P-5: Governance Token Proposal

This is the official forum proposal for our Governance token. Please see our previous Request for Feedback and our Companion FAQ. Vote on this proposal below.

Note 1: Change from RFF - Vesting portion of Founding Team & Advisors allocation will be subject to 2 year vesting, increased from 1 year vesting.

Note 2: The original NFT utility such as member access and other uses is outside the scope of this proposal and will be discussed by the community.


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 (pre-season 0 POAP or pre-season 0 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 (2 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 2 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.

Vote

  • Yes - Move proposal to Snapshot
  • No - Do not move proposal to Snapshot

0 voters

44 Likes

Hi,
I am a Java junior developer and I own 3 NFTs, I don’t understand what are the consequences of that.
I minted them because I liked them, then I discovered the project and the token airdrop.
I think this snapshot is too early and I will receive tokens for holding one NFT, not three of them, this is fair.
But what I did is not fair, because someone else will not get the airdrop because of me minting 3 and not only one.
I didn’t know if the NFTs supply had a limit or not, because on opensea I see 7.8K

5 Likes

Great work ! Thanks!

5 Likes

A well thought out proposal. Looking forward to the delegation process.

5 Likes

Unfortunately it is really hard to balance fair distribution. If people knew beforehand about how the token distribution would likely look, then we would have the problem of people gaming the system as much as they can before the snapshot.

Moving forwards however, other people will be able to join the DAO by purchasing the $CODE tokens on secondary market. This is to prevent the hard limit that membership via NFT creates.

4 Likes

Thank you very much for the answer

Plan looks great, very excited about the future

1 Like

Great work! How are we handling the addresses of the members who got hacked? I for one had mine hacked and tokens emptied out with the exception of the D4R NFT. I am certain the hacker has a bot that will collect any tokens in my address as soon as it is deposited. I ended up creating a new wallet address but wanted to verify if I should move the NFT or wait until $CODE is ready for the drop? I know someone had mentioned the possibility of using Merkle trees? Please advice.

2 Likes

Great work! Thank you very much for the great effort

1 Like

Can’t wait for us to start moving forward with the erc-20. There are a lot of people looking to join and giving them that opportunity will be fantastic.

excited for our community to grow!

1 Like

Thank you for the changes. Looks good to me.

1 Like

Thank you for putting this proposal together and spelling things out so clearly.

1 Like

Great work! Very clear and thought out, especially

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.

Seems obvious, but is a good mechanic to maintain.

3 Likes

I agree most of them. Just one suggestion to have a scholarship fund(Any member can contribute CODE toke to it), which will help any awesome Web3 developer to join DeveloperDao without any money concern.

6 Likes

The whole proposal makes total sense to me, except for the delegation part, as it’s too early to introduce that part of the DeGov and I prefer to keep the voting power distributed fairly and equally at least till we get to mid-Season 1 as I believe in the saying “your vote is your responsibility”

On the other hand, we have lots of members that are busy or inactive on the discord to be aware of an active snapshot vote. Looking at the last snapshot, around 1.11k members participated in voting out of 5.5k members i.e. 20% of members. This really makes it complicated to decide whether delegations is useful or not, as delegating 80% of voting power is dangerous and make us lose the decentralization essence

4 Likes

I think this proposal is reasonable, it will release more space for future web3 developers, in addition, it can also bring greater influence to DAO, thank you for your efforts.

3 Likes

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

Is this a hard cap or can more be minted?

2 Likes

I think 10,000,000 $CODE tokens. is the hard cap … I don’t think more would be minted .

2 Likes

thanks @willblackburn great work guys keep it up

2 Likes

This is an awesome proposal!

2 Likes