Governance Token Proposal - Request for Feedback

DAO members! Please see the below as we request feedback around the Governance Token proposal.

Note: We are requesting feedback! Following feedback, the revised proposal will follow our governance process through a Forum vote and a Snapshot vote!

Please also view the FAQ - Governance Token Proposal Companion after reading this proposal!


Title: Proposal for a Developer DAO ERC-20 Governance Token
Authors: willblackburn, kempsterrrr, nader, marc, with-heart, Erik_Knobl

Summary

This proposal outlines the creation of a Developer DAO governance token - $CODE.

Token & Developer DAO Overview

Developer DAO seeks to onboard, educate, and support web3 developers with the goal to build web3 tools and public goods. With an explosion in growth, the DAO needs to further decentralize. The creation of a governance token will help the DAO expand its operations and membership through a diversified community treasury.

The token - $CODE - will provide the governing power to accomplish these goals, done by distributing tokens to existing members. A treasury will be established for future partnerships and contributions while governance will accrue to members that contribute to the future successes of Developer DAO.

The decision to create a new governance token comes as an expansion upon the Genesis NFT - Devs for Revolution. While these NFTs will be used for early voting, it does not solve for partnerships, future memberships, and future contributors. Therefore, $CODE will become the primary governance token for Developer DAO moving forward.

$CODE is an ERC-20 token on mainnet Ethereum using audited and battle-tested smart contracts open-sourced by OpenZeppelin.

Token Distribution

Token Distribution

There will be 10,000,000 $CODE tokens.

  • 50% to the Developer DAO Treasury
  • 25% to current members
  • 10% to founding team and advisors*
  • 10% to early contributors
  • 5% to partners

* subject to vesting

Developer DAO Treasury

The Developer DAO Treasury - found at 0x7128f5ff32eD07Ce12E6a9deBE32BB40F9884b3C - will receive 50% of $CODE tokens. The treasury will be governed by $CODE holders and exists to further the mission of the DAO to onboard web3 developers.

Tokens held in the DAO treasury will not be used for governance. Distributions from the Treasury will only come from additional proposals that pass the full governance voting process.

CODEdrop - Current Members

Current Members of the Developer DAO will receive 25% of $CODE tokens via a retroactive airdrop. Current Members are defined as any genesis NFT holder at block #13612670. Using a snapshot of members at this time helps counter Sybil attacks leading to unwanted members receiving a large amount of governing power.

$CODE will be distributed to members as follows:

Distribution Equation:

Member allocation = 400 (NFT) + 359 (POAP or snapshot vote)

Every member will receive 400 tokens for holding the NFT at the time of the snapshot. At the start of Season 1 (TBD), membership in the DAO will require 400 tokens to be held. If a member holds a POAP from our Developer DAO town halls before Season 0 OR voted on either of our first two snapshot proposals, they will receive an additional 359 tokens. A member can receive up to 759 tokens through the airdrop alone.

Founding Team & Advisors

The Founding Team (6 members) and Advisors (3 members) will receive 10% of $CODE tokens. The Founding Team will retain 6%, current Advisors will retain 0.9%, and 3.1% will be set aside for future allocation.

50% of the Founder Team & Advisors allocation will vest at token issuance with 50% of the tokens subject to a 1 year vesting period. Distributions will happen monthly. Vested tokens can be used as governing power, while unvested tokens cannot.

It is essential for the DAO to have committed members helping lead and structure DAO operations and governance. Incentivizing these members is key to this goal. The lockup and vesting periods ensure that governing power starts in the hands of the DAO members and stays there.

Early Contributors

Early Contributors will receive 10% of $CODE tokens in addition to the airdrop. It is important we recognize early contributions made to the DAO before fanfare and a reward mechanism was in place. The 10% of $CODE tokens will be allocated by DAO members using Coordinape after this proposal passes. Founding Team & Advisors will not be eligible for these rewards.

Partners

Gitcoin will receive 5% of the token. Gitcoin has been identified as a perfect partner for Developer DAO with aligned missions and values. By partaking in a governance token swap, we receive governing power of the Gitcoin DAO and funding for our Treasury.

The Gitcoin partnership, to be passed in a separate governance vote, allocated 50,000 GTC to the Developer DAO treasury in exchange for 5% of the $CODE supply.

Delegation

At launch, we will look to switch our off-chain voting (Snapshot) strategy to ERC-20 voting with delegation. This would allow holders of governing power to delegate their power to other members in the community.

Delegation is an important part of DeGov (decentralized governance) as it allows for increased voting participation. Many votes do not require the full attention of constituents, while others may be complicated and require specific knowledge and time invested in research to understand. By delegating voting power, those that have the knowledge and desire to put in the time can serve as voters.

Delegation is optional and anyone can nominate themselves as a delegate. The DAO will set up ways to do this easily.

Governance Tokens & Distribution Advice

To draft our governance token proposal and formulate the token distribution, industry standards and leading advisors were consulted.

Cooper Turley

An early advocate for DAOs, Cooper has been an important contributor and advisor to a number of Governance Token launches including Gitcoin and ENS. Cooper has worked closely with the Developer DAO team to present the structure and rollout of this proposal and the $CODE token.

Preethi Kasireddy

Preethi is an experienced teacher, founder, engineer, investor, and banker who has built smart contracts for various crypto projects. Preethi started her crypto career as a software engineer at Coinbase and helped launch Ethereum onto the Coinbase platform. Preethi will help us become the #1 platform for Web 3.0 developers through marketing, developing new partnerships, writing technical posts, and more.

57 Likes

If I understand correctly, Coordinate will be used to distribute 10% of supply to early contributors after the proposal passes, meaning contributions will be rewarded?

Or do people who’ve contributed before get the tokens?

2 Likes

Thank you for this, I think it has been very thoughtfull and well crafted. My only suggestion is that early contributors tokens should also be subject to a vesting schedule. An early contributor who has been part of this project for a while should not have any issues with this, and their aligment should be no different than those of the core team.
Finally, I have one question: where will the token be issued? I know this was discussed in the goverment DAO but i dont see any reference to this neither here or in the FAQ’s, perhaps I am missing something.

4 Likes

Great proposal. However, my old eth wallet was compromised yesterday and the scammer funneled out all my crypto. I was able to move my NFT (the ones I care about to the new wallet, DDao token being 1 of them) to the new wallet am I still eligible?

Coordinape works as such:

  • Voters each get 100 votes
  • Each voter can distribute votes to other voters as they see fit, or can choose to refrain from voting

Publicly contributing people will theoretically be voted as contributors and be rewarded accordingly.

  1. I think we should have a platform where people can summarize their contributions in one paragraph (tasks, time?). This will help people who have contributed but are not quite so public facing (github contributions for example).

What does this platform look like? Everyone who is interested submits their paragraph into a notion page?

  1. What is the approximate timeline we are working with here?
  • Token RFC for ~ 1-2 weeks
  • finalization and adjustments based on RFC ~ 1 week
  • Coordinape vote open for early contributors ~ 1 week
  • airdrop distribution after 3-4 weeks, and leave redemption open for ~6 months?
  1. What is the proposed inflation rate for the token?

IMO the steady inflation is critical because it allows for:

  • new DAO members to meaningfully rise through the ranks as they contribute (prevents voting power consolidation due to being early members, requires consistent contributions to maintain voting power)
  • room for full-time team members to be compensated accordingly
  1. Since we have been talking about full-time members, do we have anything approximating an operating budget for D_D?
    Is this out of scope for this governance token proposal RFC?
    If it is out of scope, does this need to be addressed before token launch? My gut says this should be at the minimum penciled out so we aren’t flying blind.
4 Likes

Yes you will still be eligible. If you are able, can you submit a pull request to the snapshot github repo? If you voted in either of the snapshots or collected any of the meeting poaps, submit a second pull request in the appropriate file.
Look up your compromised address, replace it with your new secured public address, and then submit the pull request. In your commit message, just briefly describe why you are submitting this.

If you need help, you can PM me or ask in the discord, I’m sure someone can help you.

1 Like

There is no doubt that early contributors deserve to be compensated generously, and 10% feels appropriate. The choice of Coordinape for bottom-up allocation of rewards is also great.
Will there be more details, or perhaps a second proposal on how this 10% will be allocated? Or perhaps, examples of good use/misuse/gaming Coordinape, so that we can all be more convinced that this will be fairly distributed, and be sure that the community knows how to use the tool as intended? 10% to early contributors is well-deserved, but its a big chunk, so we should try to allocate it fairly and transparently.

3 Likes

Great proposal. I have some questions if you don’t mind, Will:

  1. Who are the people in the founding team? The current Core team members?
  2. I believe we should not put a stamp on the Gitcoin allocation until the snapshot vote for that particular proposal passes. We can maybe call it ‘allocated for partnerships’ for now.
  3. When are we planning this airdrop?
  4. Would this airdrop mark the end of season 0?
  5. Will $CODE have any monetary value at launch, or in the future?

Thanks

9 Likes

great proposal, thanks, the distribution seems to be fair in my opinion. I’m not familiar with Coordinap, but i like the fact that early contributors are rewarded by their peers, seems to be the right way to do it.

3 Likes

Nice proposal. I do have some questions regarding:

  1. Do we keep 400 tokens as the entry point of DAO? Should we consider the price after the code release? It might be too expensive the new developer to join. 400 Token + Gas fee. We should make the DAO easy to join and grow for a long run.
  2. Could we keep more CODE token for scholarship and so on for excellent developer who is lack of funding.
1 Like

is there any difference between 1 NFT and 2 NFT?
And is there any difference about the poap amount?

1 Like

Great proposal. Anyone holds many NFTs still will be received only 400 $CODE right?

1 Like

@skyone @xyholic
Token Distribution Details

2 Likes

cool,look forward for the next steps.

1 Like

Excellent proposal and happy to be a part of D_D!!! The early contributors are desired to those 10% of CODE tokens and thanks to their contributions.

Question about additional 359 tokens of CODEdrop: should those tokens be required to be held as well? In the proposal, it's said that at the start of Season 1, membership in DAO will require 400 tokens to be held.
1 Like

Agree with this allocation proposal :grinning:

3 Likes

nice , people work togeter, i want in

2 Likes

You should also include some basic proof (signed message & public key of original address) with your pr.

No. 1 or 10 poaps or stapshot votes = 359 (POAP or snapshot vote)

A member can receive up to 759 tokens through the airdrop alone.

I read it as: The maximum amount of $CODE a member can receive is 759.

What is the equation for the airdrop?

NFT holders at the snapshot will each receive 400 tokens. If you voted in one of our first two Snapshot proposals or claimed a town hall POAP before Season 0, you are eligible for an additional 359 tokens. Additional contributions will be rewarded through the Early Contributor rewards.

FAQ: FAQ - Governance Token Proposal Companion

1 Like

I’m all for giving more rewards to contributors and hope developerdao prospers

2 Likes