable HP to curate with. This gives our community a pretty seamless experience and often they don’t even notice the change.
Other times though, people just pull power with no notice and we eventually realise our power has dropped. I then go back to find out who, where and when it dropped. That’s annoying, but it’s even more annoying when power gets pulled just AFTER the Weekly Delegation Payment has gone out. That payment is paid in advance so this is just a straight up breach of goodwill and trust. People who do that and don’t make good get remembered.
To be fair our members are usually really good and they understand and respect what our curation project does for the SGS community. It’s usually people outside of our community that we have a problem with.
Unfortunately we aren’t always able to source the spare Hive Power to lease from within our SGS membership so we have to go outside. While I am reluctant to add more management overhead maybe it’s time to bring in a second, lower APR for non-members and introduce some additional terms on those agreements to protect the communities interests. What do people think?