This proposal suggests retaining a major portion of the OP allocated to The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO) as return on investment and to put these funds towards building a better future for the new DAO.
Background:
The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO) was granted 70,395 OP in order to run a marketing campaign for Optimism DAO in August 2023. More info ([FINAL] BanklessDAO’s Global Campaign to spread the Optimistic vision - ARCHIVED & OLD Missions - Optimism Collective). Before the start of the whole thing there was an internal agreement between the participating groups on distribution of funds which is separate from the budget listed in the proposal on the optimism forum.
The campaign was successfully delivered by these groups and these funds which were locked for 1 year have now been released into the multisig of the former BanklessDAO. I’d like to take a moment here to appreciate and thank everyone involved in this campaign. It was one of the largest successful decentralized coordination efforts I have seen anywhere in crypto.
Motivation:
For reasons listed by the multi-sig here, the DAO moved away from its former brand, funding model and org structure. Today, The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO), is no longer the same DAO. At the same time the groups which participated in this campaign are either no longer active or have completely rebranded themselves adding no value to the current state of affairs at the DAO.
The work done by all the groups was inside the scope of their original purpose. In other words, these groups did not need to hire or train talent in order to deliver the campaign results but could leverage existing resources and simply reassign tasks for them. Thus there were minimal to no extra costs.
How did these groups learn to self-organise and deliver campaigns for a third party? Where did they find their talent? Practise and develop their skills?
The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO), had invested 10,786,000 BANK in season 9 and 45,358,787 BANK or 4.5% of the total supply into these groups since inception. The result of this investment was that these groups learnt how to coordinate and deliver a valuable end product for a large DAO such as optimism.
According to the budget breakdown created by the campaign team (here) and comparing it to former BANK distributions as well as RPGF3 compensation received by these groups, we see that most of the work that was done was compensated already by RPGF3 as well as BANK [link]
One of the main reasons why The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO) was unsustainable was because the treasury was being overdrained for the amount of work people were showing against it. Another reason is that many groups profited significantly by selling their products or services but the DAO did not see any significant returns from this to make its operations sustainable.
“By compensating groups who have already been compensated and not seeking an ROI seems to replicate the same behaviour we tried to move away from”
Suggestion for Next Steps
Hence my suggestion is to only compensate groups or individuals who have either been undercompensated or not compensated at all for the work that has been done.
The DAO (formerly known as BanklessDAO) should retain the rest of the OP as return on investment for the 45M BANK tokens it used to fund these groups and use these funds to build a better DAO (for example make community spaces for freedom-seeking changemakers)
Jenga help me understand this in the context of the expectations of the contributors who worked on the campaign? If I recall correctly, this campaign was your idea, the proposal was scoped, completed, and now you’re saying folks shouldn’t be paid the OP cuz it overlaps with BANK payments?
As I have also pointed out in the table, many folks have been paid OP as part of RPGF3, which is more than what was budgeted. At the same time I have made it clear that some folks have not been paid OP as part of RPGF3
RPGF3 and the Intents were not correlated except that Optimism asked that we apply to RPGF3 based upon our Intents work. Because people were paid as part of RPGF3 should not matter in the least.
I don’t understand why it should not matter? RPGF3 was paid out as compensation for actual work which was done, it’s not a donation or a gift. Were the tokens received as RPGF3 not sent to the contributors?
I liked @Jengajojo’s post because I thought it brought up a good discussion, and I think it’s important to have these kinds of discussions.
I will preface this by saying I know very little about what went down in the group, I am mainly just looking at the facts that @Jengajojo presented. From what I understand (correct if I am wrong):
Members of the DAO ran a marketing campaign for OP.
the DAO paid these members ~10M BANK to run this campaign.
the members were also paid by OP via RetroPGF.
the DAO didn’t see any ROI on this.
If those facts are true, then I think @Jengajojo brings up a good point - why shouldn’t the DAO retain any of those OP tokens? The efforts wouldn’t be possible without the DAO.
Furthermore, the Transition Council has also asked that DAO groups like the Marketing Department should return funds to the DAO - wouldn’t these funds be included?
Of course I am CERTAIN I am missing information, so if someone could answer my two questions above I’m also sure we can all come to an agreeable solution. That’s what decentralized governance is all about.
I don’t think we spent 10M BANK to pay contributors for the OP campaign
In the Marketing Department, since it was not right for contributors such as designers and copy writers to wait a year for compensation, we used the season budget and executed the campaign well within the season budget without asking more .
And it was agreed that BANK payment and OP payment both would be made to contributors and hence we got very talented people to execute such a big campaign effectively.
Also in terms of value 1BANK and 1 OP token were not the same a year back and are still not the same.
We got people to contribute to deliver the campaign, only because people did expect compensation in OP or else as the Main campaign coordinator it would have been impossible to deliver this successfully in the first try and keep up the consistency for 3 MONTHS.
The campaign was run with the expectation that contributors would be paid OP for their work. It’s that simple. I don’t care about BANK payments to contributors or OP to the DAO in this instance because the agreed-upon bargain was different and clear from the outset. You may think this can be parsed different ways, but the only good-faith argument is that contributors expected to be paid OP tokens for this work as provided for in the proposal and budget.
As to 2:
These funds were earmarked for contributors from the outset. The MD etc at best is a pass-through entity but has no claim to these tokens nor would it even if the reorg wasn’t in progress.
The Intents proposal contained the terms of its compensation. To say some external compensation mechanism outside of that document, whether RPGF3 or BANK payments, now supplants that is simply BS revisionism – it was NOT the terms of the deal under which the org units agreed to work on the Intents proposal. For example, if I knew that there would be advocates for offsetting these payments, I wouldn’t have written and/or coordinated the shipping of four newsletters and four separate articles for the campaign, let alone advocated for the campaign in general. What shit lol
“The Optimism Collective is excited to announce the third round of RetroPGF. This fall, 30 million OP will be distributed to builders, creators, and educators who have provided positive impact to the Optimism Collective”
further it specifies intent based preference
" RetroPGF 3 will distribute 30 million OP tokens to reward contributions that have supported the development and adoption of Optimism. Work may be nominated in four categories:
OP Stack: Work that enhanced the efficiency, security, resilience and awareness of the OP Stack
Collective Governance: Work that provided impact to governance participants of the Optimism Collective, or helped bring new governance participants into the Collective
Developer Ecosystem: Work that provided impact to application developers in the Optimism Collective, or helped bring new developers into the Collective.
End User Experience & Adoption: Work that provided impact to end users in the Optimism Collective, or helped bring new end users into the Collective"
This announcement was live even before the proposal went to an onchain vote. Now to claim that RPGF3 compensation is outside the terms of the proposal would also be saying that groups expected only the compensation from the main Optimism proposal and not from RPGF. In order to receive compensation RPGF3, groups had to apply for the round which everyone did.
The work was done w/in the scope of the proposal based upon the budget in the proposal. The budget did not reference BANK or RPGF3 as potential offsets. RPGF3 is in addition to Intents compensation, not in lieu of. Intents was a program to proactively identify and reward contributions. RPGF is to do that retroactively. They are not the same. Conflation of the two is disingenuous at best, and misleading for sure
I understand your point that the Intents proposal & RPGF3 are distinct mechanisms with different purposes—Intents being proactive and RPGF3 being retroactive. However, the fact that contributors applied for & received RPGF3 compensation based on their work for Op does matter when we are discussing the overall compensation package
While the original proposal may not have explicitly mentioned RPGF3, its important to consider that RPGF3 was an expected avenue for compensation that was publicly known and available before the proposal went to an on-chain vote. This means contributors likely anticipated n factored in RPGF3 rewards as part of their overall compensation for the work they did, If we ignore the RPGF3 rewards now, we risk double-compensating for the same work, which could create a precedent of inefficient fund allocation within the DAO. This isn’t about revising the terms of the original deal but rather ensuring we have a holistic view of how contributors were compensated. While building the new DAO we should want to see a bigger piture to work more on sustainability of the whole DAO & that means considering all sources of compensation, both proactive and retroactive.
As far as I can see, any RPGF funding received by the DAO and its sub-orgs is entirely separate from the “S4 Intent 3: Spread Awareness of the Optimistic Vision”. Work done within scope of the Intent should be compensated as set forth in the aforementioned budget.
It is NOT safe to assume that “contributors likely anticipated n factored in RPGF3 rewards as part of their overall compensation”. We can NOT make changes to a predetermined allocation of tokens. If the outcome here is that some people are over-compensated, the solution is to change the process to avoid mistakes like this in the future.
Overall the total amount of compensation is relatively small to the DAO compared to what it means to the contributors, the majority of whom have poured their hearts and souls into this organisation only to have any semblance of return on their time and investment continually ripped from their hands. I would vote NO on this proposal, and I fear if it was to pass it would drive many people away from the org.
I just couldn’t disagree more. your words are compelling as a narrative about being holistic and sustainable, but to be totally clear, it’s def proposing to revise the terms of the original deal and in doing so creates a less sustainable org. And to assume that average contributors were factoring in RPGF3, ser. but yeah man to NF’s point, if this is the kind of MS oversight we get ‘to sustain the DAO’ wow no thanks
