[Temp Check] Season 3

General
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​​Hey Bankless DAO. It’s that time of the season where we start looking ahead into Season 3.

This post serves as a general temperature check to help weigh in and align on the S3 Spec.

Let’s get into it!

Membership Threshold

The current membership threshold stands at 35,000 BANK to join the Discord. We have the option to increase, decrease, or keep the existing threshold in Season 3.

  • Pros of increasing: Requires people sitting at the threshold to opt-into the next Season

  • Cons of increasing: Increases barriers to entry for new participants

  • Pros of decreasing: Increases accessibility for joining the DAO

  • Cons of decreasing: We’ll see a larger inflow of new members (this could be a pro or a con depending on perspective) and/or leave contributors with less skin in the game.

  • Increase Threshold
  • Decrease Threshold
  • Keep Threshold Unchanged
0 voters

Follow up poll for membership threshold:

  • Raise to 40,000 BANK
  • Hold at 35,000 BANK
  • Decrease to 25,000 BANK
  • Decrease to 10,000 BANK
0 voters

Splash Zone / Level 3 Status

  • Increase threshold for Whale status
  • Decrease threshold for Whale status
  • Keep threshold unchanged for Whale status
0 voters

Add Mega Whale Zone

There’s now nearly 30 addresses with 1M BANK. Season 3 could create an additional whale channel for those that have reached the seven-figure threshold!

  • Add Mega Whale Zone
  • Don’t create Mega Whale Zone
0 voters

Budget

Season 1 allocated 11M BANK while Season 2 increased the spending to 20.5M BANK. For reference, the treasury currently holds 141M BANK with an additional 33M expected to vest during Season 3.

  • Increase Seasonal Spending
  • Decrease Seasonal Spending
  • Same Seasonal Spending
0 voters

One of the issues with Season 2 was that the capped budget constrained a lot of projects and guilds. In Season 3, we’re opening up the option for a flexible budget following all project & guild submissions. By flexible budget, this means we will accommodate all guild and project budgets (within reason) and add on Grants Committee + DAO-wide Coordinape.

Note that we don’t have a framework in mind for capping funding if we go with flexible budgets. This would be a fairly radical experiment to see how we, as a DAO, request funding when we are not resource-constrained.

With that, here are the options:

  • Less than 10M BANK
  • 10 - 20M BANK
  • 20-33M BANK
  • Transition to Flexible Budget
0 voters

The seasonal budget will largely be broken down into a handful of categories including Grants Committee, Guilds, Seasonal Projects, and Contributor Rewards. The above poll will dictate the results for each category, but the following polls get more granular on the specific budget requests.

Grants Committee

The grants committee has distributed over 90% of its budget in S2. It’s worth noting that most projects have been funded in Season 2 and will qualify for S3 direct funding. In S3, we should:

  • Increase Grants Committee Funding (>7M BANK)
  • Decrease Grants Committee Funding (<7M BANK)
  • Keep Grants Committee Funding Unchanged (7M BANK)
0 voters

Guild Funding

NOTE: We are aiming to have all guild budgets in by December 15th in order to gauge the overall strain on the Treasury. Please submit in the subcategory here and follow the instructions provided in the template. Once your forum post is up, complete this form.

  • Increase Guild Funding (>5M BANK)
  • Decrease Guild Funding (<5M BANK)
  • Keep Guild Funding Unchanged (5M BANK)
  • Transition to Flexible Funding
0 voters

Project Funding

NOTE: We are aiming to have all project budgets (previously funded by the Grants Committee) in by December 15th in order to gauge the overall strain on the Treasury. Please submit in the subcategory here and follow the instructions provided in the template. Once your forum post is up, complete this form.

  • Increase Project Funding (>5M BANK)
  • Decrease Project Funding (<5M BANK)
  • Keep Project Funding Unchanged (5M BANK)
  • Transition to Flexible Funding
0 voters

Contributor Rewards

Season 2 expanded the Contributor Rewards to multiple rounds, including monthly rounds for Contributors, Level 1s, and recently Guest PAsses. In total, 3.5M BANK was distributed via this method.

Season 3, we should:

  • Increase Contributor Rewards
  • Decrease Contributor Rewards
  • Keep Contributor Rewards Unchanged
0 voters

Follow-up on the frequency of the Coordinape rounds for Season 2:

  • Continue Monthly
  • Discontinue Monthly and revert to Seasonal
0 voters

Additionally, Season 1 and 2 featured the hourly rate guideline at 1,000 BANK per hour. There have been multiple discussions around changing this figure. In Season 3, the hourly rate guideline for contributors should fall at:

  • 1000 BANK/hour
  • 750 BANK/hour
  • 500 BANK/hour
  • 250 BANK/hour
0 voters

(Note that this number will be radically different after Season 3, as per the most recent compensation working group post)

None of the poll results are final, they simply represent the DAO’s sentiment as we build out the S3 spec which goes through its own independent governance process.

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Throwing in my unfiltered thoughts on the Season 3 planning!

Nothing here is concrete :slight_smile:

Membership Threshold

I think we’re at the point where there’s a good argument for lowering the membership threshold. Bankless DAO should be inclusive for anyone to join and the 35,000 BANK threshold seems to be a high barrier to entry for new talent looking to get involved. This has culminated in a ton of guest passes that we should look to convert to members. Looking at @paulapivat Dune Dashboard, the most growth has been in the 10-35K range while the 35K-150K range has stagnated. We should look to convert these to full members.

For reference, the original threshold was set to 35K BANK as it was just the amount that 2021 Badge holders received from the initial distribution.

Additionally, lowering the threshold will open up more liquidity from existing members for tipping, LP’ing, lending, and other activities in the crypto economy.

On the Mega Whale channel(we need to work on our naming lol), there’s now nearly 30 holders with 1M BANK. As we continue to distirbute more BANK via each season, this number will increase. As such, this would be a fun, small reward for those that have reached seven-figure BANK positions.

With all of that in mind, this is what I’d propose for membership thresholds in Season 3:

  • Level 1: 10,000 BANK (lowered from 35K)
  • Whale: 100,000 BANK (lowered from 150K)
  • Mega Whale: 1,000,000 BANK (new tier)

Budget

This area is a bit tricky. One part of me says that we should distribute less and less BANK every season to drive scarcity. The other part says that we’re in a critical growth phase where we need to spend to drive growth. That said, each Season is only 3 months long and there are diminishing returns on the effectiveness of the BANK we distribute (we can only yolo so much around while making sure everyone is accountable).

I think the flexible budget is probably the move here as we can establish a baseline for each category and potentially begin decreasing from there in the future seasons (i.e. all budgets decay by 10% every season). Just some thoughts on overall budgeting.

Projects: Picking and Choosing our Battles

Per @frogmonkee recent brain dump, we need to pick and choose our battles. With that, I think we should drive a substantial amount of the seasonal budget to Seasonal Projects. We want to double down, prioritize, and reward the projects that are working, and most importantly, driving a positive ROI to the overall DAO.

The emphasis on Seasonal Projects would also shift the reliance off of the Grants Committee, which could operate under a substantially smaller budget. The goal for the Grants Committee should seed the early-stage projects to see if there’s a PMF within the DAO or the broader crypto ecosystem.

Contributor Rewards

The monthly Coordinape rounds are great, but I think we have too many of them. We want to minimize the number of things people need to do.

With that, I think there’s merit in shifting the monthly Coordinape rounds to just Level 2s/Contributors with a full member round at the end of the Season. (Something like 500K BANK per month for Contributors and then 1.5M for End of Season, bringing total to 3M BANK for contributor rewards). This would provide less overhead for everyone while ensuring there’s still a compensation mechanism for active contributors.

With that, I don’t see much merit in the Guest Pass Coordinape round (though we have yet to do it for S2). Instead, I would shift the responsibility towards the Grants Committee to issue Scholarships on a seasonal basis to guest passes. Under the new threshold, 100K-500K BANK would allow the Grants Committee to distribute plenty of scholarships to the Guest Passes that have gone above and beyond. Worth noting that the lower membership threshold may also convert a lot of them.

These are just my 2 BANK on S3. Overall, I’m stoked on where this DAO is headed. I have a lot of conversations every week where people compliment and admire the work we’re doing. It gets complicated sometimes, but we’re moving in the right direction.

No one said heading west was gonna be easy but I’m glad I get to do it with you degens <3

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Thanks for the earnest thinking Lucas.

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Ooops. Looks like that poll is broken

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On the membership threshold, I wonder if the amount matters as much as having the threshold itself.

For me, the difference between 10k BANK and 35K BANK isn’t the question. It’s whether I want to fork over money to join a community, especially one with benefits I wouldn’t understand until I was basically a full time member. That was my perspective back in S0.

I think it also depends on our goals for our levels of membership. What is our goal wrt to level 1s? Do we want them to become L2s? I’m not clear on this myself, and would love to see some discussion. What are the different personas of bankless community member we are trying to support and build culture for, and how does the threshold empower/detract from those goals?

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I would strongly agree with this sentiment.
Providing more concrete details on what benefits are (maybe a few key examples as they happen) would be helpful in understanding why one would join. Brief member testimonials could also be dropped into the weekly rollup - there are some great ones on twitter but they get lost in the noise.

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I agree with a lot of the above points with the exception of guest passes.

Being a coordinator of one of the guilds whose only now just implementing coordinape in the guild, it can be hard to retain them without a clear way for them to get comp & earn in. They often move onto other guilds or DAO’s for that certainty.

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Are there any advantages to becoming L3 other than having more voting power? That’s something I’m not fully clear on, so that’s partly why I don’t see a need for a mega whale qualification.

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Nope just access to a bonus Level 3 channel!

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I would be very interested to see if we managed to convert our last budget into progress for the funded projects. Increasing to infinite funding is going to stretch us thin, increase all budgets (human nature) and likely not produce more output imo. If we are to increase budget we need clear priorities, payment on tangible milestones (pay after performance, we’re doing 90%+ salaries no need for payment upfront) and we need to determine what criterias to be met for funding.

Unlimited funding strikes me as completley insane if we can’t track how its used and if thats in our interest.

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In a bull market, the dollar value of BANK goes up which makes it harder for people to join. Ideally in a bull market, we should let more people experience DAO life by lowering the threshold each season. In a bear market, the dollar value drops, and speculators leave, in this situation it makes sense for the DAO and its loyal members to buy cheap BANK. Hence I’d say, we decrease the BANK threshold for L1 in bull markets and increase the BANK threshold for L1 in bear markets.

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I Believe we are still in a phase were it makes sense to spend alot to grow quickly however i also think its important to start making sure that projects deliver before recieving new funding. Do we have clear milestones for our projects to evaluate this on, or should this maybe be included in the new season? We should imo think about allocating part of the funding after milestones have been achieved instead of upfront. It might even be time to start evaluating if we are funding projects that dont seem to deliver the hoped for value?

When it comes to how the DAO should allocate recources effectively in general my view is that we have 2 types of projects. Nr 1 is our finacial leg, funding here should go to projects were we have the best risk/reward ROI, Nr 2 are mission driven projects that cater to the onboarding 1B ppl, here money should be allocated to projects that in the fastest way onboard the largest amount of people while spending the least amount of money. Most of the time project type Nr 1 cater to the existing crypto community and contribute very little or nothing to the mission apart from bringing in the cockie dough (obviously very imortant). In all the complexity around these questions its important imo that we constantly work towards allocating funding as optimal as possible along those two main lines.

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Great overview, thank you! Quick thoughts from me in the order of the topics raised.

The current membership threshold stands at 35,000 BANK to join the Discord. We have the option to increase, decrease, or keep the existing threshold in Season 3.

I voted for keeping the threshold the same. As someone who was able to start 2 projects, receive GC funding and contribute to a number of other projects all while being on Guest Pass, I believe we already have a great framework in place for newcomer experience to not depend on how much BANK they hold. If they want to participate — they participate. Coordinape round is the only example of something they’d potentially miss out on that I can think of. But one could argue that it only motivates teammates to throw bounties at that person to elevate them as soon as possible. I’ve been collaborating with some Guest Pass holders recently that I’d call the driving force of this DAO without hesitation. And naturally, they became L1 in no time.

That was against decreasing the threshold ^. Now, I wouldn’t increase it either since - as we all know - BANK is set to explode sooner than later, making 35,000 BANK reflective of this risk/reward balance shift that’s worth paying premium for from investor perspective. I don’t see the need to multiply that by increasing the BANK number.

Whale: 100,000 BANK (lowered from 150K)

Arming myself with the definition of Whale as someone capable of affecting the market price by shifting liquidity balance substantially, I voted for Whale threshold increase. I don’t believe moving 100,000 BANK around would make a dramatic difference in the near future, and this will be true to a higher degree long-term. I think calling someone a Whale should go with increased responsibility semantics VS being a cool meme.

Note that we don’t have a framework in mind for capping funding if we go with flexible budgets. This would be a fairly radical experiment to see how we, as a DAO, request funding when we are not resource-constrained.

The grants committee has distributed over 90% of its budget in S2. It’s worth noting that most projects have been funded in Season 2 and will qualify for S3 direct funding.

  • Increase Guild Funding (>5M BANK)
  • Keep Guild Funding Unchanged (5M BANK)
  • Transition to Flexible Funding
  • Decrease Guild Funding (<5M BANK)

In my experience, Grants Committee doesn’t have a solid expertise and evaluation framework to rely on when funding domain-specific or highly-technical projects. This would hit hard when combined with flexible budgeting, because now the last layer of protection against inefficient spending — the hard cap — is removed.

Nevertheless, I’m in favour of the flexible budget, however only if it goes along with increasing Guild funding and not increasing GC funding. Guilds would be encouraged to elect their own committees with enough expertise to evaluate project deliveries and asks, because their next season funding would be on stake essentially.

Grants Committee, in my opinion, should not do domain-specific evaluation without at least advice from a guild-level authority.

Additionally, Season 1 and 2 featured the hourly rate guideline at 1,000 BANK per hour. There have been multiple discussions around changing this figure.

I think we could also start thinking about the future model of funding that’s more crowdsourced VS being reliant on treasury 100%.

There is an opinion that we may run out of liquid capital unless we decrease hourly pay or something like that. And I think we can do better than that if we start thinking early enough. The DAO won’t run out of capital, it will be just transferred to contributors. This doesn’t necessarily make it illiquid, it just means that future projects can be crowdsourced, pumping capital back through the DAO value production engine and generating returns for everyone.

Though this would certainly require a more convincing plan for people to invest in, rather than current GC approach which lets us burn BANK here and there. So I’m totally on board with the plan to focus on leveraging our existing products as much as possible!

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Got a few opinions:

Mathematically: Regarding the Level 1 membership threshold, we should not just look at the current price of BANK (~$3500 USD for Level 1) but the future cost of Level 1 membership as we increase the value of the DAO. People new to crypto can be priced out in the future if we aren’t flexible.

Socially: The current cost of entry is already steep for those just getting their feet wet in crypto, and is really priced for the crypto natives looking for a good DAO to work for. I think lowering the Level 1 requirement to 10,000 BANK will solve this along with allowing people who want to contribute, to get up and running (and earning) faster.

Philosophically: We should also consider that if our goal is to onboard 1 billion people into crypto, and that’s why the BANK token has a maximum issuance of 1 billion tokens, then this will not be the last time we lower the cost of membership. Under the original spirit of the token’s creation, eventually 1 billion people should have a 1 BANK membership in the DAO and there should be no more whale level at that point.

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there is a “secret good morning channel” created by yours truly LOL, not sure if it’s worth the 150,000 BANKs for most people.

But to me yeah, totally worth it :rofl:

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I personally agree with the 10,000 $BANK, eventually.

I do agree with slowly lowering it over the seasons, to reduce volatility on the markets, and to let our liquidity programs take full effect first. So i voted 25,000 $BANK for now.

Previously I was one of those who wanted to increase the membership level 1 $BANK requirements, but then, the climate was different.

Today, I feel that we should as a DAO, we should become more accessible for more people. I have been trying to get many people up to level 1 member this season, but it is significantly harder than in the previous season.

So lowering it would really make my life easier. It’s not such a steep jump from guest pass to level 1.

Ultimately what we are trying to do is to get $BANKs as widely distributed as possible before we load up for the moon. And this is definitely something that is in line with what we want to do.

Finding the fine balance between exclusive and inclusive can be hard, but right now the needle should start to move towards the inclusive side: Like multi-language support, lowering barriers.

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Ultimately I always tell new joiners, it’s a crypto thing, you have to get “skin in the game”.

“Get your feet wet in the technology”.

Whatever you want to name it, but each of us must own this place as our home, for this thing to work.

And that really is a mindset shift. So is it really money that we spent to “buy a membership?”. Think again.

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Thanks a lot for the work done @0x_Lucas.

I agree with all your observations. Moreover, I think that reducing the amount of BANKs required to step in the DAO and eliminating the guest passes coordinape rounds are reform that go together. As you eliminate a chance of earning BANKs but at the same time you make it easier to become a Level 1.

My only point of criticism is that we need to implement a mechanism to check whether a project really deserves to be refunded in the light of the achieved results. I would like to see some of the well funded projects creating some output (e.g. Academia, content-gater, workshops, etc.) before defining a new funding strategy.

In addition, I would work on some already funded projects that are struggling. For instance, our website - which is overall nice - looks really sad in this moment: https://www.bankless.community/

All the references are not updated… As I have tried to say in other occasions, I think that it is better to start from the simple things instead of creating THE disruptive technology in 3 months. This means focusing on things that do not look great and try to fix them.

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Maybe a radical thought about guest pass → level 1 → level 2. What if we eliminated that? What if instead, we did guest → member?

Money has always been a sensitive issue for me. I never liked benefits and rank being tied to money because then you can always buy it when it’s not deserved. Level 1 and Level 2 assumes rank over other people. If we don’t even know anyone’s identity (except mine I guess since I use my full name and real picture), do you really care about a rank?

An alternative is just two roles. You’re either a guest or a member. Guests are unproven. They haven’t shown commitment to our mission or values. They must prove themselves through their production of value. You can’t buy that. Guests are encouraged to provide continuous value through working on projects, educating themselves on Bankless, BanklessDAO, and web3, getting to know members, and just all around being active. In order to become a member, a guest pass must be nominated and seconded. Nominations can come from anyone who has worked with the individual. Maybe in order to be eligible for a nomination, you need to complete X number of bounties or see 2 projects through from start to finish. I really like the idea of doing monthly ceremonies to welcome guests to member status. These people have shown they are committed to our mission and should be celebrated.

Once you’re a member, you get all benefits. That includes access to member perks, any cohort style knowledge shares, product releases like Sobol, etc. An exception to this is financial perks which I think come at a certain level? I don’t know what those are but I heard about them. Can’t find anything on Notion… Anyway, maybe that is “member+” or something.

My point is…eliminate the ability to buy rank. Create the opportunity to earn it.

A first thought after reading this might be, “If people don’t buy BANK to become level 1, that would hurt our treasury.” Maybe… Maybe not.

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still don’t know much about the community, just keeping learning and thank you for your information.

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