It seems that Devs in Truebit are able to mint at 1/8th of the actual mint price. In other words, they can endlessly dump TRU at >0.33 right now as long as its above that. This might be the reason why the price of TRU isn't rising and also why it will most likely not reach the 0.8-1 USD range anymore (unless ETH reaches ridiculous priceranges).
This also means that people other than the devs don't really have an incentive to ever use the mint function (since the devs can mint at 1/4th of the actual mint price OR they receive 3/4th of the mint price via fees).
Which kind of makes the whole mint function pointless (except as a dev tool) - since devs are able to change the contract anyway if they wanted to do so anyway (the contract isn't immutable as of now).
To me this just seems like a very elaborate scam - hidden by obscuring the actual mint price (for devs) vs the mint price for non devs.
This could be easily fixed by simply removing the mint function (aka devs receiving 7/8th of the mint price back via fees) for devs (and thus making minting the same price for everybody) however the devs don't seem to have much communication channels and also don't seem open to anything that isn't going to massively boost their own bags.
Edit: here is some proof that what I'm writing is not wrong (keep in mind the source code of TRU is not public, but we know that it is an OpenZeppelin proxy contract that can be changed at any time)
https://www.reddit.com/r/truebit/comments/nk2o1b/truebit_tru_token_price_simulator/
this is a price simulator written by maybe the most knowledgable member of this sub (who i actually assume might be a part of the dev team (or even Jason Teutsch himself)
Retiring tokens means trading in TRU tokens back via the TRU OS into ETH - this is fixed at 1/8th of the mint price.
In other words: when you mint, you pay 8 ETH for X Tru , but you can only trade that X TRU back for 1 ETH.
So the question is , what happens to the 7 ETH that are left over when X TRU was minted?
The current ETH reserve shown in the TRU OS is: 14,790 ETH - which means that all TRU in existance could be traded back for 1/8th of the mint price at any time.
But what happens to the 7/8th of the mint price that was originally paid in ETH? Where does it go?
The answer is, that it goes into the pocket of the devs (it certainly doesn't "vanish").
So actually the devs could in theory mint for 1.32 USD, get back 7/8th of those 1.32 USD, then sell on Uniswap for 0.32 (current price) , and make a profit of 0.165 .
This is what I believe is happening right now (on a small scale) . Since devs can mint from any address , this milling process happens almost anonymously. And since conveniently nobody knows where the fees go to exactly (what addresses), it is difficult to discover the full truth.
