[Bankless Academy] S6 Budget Request

[Ornella]

Title: [Bankless Academy] S6 Budget Request

Team: Tetranome #1965, DidierKrux.eth #6120, iSpeakNerd.eth #6969, OrnellaWeb3 #1111

Date Created: 10/12/2022

Date Posted: 10/14/2022

SUMMARY

The Bankless Academy project would like to request funding for continuing its operations into Season 6, where the team will be focused on execution, growth, and partnerships with external projects.

SEASON 5 ACHIEVEMENTS & ACTIVITIES

New Feature: Academy Badges as on-chain sybil-resistant knowledge credentials, powered by MintKudos, and protected by Gitcoin Passport

Explorers can directly prove their uniqueness, claim their Academy Badges, and have on-chain proof of lesson completion.

More than 450 Academy Badges have been claimed during the first week of the launch. For more detail, you can learn more here.

Launch of our 1st white-label partner: HumanDAO Academy, powered by Bankless Academy

The humanDAO Community has leveraged our infrastructure to create its web3 learning platform.

Public release of our 1st Sponsored Lesson: DEX Aggregators, co-built with the 1inch Foundation

After two months of collaborative work, DEX Aggregators has been shipped successfully.

Whitelisting of $BANK Token on 1inch

At the end of our DEX Aggregators lesson, Explorers must complete a quest that involves swapping any token in exchange for $BANK.

To help users have the best experience, 1inch whitelisted the BANK token for us. It’s now possible to trade BANK without manually adding the token address.

Creation of BanklessDAO Governance Lesson

We’ve created a Governance lesson to educate the web3 space on the topic. This also serves the purpose of being an Onboarding Tool for BanklessDAO. The launch is programmed for the first week of Season 6.

Approval of our Optimism Grant Proposal with 95,75% support

During Season 6, we’ll build our Layer 2 Lesson thanks to Optimism.

Approved as a verified project on GIVETH

We’re LIVE on the platform receiving donations.

S5 Lesson Completions: 992 (considering August, September, mid-October)

We’ve reached a total of 14,836 lesson completions to date.

Earned media exposure for the Bankless Brand through collaborations with 1inch and humanDAO

The Bankless ecosystem as a whole has gained significant exposure thanks to the audience reach of our partners.

Real Life Use Case by the University of De Haag, The Netherlands

Students of the Blockchain Minor Course have actively taken our lessons during their classes. For Season 6, we’ll be working on more activities together. These include Guest Lectures, Twitter Spaces, Feedback Cohorts, and Level Up Learning Sessions.

Our stats reflect the growth of the project, with Explorers visiting us from the following territories:

Grown our Online Community on gm.xyz and Twitter

• gm.xyz: 944 Explorers, +169% growth
• Twitter: 2,927 Explorers, +30% growth
• More than +190K impressions from August 7th until today, October 14th, 2022.

Website Upgrade

We have launched a new look & feel for the Explore Lessons homepage with the following upgrades:

indicate when a lesson has been completed, you can directly join the Community discussion for each one

• Each lesson now indicates whether it has been completed or not.
• The Discussion button takes you directly to the Explorer Community for that specific lesson on gm.xyz.
• The Review/Resume lesson button takes you to where you left off on that specific lesson.

SEASON 6 PLANS AND SUCCESS METRICS

Our focus for Season 6 will be on the following:

• Optimisation of content pipeline/team to allow for faster lesson production.
• Creation of Feedback Cohorts
• Identifying and Defining our Community through User Research
• Creation and/or Launch of three new Academy Curriculum lessons and one Onboarding lesson for BanklessDAO:
  • Blockchains Layer 1
  • Blockchains Layer 2
  • Going Bankless
  • BanklessDAO Onboarding/Governance Lesson
• Onboarding a new white-label partner
• Onboarding a new Sponsor and/or receiving support from Grants
• Bankless Academy LIVE Education Experience
• Create a dashboard containing more detailed metrics
• Allow users to subscribe to upcoming lessons

Proposed Key Performance Indicators

Whitelabel or Grants Requests Approved

• Current: 1 New Grant Request Approved by Optimism Foundation (S5 Goal: 1 )
• S6 Goal: 1 New White-label Partner or Grant Request Approved

Lesson Completions

• Current: 14,830 as of October 14th, 2022 (S5 Goal: 14,006 )
• Season 6 Lesson Goal: Increase our monthly lesson completion average by 20% to 400,
  based on the 6-month average. Current average: 333 lessons per/month.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Salaried Roles

Lead Developer @ 20h/week

Lead Designer + Biz Dev @ 20h/week

Content Director @ 20h/week

Community Manager + Marketing @ 20h/week

Total Role Funding

80 hours / week x 13 weeks x 1000 BANK / hour = 1,040,000 BANK

Tools & Fixed Costs

Web Hosting (Vercel), database (Digital Ocean), Zoom, Tally, Descript, Grammarly, newsletter.

60,000 BANK

BanklessDAO Native Team Building - Bountied Tasks

User Research 120,000 BANK

Illustration 100,000 BANK

Content Editing 110,000 BANK

Total Estimation for S6

1,430,000 BANK

Do you approve Bankless Academy’s budget request proposal?

• Yes
• No, will comment on my reasons below.

[ernest_of_gaia]

Proposals need polls? looking good!!

[thinkDecade]

Academy looking good.

[CryptoReuMD]

This is great, looking forward

[Ornella]

Thank you for the comments and support. I understand that if we are a project that has already been funded, we do not need to set up a poll. If this has changed, please let me know where I can find out more, as it is not clear now.

[Ornella]

Thank you for your support.

[Ornella]

Thank you for your support.

[Ornella]

Thank you for your feedback and support.

[snazzx]

Impressive progress! I spent a while going down a rabbithole of all the links you’ve shared (the static screenshots didn’t tell the whole story), and I created a card for the proposal here which should be a good high level / interactive view of all the stuff you all have already accomplished.

[raybankless.eth]

great accomplishments. especially 1INCH and HumanDAO are my favs.

i thought the project grants were seasonal and we have to get voted every season.

[links]

Hey Bankless Academy team, great progress!

I’m your Grants Committee Reviewer, and my big issue with this project proposal is that the budget is ~500,000 BANK higher than your S5 proposal. Most of this seems to be coming from increased team hours.

I’m not comfortable with this. Bankless Academy has been getting grants regularly every 3 months from BanklessDAO (plus milestone-based bonuses). You’ve had a ton of support from the DAO, and with this proposal you’re asking the DAO to effectively pay 2 of your members for full-time work on this project.

This project is over a year old. Most of your contributors have been working on it 20 hours/week for ~9 months. You have been gathering revenue from other sources including grants and white-label clients. Is it really setting up the project for success for bDAO to pay for full-time roles? Does it help your team become self-sovereign? Does it help us pursue our mission?

I don’t believe so. I think you’d continue to work on this project without that additional 500K BANK, and that BANK could be used to spin up a whole new project which helps additional contributors become self-sovereign.

I’m not comfortable approving this budget for seasonal spending at this time. I would ask that you cut the team hours down to 20/week max. If you’re working on this full time, I think you should be paying for that time from other revenue sources.

Thanks!

[Tetranome]

Hi @links, I believe Didier spoke to GC during yesterday’s open call, but we’ve had a team discussion on this and will be adapting our ask to be closer to that of S5.
We will be capping Didier and my BANK compensation at max 20h/week which will lower our total S6 ask to 1.43M BANK. We will be able to make up for this difference through other grants streams to continue work.

To answer your questions:

Right now we are working to balance growth and budget. We have product/market fit.
Academy is at the point where it needs increased content production, site functionality, and marketing initiatives to attract more users (progress on the Bankless mission) and sponsors (project sustainability).
I’m aware we both have different stances on fewer people working more hours, but because our experience is that this has been an ingredient to our success, we will continue this strategy to achieve this growth/budget balance. However, as the funding is coming from an environment where working full-time isn’t the norm, and because we agree we can achieve self-sovereignty through other means, we won’t ask the DAO to pay for it.

We want to continue to give bDAO return on investment via initiatives like our free project/guild whitelabel offering and the WIP bDAO onboarding lesson, and we appreciate the continued open dialogue and feedback that challenges our relationship to grow. Thanks @links.

Ornella will be updating the main post shortly!

[links]

Hey @Tetranome thanks for taking the time to reply and reducing your ask! I do believe it will help the DAO and Bankless Academy.

@Tetranome

I’m aware we both have different stances on fewer people working more hours

Just to note I don’t believe there is any “right” way to run a project. All that matters is what works, and what you’re doing is working. Every project has different contexts and challenges, and that’s why taking a decentralized approach and pushing most decisions to where they have the best information is so intriguing.

Keep killing it, explorers

[Ornella]

Thanks, @links, for the profound feedback, and thanks, @Tetranome, for answering on behalf of the Academy Squad.

The proposal has been updated.

On we go, Explorers!

[ernest_of_gaia]

I need to get in touch with the academy, and just become aware of if you have any research talent needs. I want to understand what type of research skills is expected in contributors and such. So that we can make sure in Research Guild that we spend time focusing on teaching the skills most used in the dao.