Current Problems
- Contributors have lower income rates than the market rates.
- Contributors do not have a sense of stability as a consequence of variable monthly income.
- There is a lack of long-term alignment with the project.
- The loss of good people to better incentives should be addressed.
My Thesis
- We should offer better rates to stay competitive with the market.
- This issue is inherent when working on a DAO structure. Regardless there is a specific group of contributors that aligns well with a traditional payroll + equity scheme.
- We need to create a mechanism that gives contributors a long-term perspective.
- Motivation is essential, and I believe we still need to think harder about how we can adjust the incentives to the goals outlined in the Covenant.
Proposed Solution
Create a new way to compensate core contributors with a fixed monthly payroll and the option to receive a percentage in equity.
I believe this solution complements the existing ways to get compensated. In particular, I think it addresses the above points as follows:
- We can raise the rate of contributors and attract new talent because core contributors will be on the payroll. Also, note that we can consider blacklisting incentives like pollen for people on payroll as a way to make it more appealing to all community members.
- Core contributors get financial stability.
- The solution gives the option to receive a configurable % of the payroll on equity, building a clear incentive for long-term alignment.
- Higher rates and a payroll + equity scheme are more competitive incentives. With payroll, we have a better way to compensate multidisciplinary contributors that help across swarms.
Implementation
v1
An Aragon organization will have a list of members that vote on who to add/remove from payroll.
The payroll application is configured with two tokens: a denomination token (WXDAI) and an equity token (Nectar). Nectar will be a new token exchangeable 1:1 for HNY in the future (at the end of vesting).
There are some extra configuration parameters that we should discuss and decide on as a community:
- Equity multiplier: the multiplier that equity gets vs denomination token. For example, if we have a multiplier of 2 with a payroll of 1000 WXDAI, and we decide to receive 50% in equity, then we will get 500 WXDAI + 1000 WXDAI worth of HNY, minted as Nectar with the corresponding vesting.
- Vesting duration: the time duration of vesting
- Vesting cliff: the time at which vestings cannot be claimed.
We also have to decide as a community the payroll amounts and if we plan to have different payrolls for different roles.
v2
We will integrate with Celeste, allow anyone to add/remove members to the payroll, and make that action challengeable.
Technical Details
We have to modify the current version of the payroll app to include the HNY price oracle to the _transferTokensAmount method, so we can keep the Nectar <> HNY 1:1 relation when new payments are made.