Let’s Give the DAO Its Cut: Funding DAO Ops Through RPGF Funding | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
When you think about sustainability in terms of BanklessDAO, what comes to mind? It might be easier to think about it from the opposing side: what does it look like if the DAO is unsustainable?
Many members would likely agree that our treasury must at least bring in as much value as it sends out in order to continue supporting the DAO’s operations in a sustainable way. In this week’s editorial, Hiro Kennelly provides some insight into recent discussions across the DAO which have highlighted the need for intentional consideration of the DAO treasury when project teams apply for grants in the web3 ecosystem.
BanklessDAO is home to so many projects, and of course it is also the reason our guilds and departments exist. This week, renowned NFT artist Perchy has released the eighth Bankless Location; it’s a gloriously addictive depiction of BanklessDAO and its many teams, capturing a moment in time in the Chippiverse!
The Season 9 Grants Committee has clarified one of the items reported in last week’s Rollup, which stated that there would be KPI’s developed for the Community Call. In fact, the intended message was that project teams are strongly encouraged to take time to report progress at the Community Call, as this is an excellent opportunity to inform the DAO community about the latest activity. It’s also a great way to attract new contributors to the DAO, and last but not least, it gives us all an opportunity to celebrate our teams!
This week’s Rollup is packed with goodies, so put some time aside to dig in!
Contributors: Boluwatife, Warrior, theconfusedcoin, anointingthompson1.eth, Paulito, Vi-Fi, Trewkat, HiroKennelly
This is an official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.
✅ Vote for BanklessDAO’s application in the Arbitrum Grants Fest.
📱 Give feedback on bDAO’s new Nodeblocks Governance App.
🖊 Subscribe to The Rug News on Paragraph.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call recording.
Snapshot Votes
📥 Tokenomics - Approve DAI Capital Efficiency Strategy
If this proposal passes, the 14,693.416 DAI sitting idle in the DAO Treasury will be deposited in BanklessDAO’s Rari Fuse Pool and earn 6.53% APY.
💰 Season 9 Seasonal Funding — Late Items
This is the second round of S9 funding, consisting of a guild and two projects that missed the initial S9 funding round. If this vote passes, GC will release those funds to the respective guild and projects.
Proposals in Discussion
📦 Allocating Public Goods Funding Received Via Octant
This proposal provides a strategy for allocating any funds that BanklessDAO might receive from Octant to support projects that benefit the public good within the BanklessDAO community. Add your votes to the poll to determine how the funds should be disbursed and join the ongoing discussion.
Governance Participation
😎 Try the New Nodeblocks Governance App
At the Community Call this week, MemeBrains shared details about the PWA (progressive web app) he has developed as an idea to increase governance participation. Adding the app means you can be notified about Snapshot bDAO proposals as they are posted, and see stats on voting and treasury. Visit the website or follow the steps in the walkthrough video below to add the app to your phone’s home screen. Please give MemeBrains your feedback!
Let’s Give the DAO Its Cut: Funding DAO Ops Through RPGF Funding
Author: Hiro Kennelly
Since the DAO’s inception, we’ve focused much of the DAO’s collective efforts towards building and incubating projects. Nearly 2.5 years later, a number of these projects have been recognized through retroactive and proactive grants for their work in helping to create user-friendly onramps for people to discover DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, all things web3.
Over the course of this year, BanklessDAO projects have received hundreds of thousands of USD equivalent in retroactive and proactive funding, but very little of this financial reward has made its way back to the main DAO treasury. Some projects, such as Bankless Publishing, regularly remit 10% of revenue to the DAO, but many do not.
Many of our projects are beginning to thrive, but in that process we have neglected to nurture and nourish the body that has given contributors, projects, guilds, and departments their purpose: the DAO. If we are concerned about the health of our community, of our DAO, that status quo must change. It’s time to be more focused on giving back to the DAO.
Funding The Core Organizational Unit: The DAO Vault
You can hear some background to this effort in this week’s Community Call recording, where the roundtable discussion centered at first on the Forum proposal about Octant, but soon shifted to a discussion about Optimism’s latest retroactive public goods funding that just kicked off this week. In RPGF 2, DAO projects kept 90%, if not all, of the funding received. This time, for RPGF 3, we’re proposing to proceed as follows:
BanklessDAO applies as an organization, and all proceeds, minus a small percentage to DAOstewards for facilitating the transaction, would be received by the DAO vault.
Projects can choose to apply independently — as with the most-recent Gitcoin Grants round. However, projects would be expected to remit 25%, and perhaps as much as 50%, of any OP received through RPGF 3 to the DAO Vault.
For proactive grants, such as the most recent Collective Intent 3 grant from Optimism, projects would be expected to remit the customary 10% to the DAO Vault.
The Rationale For the RPGF Split
Retroactive public goods funding is meant to reward projects for the work they’ve done that benefits the ecosystem, so at first glance it may not seem appropriate to fund the DAO treasury in such a manner. But this reasoning must be buttressed with reality:
At present, even our most successful projects are too immature to meaningfully contribute non-grants revenue to the DAO on a scale that can begin to sustain operations.
The DAO’s runway is not infinite. Without sources of sustained revenue, the DAO as the core organizational unit may cease to exist.
Projects receiving retroactive funding have, in large part, built their reputation through the use of the ‘Bankless’ brand. The ‘Bankless’ name provides an immeasurable amount of goodwill and credibility to our projects, which has created countless opportunities for contributors and teams. Without the Bankless brand, many if not all of these projects would not exist.
Asking projects to remit 25%-50% of retroactive grants back to the DAO not only enables the projects to compensate contributors for their efforts, but also recognizes the significant role the DAO has played, and continues to play, in the projects’ success.
Finding Plenty of Good for All
The RPGF splits provide the DAO with much higher percentages than proactive grants because the proactive grants require work towards specific deliverables. When grants require new content, new efforts, it makes sense to reward contributors for that effort while still recognizing the DAO’s role in helping to secure that grant.
In contrast, rewards for retroactive grants provide an equitable vehicle to fund core DAO operations while enabling projects to be rewarded for their past work. The rationale is particularly strong with an ecosystem like Optimism where they are providing proactive grants for work and then later encouraging these grantees to also apply for retroactive funding.
With Optimism’s RPGF 3, you’ll see all of the same projects that participated in the Collective Intent 3 grant also apply for retroactive funding. In fact, Optimism sent out an email encouraging us to do so! In such a scenario, it only makes sense for the DAO to capture a significant portion of the value for itself, especially since the projects owe their existence to the DAO.
I’m certain some projects will disagree with these proposed allocations. If so, we encourage you to speak up! We’ll definitely be talking further about this at the DAOstewards meeting at 4pm UTC on Thursday. Hope to see you there!
🥧 Arbitrum Grant Round Is Live on Gitcoin Grants
Arbitrum has launched a grants round on Gitcoin Grants Stack! Please support BanklessDAO in the Education, Community Growth & Events Round. This round focuses on community growth activities such as education courses, boot camps, hackathons, and events. The round ends on September 30, 2023 at 23:59 UTC and there is a total of 12,500 ARB in matching funds available.
🎨 Community Call POAP
Every week, a great new POAP is awarded for attendance at the BanklessDAO Community Call. Attendees who hold at least one tlBANK NFT can mint for free. For those who have not locked BANK, the cost is either 0.008 ETH (Mainnet), 2 Matic (Polygon) or 300 BANK (Polygon).
The funds raised are distributed 40% to the artist, 20% to the DAO treasury, 20% to the facilitator, 10% to the organizer, and 10% to guild.xyz.
🚀 Claim Your GG18 Hypercerts
Did you donate to BanklessDAO in the recent Gitcoin Grants Round? If so, you are eligible to claim a Hypercert! Hypercerts are a new token standard for tracking and rewarding positive impact. Each hypercert represents a unique impact claim capturing the following information:
A scope of work and its corresponding scope of impact.
A set of time frames for both the work and its impact.
A set of contributors – the organization or people behind the work.
A set of rights you get by owning a hypercert.
The hypercert itself is an ERC-1155 semi-fungible token with the information above stored as metadata on IPFS.
💳 Bankless Card Update
Congratulations to the Bankless Card team, who have recently finalized the formation of a Delaware LLC. This is a big step towards being able to issue payment cards in the U.S!
🏴 Bankless Locations 8 Released
Bankless Location 8: BanklessDAO by Perchy is now live! Please be careful and follow the official link when purchasing.
We are a tribe of crypto settlers, making our way west to the frontier, united by our common cause of helping a billion people go bankless. BDAO strong!
⛴️ BanklessDAO Content
🧠 Crypto Sapiens
✍️ Bankless Publishing
🌏 Bankless Africa Newsletter
🗞 The Rug Newsletter
👺 Moloch Traps
🔩 How To Sesh Bot
Sesh is a bot for organizing calendar events and setting up polls on Discord. If you want to learn how to use the sesh bot to organize in Discord, then please join the Education Department on Tuesday, September 26 at 13:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel.
🎓 Uniswap and BANK Knowledge Session
Uniswap is an open-source protocol for providing liquidity and trading ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. Join the Education Department on Tuesday, September 26 at 13:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel to learn more about the utility of the BANK token and Uniswap.
🔭 How To Etherscan
Have you ever wanted to track the movement of your coins and tokens or would you like to know how to scan the bDAO treasury? Join the Education Department on Thursday, September 28 at 13:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel to learn the common properties of block explorers, what can be explored, and how to read your own personal wallet or NFT contract.
🏪 MetaMask Snaps: Elevating Your Wallet's Potential
MetaMask Snaps is designed to allow users to add features and functionality to their MetaMask wallet, much like an App Store offers various apps for your device. Individual ‘snaps’, created by third-party developers, can be installed directly, transforming MetaMask into a more versatile tool.
Join this demo in the Live Demo voice channel in the DAOlationships server on Monday, September 25 at 18:00 UTC to learn more.
