Title: Rewarding Season 0 Active Community Members
Original Conversation: Recorded Discord Discussion
Authors: @frogmonkee
Date: 6/2/21
Supporters: Yves, Above Average Joe,Tgriffith3433
First forum post:
SUMMARY
In order to retain talent and say thank you to everyone that has worked these past four weeks, this proposal will retroactively distribute 11.1 million $BANK based on a fair voting method available to any DAO member.
BACKGROUND
On Sunday, Joe made this post on forums yesterday, proposing a method to back pay all the valued community members and their contributions to the DAO. Shortly afterwards, people started filing into voice channels to discuss, and the conversation went on for hours.
This conversation was fated to happen as soon as the DAO was created. For four weeks, community members have lifted the DAO and carried it step by step. As time went on, this enthusiasm turned into concern about sustainability. The market had taken a dump and the hours everyone was putting in netted zero income.
From quiet whispers, Joe brought this topic in the limelight. We had a healthy discussion that reinforced the DAO’s ability to ideate and work through difficult problems as a collective.
MOTIVATION
The motivation of this specific proposal is to retroactively gift $BANK to valuable community members from Season 0. Typically, companies don’t spend money they don’t have, and we fall squarely into that category. But, we need to give some reward, or we will inevitably lose talent that feels unappreciated.
That’s why, for this season alone, we propose treating $BANK as equity and not a wage. Something like this will most likely never happen again,
SPECIFICATION
To distribute $BANK, four questions came up as the most important:
- Who will receive $BANK?
- How much $BANK will they receive?
- How will they receive $BANK?
- When will they receive $BANK?
Who will receive $BANK?
This is the trickiest question, isn’t it? Ideally, we want to be as inclusive as possible, but also support informed decision making and not a popularity contest.
The solution here is anyone with a Level 1 tag and Guild tag in Discord. Meaning, and DAO member that is part of at least one guild. With enough lead time and proper communication, members that want to participate can join a Guild if they have not already.
How much $BANK will they receive?
Collectively, a pool of 11,111,111 $BANK will be allocated. This number accounts to the monthly drip of $BANK we get from the BanklessDAO Treasury. 400M $BANK / 36 months = 11.1M $BANK per month.
At the time of this proposal, 4 weeks have passed since BanklessDAO has started. This is the only non-arbitrary that makes sense to everyone.
How will they receive $BANK?
Using Coordinape. Coordinape is a P2P budget management tool that grew out of Yearn Finance. This is explained further below.
When will they receive $BANK?
Once Coordinape is implemented, we will start a one week vote period with a trial amount of 1M $BANK. If this trial is successful, defined by an >80% satisfaction rate among surveyed members, the process will repeat with the remaining $BANK.
What is Coordinape?
Coordinape is central to this proposal. Coordinape was a project spun out from Yearn Finance. (For reference, Yearn’s governing DAO is a few steps ahead of BanklessDAO, but there are many parallels.) You can think of Coordinape as a peer to peer payroll management system. It’s broader than that, but for our purposes, it works.
The essence of Coordinape is allowing your peers to determine your salary. The process works as such:
- Each member is given 1000 GIVE tokens. Each token represents a proportional share of the salary pool (11.1M $BANK)
- Members can gift (or not) GIVE tokens to people they think deserve some share of the pool.
- After a voting period, all the unallocated GIVE tokens are burned. The remaining number of tokens represents a proportional piece of the salary pool, and members are programmatically paid their share based on the number of tokens they’ve received.
The simple premise is that if you ask everyone in the community who is doing good work, their collective answers will give a good sense of where the value is and who should be most rewarded. Over time, this also provides valuable insights for the DAO about what kinds of work is prioritized, what the community finds most valuable, and who are the key contributors in different areas.
You can learn more about Coordinape by reading their Medium announcement post, Docs, and Youtube demo.
How would this work?
Let’s tie all these topics back together. We’re proposing that:
- Using Coordinape, we will let DAO members vote on how 1M $BANK will be allocated to their peers.
- Any DAO member that has at least 35K $BANK and a Guild tag is eligible to claim GIVE tokens.
- Over a one week period, we will all be able to claim their tokens and allocate them to any other DAO member
- After the voting period, the 1M $BANK will be distributed proportionally to the number of tokens they’ve received.
- Participants will fill out a survey evaluating their satisfaction with their payout.
- If satisfaction > 80%, we repeat the process with the remaining 10.111M $BANK.
For a more concrete timeline, consider:
- Day 1: Voting opens
- Day 7: Voting closes + 1M $BANK is distributed
- Day 8: Survey form goes out
- Day 15: Survey closes
- Day 16: If >80% then voting opens
- Day 23: Voting closes and 10.111M $BANK is distributed
If we receive a <80% satisfaction rate, we will need to reevaluate.
Next Steps
- Approve the proposal on Snapshot budget (11.1M)
- Onboard to Coordinape
- Begin a one week voting period
- Distribute funds
- Take a survey
- Begin a one week voting period
- Distribute funds
FAQ:
Wait! This isn’t sustainable!
- Indeed. That is why this proposal is a one-off. If we find ourselves in this position a month from now, we will have failed.
How do we know if this model will work?
- We don’t. That’s part of the great blockchain experiment. We’re inventing new ways to distribute money in a fairer manner. But both Sushiswap and Gitcoin use Coordinape, so there is some social proof.
What about members that like to work solo?
- These people will slip through the cracks. Right now, the community is small enough that we can recognize and vouch for these members. Also, Coordinape has a “regift” feature where members that were overcompensated can redistribute. This is not a great solution, but Coordinape is working on this problem.
If we give away 11.1M $BANK, won’t we have 0 BANK for next month?
- The community treasury starts with 50M BANK. This 11.1M doesn’t touch that pool.
- Move to snapshot
- Make minor changes
- Make major changes
