Legacy: Ages & Epochs
Update
TL;DR: New rewards program, refer to the Rewards section.
Previously, when only Morpho Optimizers existed, the reward emission was done at the Morpho Optimizers level, by using the protocol. Following the launch of Morpho (formerly known as Morpho Blue), governance decided to gradually shift rewards from Morpho Optimizers to Morpho.
As per the Morpho DAO votes, the majority of MORPHO tokens that are now emitted are in favor of Morpho. Additionally, other contributors, market creators, and curators have chosen to incentivize certain markets for bootstrapping purposes. As a result, we have introduced a comprehensive rewards section in the documentation.
Motivation
Usually, DeFi protocols schedule emissions and hardcode their rewards system years in advance. This is not the case with Morpho. We believe that Morpho’s needs will quickly evolve and that a long-term emission schedule may turn out to be too rigid.
Thus, Morpho is organized in ages. An age lasts around three months and sets new rules for rewards emissions according to the protocol's needs.
Each age is subdivided into smaller periods named epochs. Epochs are checkpoints in the age where users can claim rewards (e.g., with a Merkle tree drop).
How it worked
TLDR: amounts are calculated offchain but verified onchain.
Once the community has decided on rules for a 3-month age, anyone can compute the rewards earned by every user at each epoch. For example, one could look at emitted events to rebuild the state of a user in Typescript. We open-sourced a script for age calculations.
With the script, one can compute a Merkle tree tracking the rewards of each user. The root of the tree is unique to the distribution and enables a trustless, onchain verification of the distribution. Here are the Merkle trees for the different epochs obtained when running this script.
The root of the tree is then put in the Rewards Distributor smart contract. When claiming their tokens, users interact with the contract which verifies if it corresponds to the tree.
Rewards emission across ages
Starting from Age 3, a vote is submitted before the beginning of each age to decide the allotment of MORPHO tokens repartitions that will be distributed. Refer to the following documentation to see what has been chosen in the past and for the current age.