Onwards to Season 2

[frogmonkee]

Introduction

September 30th marks the end of Season 1 , giving us a bit over 5 weeks to plan, prep, and execute a specification for Season 2.

For a quick refresher on seasons:

Recapping Season 1

Season 1 was framed as a testing ground for what season could be. Guilds were new, coordination was prototypical, compensation had hardly been discussed, and governance was up in the air. In the 2 months since the launch of Season 1, we have made some incredible progress:

• Various guilds have spun up their own governance frameworks and roles (see Writers Guild)
• Guild roles have associated salaries and bounties continue to pile on
• Grants committee and project proposal workflows continue to solidify

Furthermore, our biggest priority was generating revenue, both on-chain and off-chain.

• Barring $BANK, our treasury is sitting at just over 90,000 USD in revenue. This does not include the most recent Metafactory drop, which will add at least another 30,000 USD at least.
• Most of our income has come through MF drops and NFT sales. Purely culture related
• There’s a good chance (market willing) we can end the season with 150,000 USD in revenue. Meanwhile, FWB is raising 10M USD with absolutely zero revenue. What kind of position does that put us in? (Much love to FWB, I’m a member myself.)

In short, we’re crushing our goals for Season 1. So let’s double down in Season 2.

BanklessDAO Season 2 - Electric Boogaloo

High level priorities

In a recent Season 2 brainstorming session, many of settled on three main prioirities for the upcoming season:

• Doubling down on revenue-generating activities
• Happiness and retention
• Guild-based objectives

Doubling down on revenue-generating activities

We have some solid POCs with various revenue generating activities

• Metafactory
• NFT Sales
• Media node sponsorships (UMA sponsorship)
• DAO to DAO services
• Software products
• BED Index

Our next step is to double down on these initiatives. Properly build out teams, source talent, set objectives, and scale. This means staffing squads with different guild reps (like BizDev), setting KPIs, prioritizing DAO support for these objectives, and scaling. Eventually, the squads on each initiative will be able to sustain themselves purely through the revenue they generated, from expenses to compensation without the DAO’s full support.

Generating revenue is particularly important because we can reinvest that into our #1 asset – Talent. It’s no secret that compensation is still a tricky topic. This leads nicely into our next topic.

Happiness and retention

This priority has a few different faces to it.

• User onboarding and engagement. The First Quest project is leading this charge. For now, Angyts, Behold, and Chrisf.crypto have done a great job of easing new members into the DAO/discord with the various First Quest activities, like #first-quest-membership, #first-quest-firehose, #first-quest-scholar, and #first-quest-guest-pass. Future iterations will see this expand to guild specific quests.
• Compensation. We’ll need to continually iterate on compensation. Right now, we have bounties and salaries for roles based on a 1,000 $BANK/hr benchmark, but we need to more innovative and fluid ways to compensation. Example could include using UMA’s KPI options or incorporating Coordinape. For example, see my projects proposal discussion under Budgeting on how to integrate KPIs.
• Full time employment: There’s been some discussion around hiring a handful of DAO members as full time employees. Members that are providing extremely high-value output that don’t fall into the typical project/role category. Throwing $BANK at them may not be the most effective method, but to retain their talent in the upcoming season, we may need to allocate a couple million $BANK to them. (More on this later.)

Guild specific objectives

Now that Guilds are largely self-sufficient in their operations - though some more than others - they should begin to set their own goals in order to better improve operations and find better ways to support the DAO.

These goals are supplemental to the DAO. In most cases, they should not supersede major projects that require guild support.

I’d urge all guilds to discuss this on their weekly meeting or hold a separate meeting altogether.

Ops and Governance

For Ops and Governance, there are two major changes and one minor change proposed:

1. (Major) Formalize the project proposal workflow presented in this forum post. Next steps would involve porting it over to Notion and modifying Discourse (forum) to reflect the new process
2. (Major) Replace the current BanklessDAO multisig signers (see under Community Treasury) with members elected through the DAO. Read more here.
3. (Minor) Formalize that the Grant’s Committee must release a forum post recapping their discussion after each week’s meeting along with reasoning as to why any proposal were rejected. Note that proposals that follow the project proposal workflow will most likely never be rejected.

Budgeting

Budgeting falls into three categories:

• Guild
• Seasonal Projects
• Grants Committee

Guild Budgeting

In season 1, we allocated roughly 380,000 BANK per Guild. Most of these multisigs are still flush with BANK, as guilds are still in the early stages of distributing BANK for roles and bounties. Going into Season 2, guilds should project their budgets based on:

• Roles held and expected salary
• Expenses (software)
• Miscellaneous bounties, both inside and outside the guild (suggested 75K)
• Small amount of BANK to bootstrap projects before rolling up to Grants Committee funding (suggested 100-150K)

BANK already in guild multisigs will count towards next season’s ask.

Seasonal Funding

Seasonal projects are initiatives that the BanklessDAO has collectively decided to focus resources towards. In the context of Season 2 planning, these are projects that have been thoroughly scoped and staffed and are requesting funding to last until the end of Season 2.

Such projects will likely include, but are not limited to:

• First Quest
• DEGEN
• Bounty Board
• Bankless Academy
• Podcast/Newsletter Incubator
• Merch Shop

With Season 2 down the road, all projects that expect funding for Season 2 must begin preparing their budgets.

Grants Committee

The GC started with 5M, with 1M allocated for Coordinape. Of the 4M, there is 1.7M remaining with a month left in the season. Given projects were slow to start, it’s likely that this upcoming season will require more in Grant Committee funding.

With roughly 11.11M BANK vested each month (33.33M for the season), a rough number of tripling the seasonal spend to 15M seems reasonable.

This would allow us to expand the Coordinape circle to monthly Coordinape rounds. To account for guest passes, I’d like to propose 1M BANK in coordinape per month, of which 1/3 is set aside for Guest Pass members. In other words, 2M over 3 months for Level 1 DAO members and 1M over 3 months for Guest Pass users. (Shoutout to @jameswmontgomery.eth for the idea).

In short:

• 15M total
• 2M in Coordinape distribution for Level 1
• 1M in Coordinape distribution for Guest Pass
• 12M remaining for projects
• Assumes that most projects are already funded

Next Steps

(Running out of steam here )

• Deliberate on DAO priorities
• Deliberate on ops/governance changes
• Formalize new Season 2 spec
• Plan guild budgets
• Plan project budgets
• Formalize Grants Committee budget
• Create 4 separate snapshots: (1) Season 2 Spec, (2) Seasonal Projects, (3) Guild Budget, and (4) Grants Committee budget

[TheMarvel]

Heck of an effort Frogmonkee. I know lots of talented folks got the concept and proposal but really appreciate your dedication and effort to drag it into this ez to read and understand form. Fan friggin tasting! TY

[Behold]

Incredible work as always Frog.

One thing I’d like to double click on is how we can build governance mechanisms to incentivize revenue generation.

[tommyolofsson]

Outstanding work as expected from you frog, I have a few comments below.

For the priorities I agree, but we also need to structure this. What’s the revenue split with the DAO for these projects? (How do we track this, where can we see the complete list etc)

The following is an example, possible to insert project X when reaching revenue. Provided our awesome Metafactory drops (great work), that project reasonably should have a treasury to reinvest. How do we account for this when considering funding? Does it make sense for the DAO to fund 100% of the costs while only receiving a part of profits? (This is of course provided DAO pays bounties and/or other remuneration for work done by the Squad)

Would we ask the project to also reinvest part of their revenue (non-DAO split)? This would make sense to me for everyone to have skin in the game. When we share revenues we should share investments. All this goes for Guilds as well, if 100% funded by the DAO and we get sponsors for a podcast, it would make sense to me that the DAO is compensated by % of that revenue and that another % is reinvested in the operations which would reduce BANK spend for the DAO.

Regarding happiness I agree to all of it, UMA KPI’s would be awesome. The hard part is to track the actual output of active individuals, we all see them in discord and meetings but if this is whats warrant for example a full time employment (FTE) we would run into the same problem as Coordinape does. It’s a large portion of social standing and not really output. Your networking skills in the DAO is probably more important than your work for Coordinape. I understand we might need FTE’s, but we need to find a reasonable way to handle these individuals that’s transparent. I think maybe collect them under Ops or similar to find a role with a transparent remuneration might be a way forward. I oppose any large one-off payments that’s not vested based on KPI’s (individual and DAO), I think we would be solving a longer term problem with short term solutions.

I think we should be scoping out what that first time FTE role is specified as and how the compensation compares to others active in the DAO. These FTE’s would not be able to get any other compensation I assume? (Both Coordinape and other roles should be excluded for example)

For Guilds it all makes sense, I don’t think we will see much of BANK remaining with these demand, likely is Coordinape for members of the remaining BANK since the upside of keeping it is non-existent.

Great work on clarifying the GC earlier and I like the caveat about most projects should be funded before but.

Please keep in mind when we allocated 5M to GC (I think it was 6M including Coordinape) and 5M to guilds with 0 allocation to seasonal projects for season 1. So for me to 3x the GC allocation does not make sense, the split might then be somewhere along 15M GC, let’s say Guilds grow by 50% to 7.5M, that would leave 10M to the Seasonal projects. Doesn’t this feel a bit off, provided we should double down on revenues?

I might think we could allocate more to our large projects at the start of the season. Provided there is projects asking for enough, in general I don’t think there will be enough talent to spin up basically the same amount of spend during the S2 period. So in general if we have a 100% for projects maybe the allocation should be 70/30 to seasonal projects and GC projects? After all GC projects should be started during season so their spend would likely not reach 100% during the first half or 2/3 of the season.

Again, great work!

[Kouros]

Regarding the Coordinape for Guest passes. 1 million in total seems like a lot considering that there are not too many Guest Passes holders actually making meaningful contributions. I would suggest instead that we award outstanding Guest Passes holders for their work with 35K BANK. I assume that these need to be nominated by Level 2 DAO members outlining the merits for this and then the DAO can vote to award it on a 1 to 1 basis.

[0x_Lucas]

First, awesome job @frogmonkee! Always appreciate your initiative. Second, I’m beyond stoked with how Season 1 has gone so far–great work to all the contributors. I think we’ve ironed out a lot of operational stuff and I’m very excited to carry this momentum into Season 2.

Some thoughts:

Season 2 Allocation

I’m generally in favor of increasing the seasonal BANK allocation. However, I’m conscious of two things:

1. Seasons are a fixed amount of time and there’s only so much we can distribute within that period, meaning there’s some degree of diminishing returns on the amount we distribute. Over the long run, the goal should be distributing less and less BANK every season (as we should be generating more & more value over time). Just worth noting

2. Going off the temp check and looking solely at the grants committee funding proposed (15M), it looks like we’d be on track for around ~21M BANK for Season 2 when factoring in projects and guilds. This is roughly 2% of the total supply in 3 months. We’re in the early stages and I agree that we should want to stimulate growth, but my concern here is around the liquidity issue and ensuring that we can support 21M BANK entering circulation----especially when a good amount will likely fall into the hands of full time contributors. With that, we should just make sure we have an agreed-upon game plan for liquidity if we substantially increase the Seasonal budget (even if it’s just do nothing!!).

Coordinape + Full Time Compensation

I don’t think we’re completely at the point where we can distribute non-BANK assets to full-time contributors just yet (getting very close though). Therefore we’re probably stuck with BANK-only for Season 2.

With that, there’s 2 Coordinape rounds that I think we should target: a seasonal one for all DAO members and another recurring one for Level 2/Contributors. The latter helps the full-time compensation issue as virtually anyone that’s “working full time” (or close to it) on the DAO has earned that tag. Don’t think this is the perfect solution, but it would be a step in the right direction! I’d propose we do these on a monthly basis (just fyi that we’re around ~60 contributors right now).

This + seasonal projects + grants + bounties + guild roles should be sufficient earning opportunities for any active members.

In terms of Guest Passes, this could easily fall under the Grants Committee to distribute as “scholarships” to those individuals that are going above and beyond. For reference, they could give out ~10 per season (350K BANK budget), putting it squarely into their normal grant allocations.

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Side note: This is the framework for how I’m starting to understand distribution categories:

• Seasonal Projects: >500K BANK
• Grants: 50K-499K BANK
• Bounties: <50k BANK

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Seasonal Funding

There’s an avenue where we could mitigate the overhead for seasonal project funding requests (and let them focus on building over the next few weeks instead of paperwork!!).

This would be a multi-choice, pre-season Snapshot vote featuring a shortlist of core DAO projects (elected by the GC?). Projects would earn a pro-rata % of the “Seasonal Projects” pool based on total percentage of BANK voted towards them.

I.e. There’s a list of 10 core DAO projects and everyone can vote for 3. Let’s say Bankless Academy leads the poll with 55% of BANK voted and therefore receives 55% of the Seasonal Projects pool. Worth noting that these projects could also go to the GC during the season if they were underfunded.

Just an alternative on how we could minimize overhead for projects as we enter the end-of-season sprint

Final Outcome

All said and done, here’s the high-level budget I’ve put together after factoring in the core Season 2 goals and all the thoughts above (went with 20M BANK just so we had even numbers)

Note 1: LM can be rolled into Core Projects or GC depending on outcome
Note 2: Coordinape Monthly is 2M BANK / 3 months = 666K BANK per month

Let me know what you guys think. May have overlooked some stuff so feel free to call me out if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense or there’s a better solution!

Stoked for the next Season - let’s get it

[Kouros]

I’m more inclined with this budget as it is well thought and seems fairer to everyone.

[TheMarvel]

I love what Frogmonkee put and and the additional comments. Same concern as now pointed out about Bank burn rate this early and of course talent retention. Fantastic start and as Kouros appreciate the deeper budget look. Progress! Appreciate the dedication and talent in this community of goodness.

[kennyrowe]

Are there any legal concerns that should be considered for season 2?