BIP 35: Long-Term Core-Contributors

Hey, let’s take this opportunity to reset and capture what you’re looking for.

Do you have a concrete suggestion to improve the BIP? I believe there was some initial confusion as to how things would be distributed, or what parameters needed to be met, do you have direct suggestions of how this should be altered with justifications?

Can you please explain how this will work in real life? Personally I have no issue with high salaries as long as there are results and each member has clear accountability and is meeting his targets. Projects and companies break up and die due to team issues, trust issues, meritocracy issues and bad communication. How do you plan to manage this?

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I’ll give my 2 cents regarding this proposal.

  • Stablecoin salary looks ok
  • Badger salary could be on the high side, but it would be ok if there’s a cliff – i.e. tokens start vesting in 1 year. This align incentives and I assure you will also take the pressure from dev team if token underperforms (bc no one will be accusing team of dumping). Also, this is much more aligned with standard startup practice: 1 year clif, 4 years vesting, 25% each year.

The team has done an amazing job and I’m sure many would agree they need to get properly incentivized and get rich if Badger succeeds. But this should be aligned with long term vision.

As Buffett said to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky: “get rich slowly”. Getting rich slow isn’t actually slower, it’s slower in year one, but it might be faster in the following years. It’s much more sustainable for the protocol and for the team itself.

Get the big chunk of your payment in tokens that are locked for some time, aligning your incentives with us, the protocol holders. This is just the beginning.

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well put. I fully agree.

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Thank you along with @spartacus_rising @dgntec for the amazing job done! Regarding the core-contributors :

  • the stablecoin part is ok

  • for the badger salary, It would make sense to give a try with SourceCred. It tracks & automates value creation across plugins to give a reputational score. The badger salary would be distributed in proportion to this score across time…it will foster also the decentralization as well

I’m a contributor at SourceCred, can share some more information if needed.

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I had to sleep on this. I understand what half of the people on this list are doing, how much time they are spending on it and why they should get paid. On the dev side it is really easy to understand, because you can go look at work committed into github and understand both the quantity and quality of work developers are committing.

The Ops side is a bit less transaparent at the moment. I hate to mention specific people/roles, but I have to in order to explain:

I see all of the Senior people on here every day doing work and being involved and never sleeping. For the most part I think their work is good. I don’t think they tend to all be that great about taking, digesting, incorporating and responding tov feedback from the community all the time, which would be something they could improve on for 1+ million a year a sallery.

On the midlevel side, I see Donald’s design work all the time and if he’s not designing for badger full time he should be. We need as much media as we can get. For Emissions/treasury management I see a few BIPs from Po and Mason, but it is unclear how much time they are really spending on this and what other work they are doing. I also understand that they got paid pretty big grants for the BIP’s the wrote and work they have done and we voted recently on a BIP to reward people with upto 1000 badger for participating in governance. BIP-28.

I’m just trying to figure out if any of the mid level ops roles are actually full time jobs, and it’s unclear how much we’re talking about paying these people. It seems like a lot of the work can be handled by bounties. Again for the kind of money we are talking about, I would like to see more energy put into BIPs to make them more human readable/have better TL;DRs. I’d also like see more of a job description and a summary of what these people will be doing every day.

On the Junior side, again it depends on pay. If these people are making normal Junior salleries to learn and help out mid/senior level peoplethen cool. If they are the best paid Junior Operations People ever to grace the face of earth, I think they should be working on projects that are challenging and will be judged by the community according to very high standard. Their team-mates should take shared responsibility for making sure that their work is of the highest quality.

Lastly, we are a tech company and it seems right now that we have 3.5 developers on staff + Digg-whisperer and an ops team of 8 people + support + 3 of the 4 seed team members. In many years of work experience, tech companies that become too ops driven tend to not execute well on techincal tasks. It feels to me like we are lacking in Technical Operations people to do things like product manage, create clear roadmaps, align developer work and prioriites, etc, and are maybe getting a bit heavy on our full time ops team.

Finally, if I want a million dollar job at badger. How do I apply? Where are the open positions? Who decides if I show up on a BIP to be voted for, and who decides the positions that badger is looking for. Who decides who to hire and how much to pay them. I know the answer seems to be the community, but I imagine a community vote to hire someone who hadn’t been vetted by the team wouldn’t go over to well, and would be counterproductive if it passed, so I think a team that is seeking to pay themselves this much money needs to make it very clear how one can become a part of it.

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As an overal reset, I will point out what I’m seeing in this entire discussion.

  1. There seems to be more contention about a vesting scenario vs. the amount being proposed

  2. General sense of confusion regarding the allocation to the individual members based on part/full time and the level of their role

  3. Uncertainty about the internal monitoring of performance, and who is monitoring the monitors

  4. Clarification on the individual roles and a little info about these people seems to be a desire

If anyone from the team is addressing this BIP in the Discord, great. I believe you need to post those things here as well. Pretty much word for word. I know that Discord is easier to get quick points across when it’s full of users, but not everyone is tuned in there. For example,

That was written by @Spadaboom in the discord after this BIP was posted. If it had been included/edited onto the post, I believe we could have avoided some confusion.

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fwiw a year is a very long time in crypto

An HR should be hired ^^ but who is recruting the HR … that’s the question ! :rofl:

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Ah, yea it seems most of the conversation here could have been avoided if how the compensation was computed was clearer. That is correct. This is not setting a precedence for 7 figure compensation.

The comp is as spada mentioned - 100k-300k and a combination 50/50 stable/badger. This TC is competitive but well within the normal TC range. The badger/stock component is high because this is based on the price of badger when the core team member began making significant contributions. This is also consistent w/ how most stock packages work (they are priced at the valuation of the company when you joined). It is definitely a little awkward discussing retro-active stock grants after a project is successful. Like I mentioned before, this would be much less of a conversation if the price of Badger was still < $10.

This means that going forward, future core contributors will be offered a similar package of 100k-300k TC (based on seniority) with the stock component (badger) at some trailing TWAP (due to volatility) at their start date. Higher TC may be offered to “exceptional” candidates who can bring tremendous value to the DAO.

Performance will be assessed by the seeders and a small senior core (there is an element of both self policing and peer accountability). Core team members will be assessed on progress against the roadmap. Obviously this will have some level of subjectivity as its not uncommon to hit a variety of roadblocks when executing on a technical/operational roadmap.

I can give some background on myself and my role here at Badger. I’ve spent most of my time building platform and core infrastructure at a variety of startups/large tech companies (ride sharing/finance/cybersecurity/health etc.). Most recently I was the first/founding engineer at a high growth database startup (built from the ground up for scale - targeting specialized workloads at large tech companies).

My role at Badger up until now involved working in tandem w/ a seeding engineer to launch Digg. Went through many iterations of validation/review testing to gain confidence in the implementation. Going forward, I will be driving execution on CLAWs and various other integrations (we have quite a few in the pipeline). Some other responsibilities include strategy/security review etc.

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Thanks Shakeshack.

If core members had a short paragraph each their background and role like this I think everyone would be reassured about the proposal.

It’s looking like this might be the best team in defi.

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I’m very appreciative of your response, thank you.

I believe you will put some minds at ease here with addressing the breakdown and sharing a little about yourself. Communication from team to community has challenges and BadgerDAO has not been immune to this, but your above comment is setting a good example. As did some of @Mr_Po BIPs.

I hope that some of the other members of the team will follow your lead here and provide a little background on themselves. It helps to knit the team and community closer.

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Hey all,

A bit about myself, graduated with MS in computer science and have 5 years experience in distributed computing, web3/react development and other DAG based app development. Day job focused on digital innovation and product management, iterating quickly on proof of value projects and identifying new trends in digitization.

I have a number of roles around the DAO, mainly focused on the improvement of the app.badger.finance app, technical consulting for app integrations, off chain api development, 3rd party adaptor development and community technical question board :D.

I have been contributing to development since the launch of v1, helping with stabilization there and the development of v2. I also set up the discourse, snapshot, defipulse adaptors and am working as lead of a number of new products.

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First off, I’m very excited to keep working with Badger, theres unlimited potential here. Some background on myself:

Pre-Crypto: Econ+Philosophy major. 10+ years in tradfi fintech. Mostly at a startup making order management systems (trading, allocation, pnl, compliance, reporting, etc) (went 200-2k employees while there). Held roles in QA, Deployment, Management, and eventually launched and ran the custom development team (dev team of ~15). Was onsite at hedge funds in NY through the '08 financial crisis and seeing how the bullshit-sausage is made in the current financial system informs a lot of my motivations for working in DeFi.

Crypto: Quit my job and went full time crypto in 2018 mostly focusing on DeFi. I would consider myself a “Product and tokenomics” guy. Worked on atomica.org on a number of products (in different stages of release) for ~2 years. Extremely active DeFi user and host of DeFi Download. Founded 0confirmation.com (0 confirmation BTC trading on ethereum using renVM, live on limited mainnet). Member at metacartel and a few other DAOs.

At Badger: I have been and will continue to be very active in product management and mechanism/token design. To date I have built the models for the DIGG airdrop, Badger Boost, and Peg Based Emissions while contributing to a number of organizational and internal initiatives. I am currently working on the MEME honeypot v2, emissions overhaul, and a bunch of other things. A major focus I have right now is how to bridge community input and actual product design & development (Making BIPs real).

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Hey Everyone, been monitoring the comments here but been a bit busy to jump in yet.

Bit about me. Graduated with a degree in finance focusing on risk management and investment strategy for alternative asset classes. Spent some time building entry and mid level educational and quantitative information at an options exchange and was exploring hft firms before finding crypto in ‘16 and having a change of heart about “financial services”.

Since then I’ve worked with a number of startups as well as two non-profits doing general finance and building out investment proposals in addition to helping with community development and day to day operational decisions. Spent some time helping a community focused blockchain organization build out Opportunity Fund investment strategies.

For the last two months, pretty much every waking hour outside of my day job has been Badger. I want nothing more than to spend my entire day working on the products the DAO is working on, that is in no small part thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment here.

My goals are to ensure that the Treasury and DAO revenues are put to the most productive uses possible, ensuring diversified cash flow streams that can power the DAO for decades if not centuries. In addition to that, I believe we have an opportunity to innovate around how DAO communities manage funds.

Lastly I just want to say thanks to all I’ve interacted with so far. A community that takes time to consider and critique what’s going on means that Badger has an incredible chance to pave the way for how DAOs operate in the future. On a personal level it’s incredible to interact daily with smart and considerate people who are working towards awesome common goals.

One way or another the community has my pledge that I will continue to dedicate my time, attention, and care to what’s being built here.

We have a chance to build bitcoin banking products that last till our grandchildren’s grandchildren can use them. I think that’s beautiful and I truly think that Badger DAO has what it takes to get there.

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Hi everyone,

Out of the above I’m probably the newest member on the team - but hopefully you still know who I am!

My background is in Computer & Electrical Engineering, however I’ve focused essentially my entire career in cloud based software development. I am a full stack developer proficient in several stacks, and also bring DevOps knowledge with respect to scaling solutions for cloud applications.

I’ve been around Badger since essentially day one in a less formal role hosting and maintaining my own Badger informational site: https://sett.vision/

Additionally I have been hosting and maintaining an API for data access surrounding Badger DAO to provide information on yields and TVL to third parties such as CoinGecko and Defi Llama.

Documentation for v1 API may be found here: https://docs.sett.vision/

Moving forward, I’ll be primarily focusing on the development and maintenance of the Badger App and ecosystem API.

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With 175 votes and 87% approval, this BIP has quorum and has achieved supermajority support. Thank you all for the discussions and suggestions. Hopefully, the many of us that have chimed in have helped address most of your concerns.

With overwhelming majority support, I will be pushing this to snapshot in the next hour. Stay tuned for an updated snapshot link.

Edit:
Snapshot link
https://snapshot.page/#/badgerdao.eth/proposal/Qme2k7tbn2geSRNFpeUXoTjzgJdR1t5ELXVbKRhEM9fKMX

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You may want to add a 3rd option of “Needs more discussion” for times like this. I personally voted yes, because I do agree with the plan overall, but would have voted for more discussion. Pay is a touchy subject to begin with, and adding additional compensation or more complex payments, people get extra curious. :slight_smile:

Maybe a BIP is needed to set some baseline HR type rules. Compensation plans, bonus structures, and eligibility criteria are a few that come to mind. Could speed things up if the vote was for “Onboarding NAME using NameofCompPlan @ $$$$ per year effective MM/DD/CCYY.”

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I agree with you. Also, remembering the time and vision to create such an open DeFi community project that is pegged against Bitcoin, is something that this space needs. Lots of work has gone into a project that touches everyone worldwide, so I think the salary fits the scale of the project.

It pains me that I haven’t been more engaged in this BIP discussion and I apologize for that.

As mentioned the overarching feedback is vesting and lack of details on salary structure.

Firstly less we forget what can happen to a token value in crypto? I’ve been in the space for 8 years and things I never thought I would see happen not only happened but got much worse than expected.

We need to consider what happens when people with families that have busted their tail working multiple jobs on Badger when it was just another new project, leave their job for a full time contributor role with 50/50 BADGER/USDC compensation. I see a lot of comments about “they are making a million dollars”, guys 3 weeks ago it was 1/10 that!

The space is very unique and the volatility is unprecedented. What happens if it goes down 80%? We need to think about that side.

The fact of the matter is, these 11 core contributors made Badger what it is and without them we wouldn’t be here. In my opinion they deserve every penny of this compensation package and all the upside that will come with it.

Daily unlocking of Badger comes with the other side of the coin, the tap can be voted to turn off if there is lack of performance. That coupled with volatility of Badger price is enough in my book to not follow “traditional vesting structures”. I think it aligns the team even more.

Regardless I love the engagement here. This is what decentralized governance is all about.

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