September Grants Announcement

Frens,

It’s grants time again. This round is for work done in September and it’s a bit late, apologies for that.

Happy to announce some additions to the dev team! A warm round of applause for the wondrous x48, Doug, and Luciano.

Recurring Grants

Ops

@banteg – 12,500 (raise via community signal to multisig)
@milkyklim – 8,000
tracheopteryx – 8,000

Protocol / Dev

@fubuloubu – 8,000
@x48 – 8,000
@doug – 8,000
@PEPO – 8,000

Academic “Public Good”

@orbxball – 8,000

Comms

@franklin – 7,000
@saltyfacu – 3,000
@Dark – 3,000

Community Grants

The grants below are not just rewards for the work these folks have done but also investments in them and the broader community to keep contributing in the future. There is no quid pro quo here and nothing is asked in return. These are gifts, the kind of gift that yearn is founded on—from the protocol to the community that supports it.

Recipient Contributions Grant
Danielj discord bots master 3,000
vany365 discord setup 3,000
matt bridges made this ROI site, and helped with some initial graph work (donated to gitcoin at recipient’s request) 1,000
Bob_The_Buidler dev, stats site 2,000
Fabien for snapshot 1,000
Rain for yETH Maker black magic (declined 1,000) 0
nomad newsletters 2,000
dudesahn comms, mod 2,000
CryptoOGKauaia creator and mod of the yearn reddit community 1,000
Docs team Trying somethig new here: all the people who contributed to docs.yearn.finance will be able to join on a call where we will share this amount with each other (excluding those who have received other grants) 10,000
Tom French gnosis integration (covered by gnosis grant) 1,000
lehnberg comms, ops 3,000
Gabriel Haines educational yearn videos 1,000
pplpleaser video memes 1,000
WrongNebula memes, design, brand 3,000

You may ask “who decides there grants?” And that would be a great question. Right now honestly there is not a great system. Mostly @milkyklim @banteg and I have been trying to keep track of who is adding value to yearn and asking for nominations from other people on the team.

I hope we’re doing an ok job but I know we can’t avoid our biases and other limitations, and I know the community could do better. So before the next round I’d really love to find a better way. Let’s work on it together? I think a grants council with rotating membership could be amazing for this and would love to hear other ideas.

That all being said, I think we did a pretty great job this month and am happy to be able to spread the love to these folks here.

Thanks to everyone who gave their input on these grants: Substreight, fameal, Dark, fubuloubu, grahamu, franklin, FutureFund, x48, devops199fan, and others.

(all grants are in yUSD)

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yes those type of things are hard to determine… Can we also imagine a system where people can add what they did for the protocol and other people can decide if it’s interesting or not.

I personally wrote few article about yEarn, and also happy to write tutorials or even translate the weekly newsletter for the French community. But i also don’t want to impose it like some people did in the past. It’s just to help as i thing communication is key to bring more people. And very simple article and tuto will bring more new users.

edit: Otherwise it looks very nice. Some people are really doing an amazing job. And thanks for that. Can’t wait for more news

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The worst part about doing these grants is knowing that we’ve missed people.

Something like this makes sense. We just need people to take initiative and build these things.

I have a friend working on an idea for discord — a system that would allow for tagging and tracking contributions in realtime to create a data set for a grants committee to review when it comes time to send grants. I like the mix of data collection and subjective group assessment. Further developing our github project boards will also really help so that all project management is open and transparent.

For grants such as these, there are at least two challenges:

  1. Tracking everything that happens and who all is contributing
  2. Determining fair grants

Or we switch to a by-request model where there is a process for all grants. No one else is doing what we’ve been doing: gifting people retroactively with money they haven’t asked for. I think it’s pretty amazing though, and want to keep some form of this gift culture.

That’s great. dm me and I’ll add you to a docs group telegram.

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I think having a proposal system where you accept someone’s proposal means they will be paid after the proposal is done will solve the issue that some people are missed. If there are contributors who just “do” without submitting a proposal, then its charity. If it has a great impact, the community can then gift them without feeling guilty that some people are missed out.

This proposal system are used in many masternode based DAO’s and have worked quite well. One example is the Dash Treasury DAO system.

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Very cool, thanks to all the contributors!.

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More tips for contributors for a better world

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Yes it’s amazing. I guess we can continue like that for some times. And if members have a problem with that or a better solution we can always change .

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A by-request grants system combined with some proactive gifting sounds like a really good idea.

Since the money is coming from the treasury, how about having a vote once a months to pass the bill? That way YFI governance would act like the supervisory board while multisig holders act as the executive board. While I think currently everything is going nice and well, it´s always good to think ahead and learn from existing forms of governance.

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Well done on the selections for this month! Since you’re soliciting ideas for how we might be able to make this system more inclusive of all contributors, has any thought been given to implementing a system similar to SourceCred (used by MakerDAO), as @jtathmann and others had suggested in the past? Granted, this would only help with rewarding contributions on the Forum and not other platforms like Telegram and Discord, but still I think it’s at least worth discussing and may be something that could at least provide inspiration for a rewards system that is more catered to the Yearn ecosystem in the future.

Here is a pretty good description and video of how SourceCred works, for those not familiar: SourceCred for Maker

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I think SourceCred is very interesting. It was talked about some here but maybe someone can do more research and put a proposal together. It seems to work for discourse (the forum), github, and discord so would be interesting to see how well it works in practice. Not sure which would work better the gifting system or this one.

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I’d be happy to do some further research on SourceCred and get a formal proposal together if it seems viable. I can give some more thought / do more research on other options as well.

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Please do! I want to learn more. Looks promising

@METADREAMER had already posted a feeler to the community (see below). Lots of high-quality discussion in the thread, including from @decentralion (SourceCred founder) and @s_ben . If there’s interest in getting a proposal for a SourceCred trial, these guys would be best suited to push that forward.

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Lots of money going around here.

Do we have formal job descriptions and duties for the comms people?

Edit: or at least past deliverables? looking at monthly allocation of over $20k for comms/brand/memes and wondering what we got.

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Hello all! Just joining up here. I’m an friend and collaborator of Trach’s. Wanted to follow up on this to mention a project I’ve been working on, that would seem to have some relevance. Right now, it is a seed of a concept, titled StoryPoints. In some ways it is similar to SourceCred (@METADREAMER / @decentralion I’m really thrilled to know about your project). In other ways it is very different. I’ll soon be posting up a little two sheeter to explain it in more depth.

TLDR: StoryPoints is an active, user centered Discord application, which would allow community members to gain support from each other for their contributions. Each month, discord users would have a set amount of “Props” or “Nopes” to distribute to each other, as emoji reactions to posts of any kind. The app would use Props and Nopes to tabulate grant points, as shares of monthly allocations, on a running basis, allowing the community to easily and multilaterally determine the flow of resources to those they feel deserve it.

If of interest to the community, this would certainly be a wonderful place to develop this idea.

I think that if we want the best and brightest minds spending their time actively engaged in the development and sustainability of YFI, then they should be compensated since time is money. It is in everyone’s best interest to have an idea meritocracy. However, most people have a day job/life that precludes them from spending hours on end trying to think tank on the best way of solving an issue. We do not want YFI governance to go the way of MakerDAO which is a ghost town when compared to Yearn. They get maybe 1 or 2 replies per post and very little voter engagement. We want devs/non-devs to be contributing in governance because different points of view can result in elegant solutions to difficult problems. For instance, the issue of a revamped fee structure.

I also think that communications is over paid given the deliverables amount to tweets and weekly/daily newsletters.

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What about October ? :stuck_out_tongue: :blush:

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