Protocol Access

This release implements a "protocol fee," which essentially:

• is a tax on AUM

• is levied continuously relative to an annualized target percentage (initially 25 bps)

• results in burning a corresponding amount of $MLN

Approach

The protocol fee is charged to a fund by minting new shares to an Enzyme Council-administered contract (ProtocolFeeReserveProxy). This occurs anytime that a fund:

• receives a new deposit

• have shares redeemed

• migrates to a new release or reconfigures to a new ComptrollerProxy (see "Fund Lifecycle" page)

This approach of minting shares rather than directly collecting $MLN or other assets was thoroughly vetted and resulted in the least user friction, leanest architecture, and highest reliability.

It does, however, come with the drawback that the Council-administered ProtocolFeeReserveProxy continuously receives shares from n funds, which then need to somehow be converted to $MLN to be burned. Doing this manually via shares redemptions would be work-intensive, cost-inefficient (i.e., gas for redemptions and swaps), and in some cases not even possible (e.g., funds with all value locked in external positions).

To optimise the ease of protocol access and of passively collecting $MLN, this release uses an Auto-Access mechanism:

Protocol shares are minted at an inflated rate (e.g., 50 bps) above the effective target access rate (e.g., 25 bps). Funds can access the protocol with $MLN to pay the target rate and avoid being penalised.

A core configuration option is also provided that allows funds to automatically access protocol fee shares whenever they are collected. If setAutoProtocolFeeSharesBuyback() is toggled on in the fund's ComptrollerProxy, then it will attempt to use the $MLN available in the the VaultProxy to atomically access the full amount of protocol fee shares collected (during deposit and shares redemption actions).

Contracts

In order to implement this mechanism, two decoupled contracts with different lifespans and separate concerns are used in tandem:

• ProtocolFeeTracker is a non-upgradable, release-level contract that handles state and logic related to tracking the amount of shares that each fund owes at any moment in time

• ProtocolFeeReserveProxy is an upgradable, persistent contract that serves as the repository to which protocol fee shares are minted, and its current ProtocolFeeReserveLib handles logic for how those shares can be acted upon, i.e., bought back at a discount by the fund in exchange for $MLN

Importantly, all state-changing actions upon VaultProxy $MLN holdings (i.e., burn) and shares (i.e., mint and burn) are executed by the VaultProxy rather than via these external contracts:

• the ProtocolFeeTracker does not have permission to call a minting function on the VaultProxy

• the ProtocolFeeReserve does not have permission to call a burning function on the VaultProxy

• the ProtocolFeeReserve does not actually receive and burn its own $MLN, this is handled inside of the VaultProxy

The ProtocolFeeTracker and ProtocolFeeReserve simply provide the VaultProxy with the data it needs handle minting and burning.

This works because the ProtocolFeeTrakcer and ProtocolFeeReserve operate in complete trust of the VaultProxy, and this pattern keeps logic simple and clean, does not expose VaultProxy functions to additional state-changing callers, and is gas efficient.