The current assumption here is that there’s a large untapped market that can’t accumulate AURA due to low liquidity, and these limits orders will be quickly eaten up by hungry whales that can’t wait to buy in. However, it could conversely be argued that the current price action is due in part to low liquidity, and that the true price of AURA, given sufficient liquidity, where real demand is, is something far below current price. The market might also nuke again tomorrow, all demand everywhere evaporates, in which case these sell walls may then up being true walls, suppressing price while never being touched. And if they aren’t hit, then you end up with the same liquidity and expense issues as before.
Market forces are pretty hard to model, and it’s generally not a great idea to mess with price discovery. The pricing of the limit orders may also signal to the market that we believe X to be a fair price for AURA, whether that’s true or not, and cause price to be rangebound in that area for some time.
If immediate cash in hand is the goal, you can just sell at the current market price, rather than at some sort of upper cap. However, tanking the market with a large sale isn’t ideal either, of course. I personally think it’s much cleaner to have a gradual sell program, where X number of tokens are sold continuously, at market price, at known dates and times. Or alternatively, grant these tokens to certain departments, X for engineering, X for BD, etc., and sell as needed, at market price, once the expenses are incurred, similar to what we’ve been doing for AIP-1.
While the ideal solution would optimize for both liquidity and value, the two goals may not necessarily be complementary. In my opinion, liquidity doesn’t need to be rushed. There’s no guarantee that more tokens on markets released in one block will improve liquidity. One whale might just accumulate the entire limit order and sit on it. I believe liquidity will naturally improve over time, through emissions programs, sales, or otherwise. And early AURA believers will be the beneficiaries of this.
All that being said, haha, I’m still in favor of the proposal even if it stands as is. It’s simply better than doing nothing, and I don’t see any other proposals upcoming that are tackling this issue.