Add incentives (bribes)

This guide is for projects, DAOs, and anyone who wants more liquidity for a particular pool. By adding an incentive (often called a bribe), you reward voters for directing BARK emissions to your pool — which pulls in liquidity and tightens prices for your token.

If you're just here to swap or LP, you can skip this page.

Why add an incentive?

BARK emissions are the cheapest, deepest source of liquidity on BarkSwap — and voters decide where they go. An incentive is how you compete for those votes:

You deposit a reward (any token) on your pool's bribe contract for an epoch. Voters who back your pool that week split your incentive. In exchange, your pool wins more emissions → more LPs show up → your token gets deeper, more stable liquidity.

It's often dramatically cheaper to rent liquidity this way — paying voters a bribe — than to run your own liquidity-mining program.

Your bribe rewards the voters; their votes pull emissions — and liquidity — to your pool.

How to add an incentive

• Go to Incentivize (or Bribe) in the app.
• Pick the pool you want to incentivize.
• Choose the reward token and amount. This is what voters who back the pool will share.
• Approve the token (one-time) and confirm. Your incentive is now live for the epoch.

Voters see your incentive on the Votes screen and weigh it against the pool's fees when deciding where to point their power.

Tips for incentivizing effectively

• Match the incentive to the emissions you want. Voters chase rewards per vote, so your bribe competes against every other pool's fees and bribes. Watch what comparable pools offer.
• Be consistent. Liquidity follows reliable rewards. A one-off bribe brings a one-off bump; steady weekly incentives build lasting liquidity.
• Time it to the epoch. Incentives apply to the current epoch, which flips Thursday 00:00 UTC. Add yours early in the week so voters can factor it in.

The win-win

A good incentive program is positive-sum: you get deep liquidity at a known cost, voters earn your bribe, and LPs earn the extra emissions your pool attracts. That alignment is the whole idea behind ve(3,3).

Want to automate it?

Programmatic incentive management (scripting bribes each epoch) is a developer task — see the developer docs for contract-level details.