BIP 59: Grants Month 6

BIP | Badger Improvement Proposals
1

Category: Governance

Scope: Distribute grants for Month 6 and formally close out monthly contributor framework to transition to project-based program

Objectives:

  • Outline Month 6 General Contributors and proposed grant amounts
  • Describe responsibilities of those receiving recurring grants
  • Formalize closure of monthly contributor program

Overview

As BadgerDAO continues to grow, we are making efforts to move towards a more project-based compensation system that allows contributors to join building with Badger in a more focused and targeted manner. Simultaneously, we are looking to formalize a process by which hiring can be accomplished expeditiously, bringing on core team members directly as needed or based on exceptional project work.

Thus, this proposal will lay out the final round of monthly grants in lump sums that include backpay for certain contributors. Each contributor is named along with the function to which they contributed, the amount of their grant, and their specific contribution. As always, General Contributors are compensated in $BADGER from the treasury; however, in light of recent market volatility, amounts are denominated in USDC with the amount of $BADGER being calculated at the time of payout.

Though the new processes to be implemented are not yet finalized, the team is working hard to quickly introduce them by the end of the month, so please keep an eye out for these plans.

Details

Please note that the amounts provided may also include backpay for certain contributors who have been working full-time or overtime or made significant contributions to BadgerDAO’s operational or technical advancement.

Name Function Amount Contribution
Arben Advisory $10,000 Business development/institutional relationships
Cookies Development $4,000 Bot Squad
ethkaneki#7128 Development $6,000 API development and enhancement
Ethkey Advisory $5,000 Review work completed in April
Faces#5567 Project Management $2,000 Project management of new strategy development and procedure document
Gabs#0291 Content/Marketing $1,500 Video editing
gosuto#7559 Business & Economics $3,750 Business reporting and dashboarding
ICEITH#5793 Content/Marketing, Project Management $1,500 Badger Medal, events and launch calendars, Badgers Never Hide, Badger Boost Visualization
Ingalandia #9826 Content/Marketing $1,500 Enter the Badger episode 3
kerthmash#2764 Development $2,500 AWS account reorg
Kilogold Development $10,000 Badger Arcade Faucet development and advisory on NFT gamification
Lipp Advisory $10,000 Organizational and operations structure, legal, and business development
Omnifarius Content/Marketing, Development, Support $5,000 digg.finance development and hosting
plug#5346 Development $5,000 Kubernetes-based execution environment for bots and keepers
Richard Advisory $5,000 Quanstamp (Smart contract audit and review)
ri0t#2144 Content/Marketing $900 Newsletter (for both Months 5 and 6)
robCarl Operations $800 Dune Data querying and auditing (treasury)
saj#8488 QA, Development $20,000 Quality assurance, testing and bug fixes
Tritium Project Management, Development $20,000 Bounty Program, DevOps, community outreach, and building tech org
WasabiBoatResearch#0577 Content/Marketing $5,000 Content creation, community leadership, marketing
Wezekbruh#1042 Content/Marketing, Business & Economics, Advisory $5,000 Content creation, community leadership, financial management
will.i.am#8600 Content/Marketing $12,000 Marketing strategy, content management and distribution, social media, events

Support

Name Amount Role
blackbear#4259 $7,500 Head of Support
Kryptobi $1,500 Member of Support team
sp7290#4859 $1,500 Member of Support team
hyment#1402 $1,500 Support team voluntary assist

Total Allocation for month 6 = $148,450.00

BIP-55 Bounty Payout Details

Per BIP-55, the items below have been pre-authorized and were already paid out under the Bounty Program:

Discord Name Bounty Result Badger Paid
0xGranger Bridge flow + ibBTC (scout) GitHub - 0x000da38758/scout 225
Gosuto Bridge flow (dune) Dune Analytics 100
Cookies Bot Squad + Sourcecred Trial (April) In Progress: Bot improvements by btcookies ¡ Pull Request #98 ¡ Badger-Finance/badger-system ¡ GitHub 200
robcarl ibBTC dash (Dune) Dune Analytics 40
hywelpaca Yearn Docs Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.. 75
Flashwav sett.vision refactor https://github.com/Badger-Finance/badger-dashboard/pull/8 150
Alex The Entreprenerd Strategy review (mstable) Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. 150
Alex The Entreprenerd Strategy review (unit) Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. 150

Vote “For” if in favor of the proposed Month 6 grants and vote “Against” if not in favor.

  • For
  • Against

0 voters

2

Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but is it just me, or is there no poll included with this BIP to be able to vote?

3

Apologies, it’s there now!

2 Likes
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I think the USDC compensation is a brilliant idea!
It saves us from adding more sell pressure on the governance token.

On the flip side, those of us who wish to collect in $BADGER can freely trade the USDC for $BADGER, adding more demand for the token.

I’ve been recently looking for ways to create buying pressure for $BADGER, so I’m happy to see us trying different things here.

5

What’s the difference between that and just buying Badger and paying out in Badger?

6

Good question. I admit I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s mass assumptions on my part and my comment reads a bit misleading… I’m currently designing a literal Badger Arcade (with games and prizes). One incentive for me is to foster $BADGER appreciation somehow. I’m experimenting with vaguely similar ideas to $BADER/$USDC/$ArcadeToken liquidity pools and such. It’s too early to share more, and I realize it’s beyond the scope of this BIP.

Sorry for the distraction. More to come. :slight_smile:

7

I am always in support of fair compensation for all the people contributing to the DAO and usually vote for.

In this case I can’t. I would happily provide my reasons, but I know nobody cares. I have voiced them before anyway.

I am fully aware that this will easily pass, I just prefer it is not unanimous.

1 Like
8

well if you would happily provide your reasons, why not make yourself a little happier? :upside_down_face:
It would be more useful feedback than the semi-silent “nay”.

To the previous commenters, I believe there is a little misunderstanding: the compensation is paid in Badger, not in USDC - it’s just at the rates of the day when it’s paid as per:

amounts are denominated in USDC with the amount of $BADGER being calculated at the time of payout.

So according to USD price of Badger when the distribution is made.

I wouldn’t mind contributors receiving a part of their compensation in USD and a part of it in Badger, if there is a demand for it and the proportion that everyone would be fine with.

But I’d like to note that from the token holders’ perspective, contributors’ salaries don’t affect the price in any meaningful manner even if they were to sell most of it.

1 Like
9

Noted. Thank you for the insight, @Mr_Po!

@cryptomooniac, I understand how you might feel like befalling on deaf ears (or eyes?). I do think that periodic reminders of differing opinions serve as “writing on the wall” when retrospectively evaluating our DAO’s performance. Historically, people only tend to take corrective action when they become affected by their own mistakes. If/When we get there, your thoughts may very well become a voice of reason. That voice of reason does not exist if all we get is a silent ‘nay’. Just my two cents, nothing more than that.

10

Since you ask, I gladly explain. Two main things:

  1. More info / data in order to vote and make an informed decision. Even when I trust the team and all the proposed grants might be more than fair, there are some handsome amounts in the BIP which I believe would require more than a 7 word description. I will give you an example: saj#8488 is being granted $20,000 for “quality assurance, testing and bug fixes”. That could mean a lot of things. Again, I trust the team and I am sure that he did a great work, invested a lot of his time and he fully deserves this grant. But still I feel like I am voting blindly because I don’t really know what his contribution was. I believe that we as a community, deserve a little bit more than such short and generic description.

  2. The conflict of interest that I have also mentioned previously. I do think that Tritium is someone that has contributed to the DAO in several ways and I am also sure he deserves the amount being granted (even when I think we also deserve more than a 9 word description). But, he is also a community-appointed member of the council. The council consists of both people representing the team, and people representing the community which in my opinion, should be independent from the team. The fact that he is also contributing in some projects and receives grants proposed by the team, signals a clear conflict of interest for me.

3 Likes
11

I see, thanks for sharing. Although I have no swaying power on this, I will keep your concerns in mind when involving myself in related deliberations. FWIW, transparency is surely a welcome improvement - a challenging one when you think about coordinating many excited individuals running their own initiatives. I think this is something that will just need to slowly improve overtime as we get better at it.

I want to let it be known that your concerns are not ignored, at least by me. We’re all a bunch of apes (Badgers?) just trying to make the right decisions to the best of our abilities and we may not always get it right for an extended period of time. Thanks for staying with us on this.

1 Like
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  1. More info / data in order to vote and make an informed decision. Even when I trust the team and all the proposed grants might be more than fair, there are some handsome amounts in the BIP which I believe would require more than a 7 word description. I will give you an example: saj#8488 is being granted $20,000 for “quality assurance, testing and bug fixes”. That could mean a lot of things. Again, I trust the team and I am sure that he did a great work, invested a lot of his time and he fully deserves this grant. But still I feel like I am voting blindly because I don’t really know what his contribution was. I believe that we as a community, deserve a little bit more than such short and generic description.

I agree and have been working on this. All of the contributors on the technical side wrote detailed explanations of what they are doing, however in many cases the information is sensitive from a security and/or product messaging point of view, and it’s a really really haevy process to pick through it all (at least last month). I’m working to get engineers to write less detail so hopfully we can get something you can find.

The 20,000 that is being paid to Saj and I, are based on the fact that we are both working very hard like owner/operators and it has taken a while to add us to the core team. As the price of Badger went down, we both ended up being paid well below market rate and working well above 40 hours a week. The 20k was a combination of better pay this month and compensation for work done in prior months.

Some of our team members like @saj and @Lipp are super focused on building/internal stuff and aren’t as comfortable and/or don’t have the time to focus on communicating outward to the community. That being said, Saj plays a HUGE role in testing all our code, which we usally build too fast, finding problems and fixing them., Further, he works across the frontend and backend teams to think about integration and often times provides a useful interface between busy people.

Lipp has been spending tons of time thinking around how to change our internal processes and governance in order to be more efficient and reasonable. We’ve been working very closely together, and while he is thinking from an operational level and talking to all of our partners, large investors and researching what other DAOs are doing, I’m trying to figure out how to build this all into a cool council based representative democracy.

I’ll personally try to make sure that next months grants BIP has more context whenever possible.

  1. More info / data in order to vote and make an informed decision. Even when I trust the team and all the proposed grants might be more than fair, there are some handsome amounts in the BIP which I believe would require more than a 7 word description. I will give you an example: saj#8488 is being granted $20,000 for “quality assurance, testing and bug fixes”. That could mean a lot of things. Again, I trust the team and I am sure that he did a great work, invested a lot of his time and he fully deserves this grant. But still I feel like I am voting blindly because I don’t really know what his contribution was. I believe that we as a community, deserve a little bit more than such short and generic description.

I am aware that I am now on the core team and there are only 2 community members left on the Council (Ethkey and Gabriel), and that they too sometimes get paid by badger. It is also the case that the team members were not voted onto the council by the community.

As i told you in Discord, over the next weeks I will be working to restructure the council. Part of this will include a new election and another split. Suffice to say, all members will be elected by BIP, although the makeup of the council may be fixed.

3 community members
3 core team
1 representative from our VCs
1-2 representatives from other DAO’s that we hold a lot of coins from, such as Gitcoin or Sushi.

Again, in each category people will run and be voted in. As part of that, everyone will be re-elected, and while I’d be happy to remain on the council as a core team member, I’m also happy not to be if people feel it becomes too much of a conflict of interest. I shall leave it to the community to decide.

You’re right about all these things, but remember that this is all new and building good governance takes time and attention. We’re trying to get products out and do everything all at once, so sometimes it takes a while. The DAO is going through a lot of restructuring right now. We have new vaults coming out, and the team is getting more organized. I think we’re also realizing that sometimes instead of moving forward from the systems we had, we need to learn from what we have done and kind of rethink things from the ground up. It’s my goal to do this with governance soon:tm: and I really welcome your feedback and support, in so far as it is constructive and willing to accept that sometimes when faced with reality, perfect plans must be paired back enough so things can work and stay fast/agile.

When I think about DeFi DAO governance, I see small teams of workers and reasonably tight communities of holders and users trying to make decisions together. This is quite different than a governmental democracy, or a corporate board. It’s smaller in it’s nature and must be more human in nature.

I look at models more like community councils, home owners organisations in the US, small city councils. I even recalled a documentary I saw about Avocado cartels in central and south America, and how in some regions farmers had formed community run cartels to keep their communities safe and in control of their own destiny. Part of the Art Bounty posted on this months Gitcoin hack-a-thon is asking artists and thinkers to explore governance. The academics we are working with have also been considering decentralised governance from alternative points of view like historic cultures of native tribes and how they organised and governed themselves.

These same people will be doing an artistic residencee later this year, and part of this is thinking about how we can sponser these thinkers a bit and perhaps have them think about/look at/reflect on our context a bit in their work.

Maybe I’m getting a bit out there now, but the point is that I am thinking about this all the time, and have been since badger launched. I’m trying to figure out how to engage the right minds and the community and team team in a positive way and move forward and explore what it means to DAO, and how we can use that to do things better and faster, not get stuck in indecision and debate. I’ve been quite busy trying to fill gaps in the team through hack-a-thons and bounty programs, but that is going quite well so now I can focus on what is dearest to my heart. We will have many conversations about our next steps before anything is made, and our next steps will just be next steps, that we will invite wide retrospection over, reflect on, and then step a bit more :slight_smile:

2 Likes