First of all, my perspective is that bribe is highly parasitic unless its POL. Even if that, the treasury would be effectively selling its own native token for a direct financial return, which seems like an action that should be voted on just as if doing a DAO-DAO token swap.
In addition, it’s been seen in all AMMs where bribe is available that vast majority of the bribe is sold right away, especially for the native tokens of the AMMs that can further enhance the bribe rewards for the venal.
The same can be said about using $COW directly as incentives to LPs. Although, there is a higher chance that those LPs might intentionally accumulate $COW as they see the potential of future value appreciation in it. Yet, it’s still a slippery slope in terms of spending native tokens getting mercenary LPs.
Then the question should be why $COW feels the need to incentivize LPs, especially after time and time again it has become crystal clear that most liquidity has been exit liquidity for $COW farmers and other holders. If we keep going down this route, it will likely become a vicious circle spiraling downwards.
Given the above, I’d say
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Put a full stop on the $COW incentive, and let the market find its own way and price the token accordingly. As a small cap token, it’s natural to have less liquidity compared with the mid and large cap because the trading volume / demand does not require as much. It is what we see in Curve/Balancer, where most of the liquidity just idles, and the incentives go to waste. Once the demand picks up, the volatility is the price that the traders have to pay for the potential lucrative upside.
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At the same time, deploy unincentivized liquidity on Uni V3 and use concentrated liquidity feature to offset the negative impact from limited liquidity sources.