Throwing in my unfiltered thoughts on the Season 3 planning!
Nothing here is concrete 
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