I really like the overall layout of everything. I’d just like one clarification:
How would new people be able to enter the space? As @Narb also just asked: if the 400 Token threshold will keep every (or most) current members to hold their token, how will newcomers be able to join? IF there are any plans to contribute liquidity to any kind of Layer1 Ethereum exchange, I’d think it’d be necessary to include those plans (or at least an outline of them) in this summary. Legally, shouldn’t it still be possible to keep $CODE as a non-monetary (at least at the time of distribution) governance token and then create a pool out of the treasury?
I think it’s an important detail of the tokenomics, how future members will be able to get a hand on these.
Yes! So in this document founding team === core team. Will add some further thoughts to the FAQ today but to shed some light on the thinking behind this…
It’s been awesome to see people in the community take on lots of responsibility and also others who are interested in starting new guilds, but it’s clear the structure needs to evolve to support such people and recognise their contributions. Current thinking (to be debated on and decided by community) is to change the nature of the core team to FT staff that perform specific roles and removing the strong equality with guild leaderships so there’s a clearer path for new guilds to form and new people to take on leadership roles within them.
How will the tokens claim process work? Will there be a website claim page much like ENS did or just a straight airdrop? If it’s a straight airdrop are the gas fess going to be taken out of the treasury?
Likely a claim page like ENS!
How will new DAO membership work? Since people need 400 tokens to remain a member, thus causing the residual effects of people to hodl, how will new folks look to join? Will it be the application process as discussed on another thread and if so, will those tokens be distributed from the treasury?
These things generally work themselves out. But many members will be receiving more than 400 tokens. That + opportunities for application process, etc etc.
Nice proposal! Early contributor rewards stand out as a big chunk but seem well deserved. I think the way they will be distributed (i.e. Coordinape) will be key to the DAO’s longevity. Later contributors will also expect to be well rewarded for their efforts and will compare themselves to early contributors so that needs to be balanced and planned for.
I didn’t hear about Developer DAO until after the initial mint, and so bought one on OpenSea because I wanted to participate. According to this I won’t get the tokens and have just wasted my money? And the guy that sold it gets the tokens instead? That doesn’t seem very fair.
I would assume if you changed governance process you would allow anyone to use their current NFT to claim tokens, not do a backdated airdrop thus screwing over all the people that purchased later on Open Sea hoping to participate.
Great proposal. Thank you for preparing it and also for mentioning other projects as an example (it was a good read on the topic to see what others did).
5% partners basically represents the partnership with Gitcoin. I think this a great idea and I already voted for it on snapshot. Also, I really liked the idea of each DAO having to hold 50% of the coins for two years.
So this is why I’d like to propose to also up the vesting time for the founding team and advisors. AND also introducing it for early contributors.
One year is a very short time traditionally for vesting and I think it’s important to have an incentive to keep the founding team members and early contributors on board. This is why I’d propose to have a two year vesting for 50% of the tokens going to founding team, advisors and early contributors.
If the vesting time is supposed to be shorter, I’d rather prefer to give only 5% to founding team, advisors and early contributors without vesting and move more tokens into the treasury to secure future development of the DAO.
Great proposal. It’s clear that the team has pushed to be fair and long term minded in approach.
A few points that I would like to make note on, but feeling good about it passing as is:
I have a strong preference for 2-3 year vesting for all involved. Getting some early liquidity is fine, but believe we should minimise the number of millionaires on token drop and maximise those created over the lifetime of the DAO.
Would have liked to see some exploration on a seasons model where new tokens are minted and distributed each season over relying on a fixed supply treasury, but I’ve not done that work myself and understand why team would go with existing models. Perhaps this can be done as a separate proposal.
I’m a little concerned about governing power being concentrated. 50% will be held in the treasury to begin with and so Core team, early contributors, and gitcoin combined will beat out the wider community in voting. community participation in voting is likely to be significantly lower and so perhaps the community vote won’t count for as much? Perhaps the delegation model can address this.
Wonder if an NFT per season (using layer 2) that gives access and governance rights is a better model for access and governance than a financial token that won’t be accessible to most. How will we make it so a broad number of contributors can join and benefit from the DAO if the entry price is high?
In honesty, I think there would have been a bunch of interest from value aligned DAOs to do a token swap as founding partners of D_D. I think engaging top ~5 super aligned ones would do wonders for the DAO and this won’t be as compelling post token launch.
I know its been mentioned elsewhere and that the 50% treasury exists for things like this - but I would really like to see that as a DAO we explicitly have scholarship allocations mentioned from the start.
Making this explicit from the beginning lines up properly with our values and keeps the door more open to folks from more underrepresented communities. While I as a DAO member know we have these values I think we need to express that through these allocations as this is a public item that folks looking into the DAO would see first.
I think we have a unique opportunity to lead the way for developer communities in the web3 space and have a responsibility to make sure that we’re being as intentional as possible to get a wider variety of voices in web3.
@willblackburn This looks great – thanks for writing it up!
The only question I had echoes some of the other comments re: how we define “early contributors”. Just interested to hear more about the mechanics here out of interest and for my own edification.
Super pumped about all this. Thanks for all the work you and the core team have put in to it!
I think you have a fair point about buying off secondary. I sent some to friends with the initial hope that the air drop would follow the NFT. On the other hand, @willblackburn and others have mentioned not dropping to anyone who doesn’t still hold the mint, so whoever you bought it from wouldn’t also get the air drop in that case. I struggle to make a good argument as to why someone who bought off secondary shouldn’t get the airdrop though.
Thanks for the feedback and your continued role you play in the community!
1 - I have a strong preference for 2-3 year vesting for all involved. Getting some early liquidity is fine, but believe we should minimise the number of millionaires on token drop and maximise those created over the lifetime of the DAO.
3 - I’m a little concerned about governing power being concentrated. 50% will be held in the treasury to begin with and so Core team, early contributors, and gitcoin combined will beat out the wider community in voting. community participation in voting is likely to be significantly lower and so perhaps the community vote won’t count for as much? Perhaps the delegation model can address this.
Put these together for my answer! We did spend a lot of time going back and forth on the vesting. We eventually opted for a smaller overall allocation to the team with quicker vesting. You usually see a larger allocation vesting over 2-4 years. So we still wanted the team massively incentivized to contribute and thought this was the right balance to do that with only 10% to that team.
Also spent a lot of time on the governing power at launch. If you check the FAQ, it outlines the power at launch which does show that the airdrop for current members still outweighs the founding team, early contributors, and gitcoin (55.6% v. 44.4%). That does assume 100% community participation which isn’t exactly realistic. When thinking through these groups, we had mentally grouped the early contributors with the airdrop as the “community”, note that the founding team isn’t eligible. That skews the voting even more in favor of the community - 77.8% v 22.2%. We were comfortable with this and want to focus on delegation like you mention!
Would love to hear your response here!
Would have liked to see some exploration on a seasons model where new tokens are minted and distributed each season over relying on a fixed supply treasury, but I’ve not done that work myself and understand why team would go with existing models. Perhaps this can be done as a separate proposal.
Yes, we definitely wanted to leave the door open for things like this for the community to decide through governance.
Wonder if an NFT per season (using layer 2) that gives access and governance rights is a better model for access and governance than a financial token that won’t be accessible to most. How will we make it so a broad number of contributors can join and benefit from the DAO if the entry price is high?
This is another thing we want to leave open to governance by the community. But I think many in the community agree that a token only gated community has issues of inclusion.
In honesty, I think there would have been a bunch of interest from value aligned DAOs to do a token swap as founding partners of D_D. I think engaging top ~5 super aligned ones would do wonders for the DAO and this won’t be as compelling post token launch.
Yep, agree with you here as well. That being said, I think we best serve our community by getting the token in their hands and then moving forward.
I guess it’s hard to discuss whilst not knowing what the team was optimising for. To me a smaller allocation and faster vesting seems like it’s optimising for an exit to the community, which is fine if that’s what the team wants. If the core team wants to drive this forward then I would personally be a fan of larger allocation and slower vesting. The energy pre and post token is very different and most of my points are around trying to align everyone and create most value post token. I don’t understand the idea of not making it the best financial opportunity alongside the intrinsic drivers for founding teams as that leadership is still critical imo.
Fair enough. That makes sense. Thanks for breaking it down. Voting power dynamics is probably outside of the scope of this conversation, I was just a little worried it may be completed broken, but your breakdown has helped clear that up.
cool cool. guess we can work these out as we go.
This is probably the point I feel most strongly about. I have to state upfront that I am biased as I am also core team at Radicle and believe we would make a great launch partner. Having stated that, these are the reasons I think we should consider this:
I have actively been speaking to partners as an active member of the mbd guild and understanding sentiment from large web3 (sorry Jack) projects. We have some amazing projects that want to work closely with us.
I have been building a bunch of D2D relationships. A number of great DAO projects such as Figment Learn and web3.university launch has been with a list of founding partners and everyone wins given the quality. Projects are much more inclined to give over a serious piece of their ecosystem’s work/resources to a DAO that the are founding members of.
The enthusiasm pre and post token launch is entirely different. So although I understand the desire to just getting the token out into community hands to then let the rest happen via community governance, it won’t work anywhere near as well to get partners in.
I don’t think it will create much more delay (couple of weeks?) to speak with the top few and get them to express a strong and clear interest in being a founding partner and we can just a agree a founding partner pool for now.
I think these partners will be best for both the short and long term outcomes for D_D. In the short term we will immediately have more liquidity in our treasury, our community/token will have more credibility, and in the long run those partners will be very aligned to work closely with us to build D_D as a significant part of their ecosystems.
As I’ve already mentioned, I trust the team knows what it’s doing and have been very impressed across the board with the approach taken, so am at ease. These are just my 2 cents and I am happy to support the proposal as is.
Are you just ignoring my post? I don’t think you realize how bad it looks to outsiders by airdropping tokens to people that minted and leaving those who purchased the NFT later with nothing.
You told your existing members about this reactive airdrop, but the outside community still thought you needed to buy an NFT to participate right?
In essence you’ve told your members: “Your NFT is now worthless, you should sell it on Opensea to scam some newbie out of their ETH, AND we’ll still airdrop you your $COIN”.
Do you think encouraging this behavior is good and fair? There’s over 100 people who’ve basically been scammed over here and you’re rewarding the people who scammed them.
Apologies for the delayed response, I am not ignoring you as there are a number of posts I have yet to reply to!
This is definitely still being discussed in the community as a whole. For clarity, we did put out this information publicly on Twitter (https://twitter.com/developer_dao/status/1459794282626396163) and changed the OpenSea description. But with a token like this, we cannot disable trading of course.
All that being said, we have continued to discuss the NFT’s role in the community going forward (potentially still allowing access, etc) and hope to have an update soon.
It’s difficult to avoid profiteering on either side. If we didn’t use a snapshot, those that hoarded tokens get to profit off of selling them & gaining governance. So in the end, we are left with having to make some trade-offs while hopefully being able to solve for individual circumstances like those that have bought the token with the genuine desire to join the DAO. I think we will get there.
Hey @nas thanks for raising this concern. I’m with you; I think those subject to vesting should be incentivized to improve the DAO over a longer period. I’m in favor of bumping that to two years and have communicated that to the rest of the founding team.
