Previous Documentation on Season 3:
Introduction
January 7th marks the end of Season 2 
, giving us just a month to plan, prep, and execute a specification for Season 3.
For a quick refresher on seasons:
Recapping Season 2
Season 2 saw an explosion in activity! This is no surprise. Season 0 focused on theorizing our governance and coordination models. Season 1 stress-tested these models, and Season 2 scaled them. Let’s take a look at some of our accomplishments:
Membership Growth
Discord is our workplace. It’s where 90% of all activity occurs. Since Season 2 launched on October 1st, we’ve already grown almost 45% to over 15,000 members! Naturally, not all of these members will stick around, but we do have high activation and retention rates.
Translating into $BANK Holders, we’ve seen a 10% increase in total BANK holders. But when we break it down through the cohorts found in one of the Analytic Guild’s Dashboard, we see:
- 1-10K: Up 23% from 1,423 to 1,754
- 10-35K: Up 13.8% from 369 to 420
In other words, we’re seeing adoption from the long-tail of BANK holders, though neither Level 1s or Whales are dumping their bags. To me, this means that L1s and Whales have a strong conviction that we’re building something important and the long-tail means we’re growing and attracting talent. But it also means that we don’t have enough of an incentive to convert members below the 35K threshold to the 35K threshold – which is fine!
Projects Funded
This Season, the Grants Committee has 7M BANK set aside for funding Projects. With a month left in the season, that amount sits at only 600K BANK left. We spent a lot! On what you may ask? Here’s just a sampling. The full list can be found here.
- BanklessDAO Newsletters
- BanklessDAO Mobile App
- DAO Dash
- Editorial and Publishing Arm
- BANK Available on Polygon
- BanklessDAO at NFT NYC
- Consultancy
- Podcast Hatchery
- Bounty Board
- International Media Node
Each of these projects work towards proliferating the Bankless movement or improving the DAO experience. I cannot think of a single DAO that is doing as much as we are.
Revenue
What does this mean for our coffers? Excluding BANK, BanklessDAO is sitting at a healthy 350,000 USD. More than half of that has come in just this season alone! In Season 3, we’ve generated almost 180,000 USD and we still have another month! We can expect to see another 40,000 USD in the WGMI Metafactory Drop as well.
Two important things to note:
- This doesn’t fully capture all of the DAO revenue streams. Some streams come directly to the DAO while some streams are split project teams. For example, the Writers Guild Client Services had generated roughly 15,000 USD in revenue, but only 10% of that has gone to BanklessDAO treasury. The majority is split between writers and editors that produced work. In other words, 180,000 USD is likely underestimated.
- The DAOpunks drop netted BanklessDAO 24.89 ETH, which accounts for over 50% of this Season’s revenue. That’s fucking fantastic and represents the first micro-community that has spun out of BanklessDAO. But it’s also not something we can rely on next Season. Just something to think about.
Liquidity
Liquidity was a big pain in the previous season. We had maybe $1M in total liquidity in Season 2. With this season’s Balancer LM program, we’re now sitting at $2.8M across Sushiswap, Uniswap, and Balancer.
And not only do we have deepened liquidity, but we Protocol Owned Liquidity, thanks to Olympus Pro. Right now, BanklessDAO owns 21.6% of Sushiswap BANK-ETH LP tokens. Meaning we own over 1/5 of the entire liquidity depth on Sushiswap, which nets us revenue in daily trading fees!
Guild Maturity
Another awesome development we’re starting to see here is guild maturity! Guilds are how most people get involved in BanklessDAO. They are the first coordination unit that members will come across, and we’re seeing them evolve and mature.
One thing to keep an eye on is that best practices are proliferating across guilds and role holders beginning to coordinate. For example, this season we’ve seen Talent Scouts start to coordinate and share their models of onboarding new talent.
On a whole, BanklessDAO Strong 
. The strongest signal of this is our cNPS (community NPS) score that we tabulate during each Coordinape round. Below is our cNPS calculation for last month’s Coordinape round.
Season 3: Revenge of Moloch
In Season 3, we must focus on governance and coordnation. By this I mean introducing processes, protocols, frameworks, and mental models to form an “operating system” for the DAO that reduces reliance on people.
To understand why, you need to understand our history. I outlined some BanklessDAO’s history in my previous brain dump, but the gist of it is that in Season 0, all we did was discuss governance because we didn’t have anything else to do! There we no guilds or projects, just governance.
As BanklessDAO has grown in the past two seasons, we’ve all gotten busy with our niches in the DAO. And while we’ve been toiling away within the DAO, we’ve let governance problems pile up, such as:
- Centralization around grants committee
- SubDAOs
- Compensation
- Strategic prioritization
The distinction I’m making here is working in the DAO vs working on the DAO.
We spent Season 0 working on the DAO and Season 1 & 2 working in the DAO. We need to work on the DAO again. If we don’t, Moloch will come and tear down everything we’ve built so far. In Season 3, we’re seeing a need to focus on governance once again, while trying to maintain the cadence we’ve established thus far. (More discussion here and here)
We’ve made some progress here, such as with [Draft 3 - Final] Firming Up Governance and the compensation working group, but there needs to be a way to crowdsource ideas and distribute the workload. I have some ideas on this, stay tuned for another forum post.
- Yes, updating our governance and coordination models should be a top priority
- No, I think there are other priorities beyond governance and coordination
0 voters
Season 3 Operations
Going over the results of Lucas’s [Temp Check] Season 3, we see:
- Membership Threshold stays at 35,000 BANK
- Whale Threshold stays at 150,000 BANK. Mega-whale channel (>1M) is not created
- Average BANK hourly rate stays at 1000 BANK/hr
- Project and Guilds transition to flexible budgets while Grants Committee stays at 7M BANK
- Coordinape rounds continue monthly
I’ll break down what this means in the following categories.
Project and Guild Budgets
To understand this section, you must understand our governance process:
BanklessDAO funds guilds and projects directly from its treasury, which is different than the Grants Committee funding projects.
- In Season 2, guilds were funded directly through treasury. In Season 3, we follow a similar model, requesting that Guilds complete their budget submissions in this forum category by Dec 20th (previously 15th).
- In Season 2, any project that was funded by the Grants Committee in Season 1 was eligible to receive funding directly from the treasury. If we extend that logic to Season 3, than any project funded in Season 2 or earlier can receive funding from the treasury. We request that project complete their budget submissions in this forum category by Dec 20th (previously 15th).
In Season 3, Project and Guilds would operate under a flexible budget. The idea here is that instead of forcing guilds and projects to budget below 5M BANK, there would be no cap.
This is a radical idea. Especially because we don’t have a solid project evaluation framework in place to gauge what we continue to fund. But the sentiment here is that we’re in a bull market and people are coming. Rather than turn them away with a constrained budget, let’s fund what there is demand for and figure out the rails as we continue to build. We’re all responsible adults, right? Right???
However, we do have a safety check in place. During Season 1, in prep for Season 2, each proposal was sanity-checked by the Grants Committee. In Season 3, we will do the same thing. In other words,
- Budget submissions would be received by Dec 20th
- Grants Committee would review on the 21st
- Teams would workshop proposals and resubmit before the 28th
- Grants Committee would review a final round on the 28th
(Dates subject to change considering people may be out for the holidays.)
Grants Committee
As per the Grants Committee spec, 4 out of the 7 seats are in rotation. You can submit your application here. Submissions will be open until one week prior to Season 3 start.
One thing to note is that previously we held nominations in Discourse, then elections in Discourse, and ratified on Snapshot.
The new flow will allow nominations in Discourse and move elections to Snapshot with a weighted snapshot vote - meaning you can select as many nominees as you like, but would have to split your tokens across them. This prevents people from creating accounts and skewing the vote if elections were done in Discourse.
Coordinape
In Season 3 we will continue with monthly Coordinape rounds with separate circles for Level 1, Level 2, and Guest Passes, each with 500,000 BANK per circle per round, totalling to 4.5M BANK.
The only change here is upping the total for Guest Passes from 500,000 per season to 1.5M. Viewing the analytics above that we have a notable jump in Discord users and holders until 35K, it’s apparent that many of the new contributors are guest pass members and should, arguably, be compensated on par with other DAO members as to reduce exclusivity.
- Agree
- Disagree
0 voters
Rounds will work as follows:
Roadmap
------------ EDIT --------------------
Grants Committee had a great discussion on how to better prepare for Season 3. The idea is NOT to extend the Season, but to extend the re-submission deadline by an extra week as follows:
- Season 3 Specification Draft #1 goes up Dec 13th
- Season 3 Specification Draft #2 goes up Dec 20th
- Projects and guilds submit their budgets by Dec 20th
- Grants Committee reviews proposals on Dec 21st
-
Season 3 Specification snapshot goes live from Dec 25th to January 1st - Projects and guilds review and re-submit their proposals on JANUARY 3RD (two weeks)
- Grants Committee nominations close Dec 31st
-
Grants Committee snapshot goes live from January 1st to January 8th
- Grants Committee reviews final round of submissions on January 4th
-
[Draft 3 - Final] Firming Up Governance snapshot goes live from January 1st to January 8th
-
Project and Guild budgets snapshot goes live from January 5th to January 12th
- Season 3 Starts on January 8th
- BanklessHQ holds a twitter spaces event with BanklessDAO on the week of January 17th
The major change here is that instead of having one week to resubmit project and guild budgets, teams will have two weeks.
Wish community grows rapidly and healthily, and one day there will be a CN section for GMT-8 time.