Reward Season 0 Active Members

Title: Rewarding Season 0 Active Community Members Original Conversation: Recorded Discord Discussion Authors: @frogmonkee Snapshot Proposer: @0xLucas Date: 6/2/21

SUMMARY

In order to retain talent and say thank you to everyone that has contributed to Bankless DAO over these past four weeks, this proposal will retroactively distribute 1 million $BANK based on a fair voting method available to any DAO member via Coordinape.

This will serve as an initial trial for contributor compensation for future rounds in Season 1.

BACKGROUND

On Sunday May 30th, AboveAverageJoe made this post on forums, proposing a method to back pay all the valued community members and their contributions to the DAO. Shortly afterwards, people started filing into voice channels to discuss, and the conversation went on for hours.

This conversation was fated to happen as soon as the DAO was created. For four weeks, community members have lifted the DAO and carried it step by step. As time went on, this enthusiasm turned into concern about sustainability. The market had taken a dump and the hours everyone was putting in netted zero income.

From quiet whispers, Joe brought this topic in the limelight. We had a healthy discussion that reinforced the DAO’s ability to ideate and work through difficult problems as a collective.

MOTIVATION

The motivation of this specific proposal is to retroactively distribute $BANK to valuable community members from Season 0. Typically, companies don’t spend money they don’t have, and we fall squarely into that category. But, we need to give some reward, or we will inevitably lose talent that feels unappreciated.

That’s why, for Season 0 , we propose treating $BANK as equity and not a wage.

SPECIFICATION

To distribute $BANK, four questions came up as the most important:

• Who will receive $BANK?
• How much $BANK will they receive?
• How will they receive $BANK?
• When will they receive $BANK?
• Who will receive $BANK?

This is the trickiest question, isn’t it? Ideally, we want to be as inclusive as possible, but also support informed decision making and not a popularity contest.

The solution here is an opt-in program for all members. Anyone is eligible for the round and may self-select by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/4yLDFcZvq2kcFJVw7

All members who fill out this form prior to the starting period will be eligible to participate in the round

How much $BANK will they receive?

Collectively, a pool of 1,000,000 $BANK will be allocated to Coordinape.

** How will they receive $BANK?** Using Coordinape. Coordinape is a P2P budget management tool that grew out of Yearn Finance. This is explained further below.

When will they receive $BANK?

Once Coordinape is implemented, we will start a one week vote period with 1M $BANK, after which the funds will be proportionately distributed across participating DAO members based on the results from the Coordinape voting.

What is Coordinape?

Coordinape is central to this proposal. Coordinape was a project spun out from Yearn Finance You can think of Coordinape as a peer to peer payroll management system. It’s broader than that, but for our purposes, it works. (For reference, Yearn’s governing DAO is a few steps ahead of BanklessDAO, but there are many parallels.)

The essence of Coordinape is allowing your peers to determine your earnings. The process works as such:

• Each member is given 1000 GIVE tokens. Each token represents a proportional share of the salary pool (1M $BANK)
• Members can gift (or not) GIVE tokens to people they think deserve some share of the pool.
• After a voting period, all the unallocated GIVE tokens are burned. The remaining number of tokens represents a proportional piece of the salary pool, and members are programmatically paid their share based on the number of tokens they’ve received.

The simple premise is that if you ask everyone in the community who is doing good work, their collective answers will give a good sense of where the value is and who should be most rewarded. Over time, this also provides valuable insights for the DAO about what kinds of work is prioritized, what the community finds most valuable, and who are the key contributors in different areas.

You can learn more about Coordinape by reading their Medium announcement post, Docs, and Youtube demo.

How would this work?

Let’s tie all these topics back together. We’re proposing that:

1. Using Coordinape, we will let DAO members vote on how 1M $BANK will be allocated to their peers
2. Any DAO member that has at least 35K $BANK is eligible and can opt in with this form
3. Over a one week period, we will all be able to claim their tokens and allocate them to any other DAO member
4. After the voting period, the 1M $BANK will be distributed proportionally to the number of tokens they’ve received.
5. Participants will fill out a survey evaluating their satisfaction with their payout.

Success is defined as a >80% satisfaction rate.

Next Steps

1. Approve the proposal on Snapshot budget (1M BANK)
2. Onboard to Coordinape
3. Begin a one week voting period
4. Distribute funds
5. Take a survey

FAQ:

How do we know if this model will work?

We don’t. That’s part of the great blockchain experiment and why we're allocating a smaller amount of BANK to this program. It's meant to act as a trial! We’re inventing new ways to distribute money in a fairer manner. But both Sushiswap, Yearn and others use Coordinape, so there is some social proof. Internally, we will define success as a >80% satisfaction rate amongst participants.

What about members that like to work solo?

These people will slip through the cracks. Right now, the community is small enough that we can recognize and vouch for these members. Also, Coordinape has a “regift” feature where members that were overcompensated can redistribute. This is not a great solution, but Coordinape is working on this problem.

Resources

Forum Post Draft Forum Post Final