Season 8 Is a Clean Slate | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO

May 20, 2023

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

Welcome back from the gap week, when we paused to reflect, recharge, and prepare for the upcoming season. We hope you all had a rejuvenating time and are ready to dive back into the exciting activities of the DAO! In this week’s editorial, Boluwatife leads us through some of the initiatives BanklessDAO has in store for Season 8.

There is always room to participate in DAO governance. Your contribution to the DAO’s improvement is welcome and your informed vote is needed on proposals on Forum and Snapshot.

Our Forum’s lack of Sybil resistance was the subject of this week’s Community Call roundtable discussion. There are a few approaches we could take, including the use of Discourse plugins or combining Discourse with external tools such as Governator or Snapshot for voting. The option to migrate to another platform entirely was also considered. Listen to the recording or hop in the Governance channel to learn more about available options and the pros and cons of each.

We’re sad to report that the Weekly Rollup Recap video series won’t be produced in Season 8. Thank you to Allyn Bryce, WinVerse, and Droste for the laughs we’ve enjoyed along with the highlights of the previous week’s edition.

There’s still plenty happening though, so enjoy the content — and contentment — that this season’s first Weekly Rollup Newsletter brings you. Let's make Season 8 the most impactful season yet!

Contributors: Boluwatife, anointingthompson1.eth, theconfusedcoin, KingIBK, MiuMan, Paulito, Warrior, twinFin, Trewkat, HiroKennelly

This is an official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.

✅ Action Items

🗳️ Vote on the Multisig Election and Uniswap Fee Claim proposals on Snapshot.

📜 Read about the Revision to BanklessDAO Constitution and add your feedback.

🤓 Check out the Education Department’s Live Sessions Calendar of upcoming events.

🏃‍♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.

🏛 Governance

Snapshot Votes

🗳️ BanklessDAO Multisig Wallet Election

The vote for seven individuals who will act as signers of the DAO's multisig wallet is live on Snapshot. These individuals will represent the DAO, so it's important for every member of the DAO to engage in the decision-making process.

💰 Uniswap Fee Claim

The DAO has earned on its full-range Uniswap liquidity position. This proposal is to move these fees into the DAO's multisig.

Proposals in Discussion

🌡️ Proposed Revision to BanklessDAO Constitution

The current BanklessDAO Constitution lacks some clarity and completeness, so this revised version — which clarifies the language and layout without making any changes to governance — has been drafted as the first step towards future governance updates. This temp check seeks feedback from DAO folks on the revised document itself as well as input on a few outstanding questions.

Season 8 Is a Clean Slate

Author: Boluwatife

In Season 8, BanklessDAO will continue to focus on governance, with particular emphasis on revamping the Constitution and increasing our Sybil resistance. In big treasury news, the election for banklessvault.eth multisig signers is live now, and the DAO will soon be transitioning to new membership options based on tlBANK. We also have five new Grants Committee members, a few of whom have previously served on the GC. Icedcool and links have been confirmed as Grants Committee Leads for the season and we look forward to the group developing the cohesion needed for successful discussions.

In short, there’s a lot of DAO action in the works for Season 8. Add in some new projects and ecosystem funding opportunities, and we have a lot to talk about!

Governance

On the governance front, much of the work of Season 7 continues. The temp check for the Constitution revamp just got up on Forum, and early indications are that there’s broad community support for the revisions made to the document. Expect to see a bDIP in the next few weeks. Even if the bDIP to revise the Constitution is approved via Snapshot, that is just the first step to further refining the Constitution and introducing a separate Community Handbook, a sort of operations manual for BanklessDAO.

Another area of focus will be implementing Sybil resistance on the Forum. Sybil resistance is the idea that each user should be limited to one account, because when a user deploys multiple identities on one platform, it undermines the integrity of that platform. There are a number of solutions under consideration, including forthcoming Discourse (Forum) integrations, using a hybrid of Discourse and a gated voting platform such as Governator or Snapshot, or migrating to a completely new platform such as Commonwealth or CharmVerse.

For many seasons, there has been confusion as to whether there are seasonal quorum requirements on Forum proposals for previously funded projects. This question may be resolved in Season 8 along with the introduction of more rigorous Sybil resistance.

Treasury

The main update directly implicating BANK is the tlBANK initiative and accompanying changes to our membership structure. Another important discussion towards the end of Season 7 and into Season 8 was about remuneration in the DAO being based on 1,000 BANK per hour.

tlBANK

tlBANK is currently a very hot topic in the DAO, and is spearheaded by the Tokenomics department. With time-locked BANK, contributors to bDAO stake their BANK, and an NFT is minted for proof of that stake. The proposed parameters are 40k BANK for six months or 80k BANK for one year. The resulting NFT provides Level 1 membership to the owner for the specified period, an alternative route to simply holding 35,000 BANK in a wallet. The NFT will be tradable on secondary markets but will not confer Level 1 membership status to the new owner.

As tomahawk wrote in a previous Weekly Rollup:

tlBANK enables future use cases that will help us focus on longevity and sustainable operations, and once proven, this time-locking core primitive can be extended and generalized to drive long-term value alignment in any guild or project. Locked-BANK NFTs incorporate art value and open up new trading opportunities for value-aligned BANK investors looking to acquire tlBANK at discounted prices. Projects can incentivize a sustainable, long-term approach to building by offering tlBANK as rewards.

Compensation

Nearly since the DAO’s inception, there’s been a suggested ‘rule of thumb’ that contributors are remunerated at a rate of 1,000 BANK per hour, or at least that budgeting uses that rate as a basis. There have been previous Forum posts on the issue, and folks are again talking about it. When BANK was at 10 cents USD, 1,000 BANK per hour equated to 100 USD per hour, a great wage for anyone wanting to earn a living through DAO work. With BANK currently valued at under half a penny, that same remuneration equates to less than 5 USD per hour — more than a 95% reduction in real buying power.

Expect to see more conversations in Season 8, while we grapple with the reality that the DAO can’t actually afford to increase that rate until revenue is much, much higher, and we debate the pros and cons of having a governance token which is also regularly exchanged for a wage and the sell-pressure this creates.

Grants Committee

There are five new Grants Committee members, including returning members Icedcool and links. Among the things we expect the GC to take up this season are to further clarify seasonal funding requirements for guilds, departments and projects. Chief among the questions is whether GC will enforce Forum quorum requirements and whether existing organizational units will see grants offset against their multisig holdings.

There’s been concern among members about the amount of BANK that is disbursed, so we should also expect a discussion this season about BANK emissions and our financial runway.

Projects

A few projects that launched towards the end of Season 7 are expected to drive both attention and revenue to the DAO in Season 8.

BanklessWallet

BanklessWallet (bwallet) is an account-abstracted hardware wallet. This project is a unique hardware wallet that comes with a smart-contract companion. With bwallet, you no longer have to worry about keeping your private keys safe or losing your hardware wallet. Head over to the proposal if you are interested in learning more.

The L2 Newsletter

The BanklessDAO Newsletter team launched a newsletter focused on the Layer 2 ecosystem: called Layer 2 Review. In a new model, the team isn’t seeking any BANK funding, but instead will apply for grants and retroactive public good funding. The Review is shipping monthly to start, with plans to become more frequent.

Launch of Spanish-language SubDAO

Confirmed at the end of Season 7 but really launching this season, a Spanish-language subDAO will increase translation capabilities and produce written and audio-visual content to promote the importance of crypto knowledge and bring financial, artistic, and inclusive tools to the 500 million native speakers of Spanish.

Ecosystem Funding

Many BanklessDAO media and educational project teams were recognized for their outstanding work, receiving retroactive public goods funding from Optimism. Bankless Publishing, Newsletters, IMN, and The Rug received nearly 30k OP tokens combined. Bankless Academy also received “optimistic news”, receiving a whopping 58k OP tokens. This funding came at a good time for the community, as we all know it is not easy to continually build during the bear market.

A Conclusion, But Only to Season 7

Each Weekly Rollup newsletter adds a chapter to the story of BanklessDAO, and this week we’ve put the plot twist that was Season 7 firmly in the past by showcasing all that is to come. Season 8 is an opportunity for a clean slate, but rather than starting with nothing we can carry forward the experience and wisdom gained in our first two years.

We are, now and always, bDAO strong.

Adiós 🤗

👀 In Case You Missed It

📊 Our Journey So Far

ThePass wrote a Twitter thread highlighting bDAO’s key milestones, treasury updates, and governance activities over the last year. With some great infographics, this thread gives a good snapshot of the year that’s been!

🌐 Bankless Korea in SeoulBound

Author: twinFin

After DAO Tokyo and ETH Tokyo, DAOists worldwide were bound to Seoul for SeoulBound 2023. Joined by local community builders, it was a close-knit, three-day gathering of DAOeast&rest (puns intended).

They were a group of cross-cultural artists, politicians, students, psychologists, and tech sis&bros that came together to share unique wisdom and experience on collective practices and challenges. The first day opened up with a meditation session, followed by an ice-breaking at a park nearby with historic Korean architecture surrounded by modern skyscrapers. The deep connections built on the first day facilitated the threads of deep conversations the next day.

The second day included more than a dozen sessions which had been proposed on the first day. The topics ranged from ‘Politics & DAOs’ and ‘Lifecycle of DAO / Resilience’ to ‘How to create a trustless multi-chain DAO.’ On the last day, five initiatives came out. One of the initiatives, called xBound, became one of the Gitcoin Grants. Hopefully, we can see other xBound events in other Asian countries and the Southern part of the world!

The finale was a K-POP dance class followed by a K-BBQ party at the rooftop of nonce, a crypto hackerhouse on a hill. That’s how the group photo got such a great view!

🗓 Set A Reminder

🤩 New Joiner Session S8 x 01

Join the New Joiners Session to learn more about BanklessDAO and how to get involved. You will meet mentors who could guide you on your journey into DAO life as well as other new joiners who may become fellow travelers on your journey. This session will be held on Zoom. Please be prepared to share a little about yourself.

RSVP to have Zoom meeting details emailed to you nearer to the event, which will be held on Monday, May 22 at 13:45 UTC.

🧰 How To Discord

Learn how BanklessDAO uses Discord on Tuesday, May 23 at 13:45 UTC in the watercooler voice channel. RSVP and remember to bring your questions about bots, threads, permissions, and navigation. You can always find Discord Help documentation in the How To Guides on the home page of the DAO Notion site.

📝 How To Notion

Do you want to learn how to effectively use Notion? If yes, join the Education Department on Thursday, May 25 at 13:45 UTC to get help with the Notion Ninja Learn to Earn courses. Understand how Notion permissions are managed and the skills you need to be an effective Notion user.

⚖️ Tally Demo — bDAO BizDev

Tally is a front end for on-chain DAOs. Tally gives users real power in their decentralized organizations to delegate voting weight, create or pass proposals, manage a protocol, or upgrade a smart contract. Join this demo on Tuesday, May 30 at 18:00 UTC in the Daolationships Voice Channel.

🏗️ DAOstruct Demo

DAOstruct is an end-to-end DAO aggregation, governance, and research platform with a mission to facilitate the mass adoption of DAOs and build systems and frameworks. Their DAO discovery dashboard, a partnership with DeepDAO, has more than 4500 DAOs listed.

Join this demo in the Amphitheater on Wednesday, May 24 at 19:15 UTC.

🚀 Launchnodes Demo

Launchnodes provides nodes for solo staking ether, and RPC nodes for native access to blockchain data, specifically pre-synced Geth, Beacon, and Validator nodes that run in your AWS account.

Join this demo in the Amphitheater on Wednesday, May 24 at 18:30 UTC.

🍔 Grab It While It’s Hot

🌐 Global Events

BanklessDAO is excited to announce our partnership with ETH Milan, the largest web3 conference in Milan. ETH Milan will be held on October 5-6, 2023 at Palazzo delle Stelline, a beautiful venue in the heart of the Old Town.

Be sure to follow both BanklessDAO and ETH Milan on Twitter, and stay tuned for information on how to win tickets!