yDAO for yEarn Community Funding

Cooper Turley
6 min readAug 9, 2020

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Made with love by DAOhaus. Special thanks to Ven Gist for the reskin!

Key Summary:

The yDAO is:

  • Used to fund value-added contributions to the yEarn ecosystem
  • Open for anyone to request funding for yEarn related tasks
  • Open for anyone to join with a base rate of 1 Share = 0.1 YFI
  • Meant for tribute to be spent and share value to be diluted.
  • Built using DAOhaus and the MolochV2 standard
  • Focused solely on funding projects, not on protocol-level governance.

Want to contribute to the yDAO without pledging? Send DAI or YFI directly to 0xcb46298767fb5d44c18313976c30d3eeb5071862*

*Note: Only DAI and YFI have been whitelisted so please do not send anything else.

Forum post to discuss all things yDAO here.

Objective:

The yDAO is a trusted onchain resource for anyone to request funding for important ecosystem tasks.

The yDAO is used to pool DAI and YFI as a trusted reserve for known community members to vote on fund allocation relative to sentiment and impact.

Why Create a Funding DAO?

Inspired by the Synthetix multi-DAO framework, we believe that having a DAO specifically for community funding allows attention to be directed towards one specific initiative, rather than having it be tasked with protocol upgrades which are better suited for ygov.finance/vote and by the multisig signers.

Given most major DeFi protocols have a grantsDAO, the yDAO offers an interesting spin where not only supplementary ecosystem projects are funded, but the most critical aspects of a healthy and sustainable foundation commonly funded by the core team.

By creating a funding pool for both key contributors and third parties aiding in the security and improvement of the protocol, yEarn can hire contractors for one-off (and hopefully recurring) tasks and sprints that further the advancement of the protocol at large.

Seeding the DAO

Building off the principles laid in place by MolochDAO and MetaCartel, yDAO will be completely opt-in and permissioned to start.

While there is merit in having a percentage of protocol fees and rewards allocated to the DAO, I believe that a recurring stream of funding (at inception at least) may attract actors who look to acquire shares purely for the hope they will appreciate in value as more YFI + fees are deposited.

Instead, yDAO proposes that:

  • Members join with full knowledge that their contributions are meant to be allocated and that their share value will be diluted.
  • There is a minimum threshold for joining of 0.1 YFI.
  • There is a base peg rate per share when joining (1 Share = 0.1 YFI) with future hopes that YFI may be airdropped into the DAO as share value falls below a predefined threshold.

The Andre Example

As the founder of yEarn, Andre has been generous enough to approach the project with no premine, and no paid salary.

When asked what he’d like to be compensated for, he responded:

“I’ve got stuff to build, if possible, just YFI to cover the running costs for the servers and forum would be nice”

Luckily, the community has rallied in the past week by funding the yEarn Gitcoin Grant to the tune of $120k and counting. This direct stream to Andre is fantastic, and will always be a great way to route coin directly to him. However, I’m confident the yDAO may be more suitable for Andre to request funding as he sees fit.

Andre responding to Decrypt FUD and an influx of donations from Gitcoin.

Who & What Deserves Funding

Anything which adds values to the yEarn ecosystem deserves funding. The definition of “value” is entirely determined by DAO members and is grounded in the premise of creating and maintaining a sustainable, community-centric protocol.

Presented below is an ongoing list of the type of work the DAO may fund:

  • Smart Contract Audits
  • Economic Audits
  • Translations
  • Development (past and future)
  • UI Upgrades
  • Governance Moderation
  • Meme campaigns
  • yToken-based products
  • Content Creation
  • YIP bounties

What the DAO will NOT fund:

  • Overly ambitious ideas with little to no thought out plan of action
  • YFI forks (sorry)
  • Exchange listings
  • OTC deals

Expectations

To receive funding from the yDAO, proposal creators are expected to present a formalized grant request using the yEarn governance forum. The more detail, the better. Some example of topics which should be mentioned include:

  • Objective — What is the funding for and what is the desired outcome?
  • Context — What makes you well suited to accomplish this outcome?
  • Timeline — How long do you expect this task to take?
  • Funding Amount — How much funding are you requesting?
  • Fund Allocation — What are you planning on doing with this funding?
  • Team — Who is working on this project with you?
  • Commitment — Is this a one-off request or do you plan on being a recurring contributor?

yEarn DAO Structure:

  • Base Tokens: YFI
  • Supported Tokens: YFI, DAI
  • Tribute: 1 Share = 0.1 YFI
  • Voting Period: 4 days
  • Grace Period: 3 days
  • Sponsor Deposit: 10 DAI
  • Processing Reward: 0.1 DAI

Benefits of MolochV2

Building off of Moloch’s Minimum Viable DAO framework, Moloch V2 (the standard the yDAO is based on) offers a suite of benefits from its V1 counterpart including:

  • Multitoken Support — The ability to whitelist any ERC20 token
  • Non-member proposals — Anyone can create a proposal, even if they do not own shares.
  • Funding Proposals — Receive funding directly in YFI or DAI, regardless of whether they do or do not own shares
  • Minion — The ability to have the DAO interact directly with smart contracts.
  • Ragequit — Exit the DAO with a pro-rata share of assets at any point in time
  • GuildKick — Forcibly require a member to ragequit the DAO through an onchain vote.

A deeper primer of MolochV2 and its benefits can be found here.

In summary, the yDAO is meant to do one thing — allocate funding. We believe that this simple thesis suits the Moloch framework well and presents an intuitive interface for anyone to request funding for yEarn related tasks.

How to Join

First, Create a new Member Proposal with the following information:

  • Title: YOUR NAME/ENTITY
  • Description: “Pledging X amount of YFI in exchange for Y Shares” (Please make this consistent with the amount being pledged at 0.1 YFI per share.)
  • Link: Link to you or your entity (Website, Twitter, Linkedin)
  • Shares Requested: The number of Shares being requested
  • Token Tribute: The amount of YFI being pledged (you will need to unlock YFI)
  • + Loot: The number of shares being requested

Submit your proposal. This will require you to accept 2 transactions, the first to unlock YFI, the second to submit your pledge.

Once submitted, you should see your proposal in the “Unsponsored Proposal” section. Please double check that your proposal is there.

After you are in the queue, you will need a sponsor. Please copy the link to your proposal and let us know you’d like to join in the yDAO Telegram channel.

Closing Thoughts

In order for yEarn to be sustainable, key contributors need to know they can receive funding to accomplish crucial tasks. While the graciousness of Andre to launch YFI in a truly distributed fashion was beautiful, it’s up to us as a community to ensure the burdens of an ever-evolving protocol and backed by adequate funding.

If you believe you would make a good steward to vet whether or not funding requests will add tangible value, please join this group to discuss the next steps in getting the DAO off the ground.

#diditforandre

Resources

Forum | Twitter | learn2yEarn | Medium | Discord | yGov

Special thanks to NXM Chad, devops199fan, Andrew Kang, Daryl Lau, Spencer Noon, and many others for providing feedback on the early stages of this content.

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Cooper Turley

Chance favors the connected mind. Focused on building communities by making crypto cool again.