Over the past 5 weeks or so the 1hive community has been experimenting with using SourceCred to reward contributors to discord, discourse, and github automatically. The original proposal was rather modest at the time, distributing 50 HNY a week. At the time of first distribution on September 11th this was worth approximately $2000/ week.
Since the original distribution, there have been a huge influx of community members, and the price of honey has skyrocketed. At it’s peak these distributions were worth over $60k usd per week! There has been some discussion in discord about what the new weekly honey distributions should be. Some believe distributions should remain the same or even increased, while many believe we should lower the distribution amounts due to the unexpectedly high payouts recently. I am adding a poll to this post which will help us decide what seems like the right proposal quantity.
You can see the original pollen proposals here and here for more details around the original motivations for pollen.
Expected duration or delivery date:
Due to the volatility of honey at present, it likely makes sense to revisit distribution payouts on a regular basis. I propose we try to revisit this for now approximately on a monthly basis. Because of this I think this pollen proposal should have either a 2 week or 6 week duration to align the next proposal with roughly the beginning/end of the month.
What duration should this proposal have?
2 week duration
6 week duration
Other (please explain below in comments)
We should not continue funding pollen
Abstain
0voters
Team Information (For Funding Proposals)
Funding will go directly to the pollen multisig for distributions. The multisig is currently controlled by @befitsandpiper@lkngtn@luigy and @sem
Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:
This proposal is an extension of previous work the above members have been managing
How much HNY should be distributed via pollen per week
10 HNY
15 HNY
25 HNY
35 HNY
50 HNY
100 HNY
250 HNY
Other (please explain in comments below)
None, the pollen project has run its course
Abstain
0voters
Polls will end on Monday October 19th to have enough time to create the proposal
Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)
tbd by above polls (will edit when polls are over)
Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:
0x94726a37ee00308dbead364eb3d2e10d366949f4 (pollen multisig agent address)
More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:
all distributions will be done through the Aragon pollen multisig, and will be voted on by the above mentioned memebers, or any other members later added to the multisig.
Great write-up @befitsandpiper, well done. I am surprised that many prefer a 6-week duration. Maybe there could be an alternative to keep it at 2 weeks and automagically renew it for 2 weeks with approved amounts unless a new proposal is accepted?
Just wanted to add great work in general on pollen, really helps to build the community. Also a lot of effort has been put in on the back end to ensure its a fair system for everyone that is providing content and contributing to this ecosystem. Hopefully this trend continues and this is just one of many pollen distributions
Also for those who are not aware what pollen is: Sourcecred distributes Honey as pollen based on contributions to 1Hive github repo, Discord, and here in the Discourse Forums. You can find more info here:
I think keeping it at 50 is better. If it were to increase, more people would be eagered to sell their honey instead of holding. By making it scarce, people will hold onto it. It won’t be a “get honey sell for money”.
About the duration the proposal should have, I feel like it really depends on how volatile HNY is. I feel like the longer periods are not as sustainable if HNY fluctuates a lot. On the other hand, having a stable price would mean that longer periods such as six weeks could be more sustainable, as the payout wouldn’t change as much. This brings me to our our current scenario, even though we are currently at a stable price, farming and proposals are coming back up. Therefore, wouldn’t it be better to play it safe and put it at a shorter period, e.g 2 weeks? As there might be a lot of volatility to come. Also, thank you again sandpiper, for all your hard work. Really appreciate it once again.
I would suggest that we also consider a dynamic HNY allocation. Maybe we could set some indicators and have the amount of HNY distributed be proportional to those indicators. e.g. the total number of recent social activity around HNY could influence the amount to be distributed in the next period.
This is an interesting suggestion, and something we should discuss for sure, but it would not be feasible to do prior to this proposal, since this has to be voted on on-chain in roughly the next 10 days.
Makes sense, I also see that as more of a long term solution. It would require discussions around specific metrics and how to capture then. We might also discuss the possibility of having incentivized social metrics, we could for example want to boost twitter visibility by providing more weight to twitter social metrics during a certain distribution period, but I’m getting ahead of myself here .
I think 2 week rather than 6 week duration for sure, allows you to be more flexible. E.g. what if you find now that there are a lot more people earning cred, there is 30 HNY out of 50 being immediately dumped every distribution and crashing the price - you are stuck distributing 50 HNY for another 5 weeks potentially taking HNY back to sub $200 per coin and making it look like a pump and dump chart
I believe the honey rate should relate to the number of qualified recipients during that period. It would be a honey saver during weeks when not many participate yet would also allow a reasonable distribution during large increases of news users.
With the influx of new people earning cred, the distribution will be spread thinner organically. I’m on the verge of whether I believe 50 HNY should be maintained or a lower 35 although I’m leaning towards the latter. Because of this I voted for 35 HNY for a 2 week duration. The 2 weeks is enough time for everyone to evaluate how the newly distributed pollen performs and from there decide which direction is more beneficial. If it appears to have been cut too short in addition to the already thinning distribution we can revert to 50. Volatility will play a huge part in the duration so I don’t think 6 weeks is feasible, at least not yet.
@befitsandpiper thanks for reviewing the original proposal. I do believe 2 weeks is adequate justly because of the market volatility. A 6 weeks duration may impact more on price by people dumping their HNY on the market. 50 HNY a week might look a lot but this should attract more people too to participate actively in the community. / See what happened to Honey Faucet…
Wishing you nice week
By the way, as a comparison: currently the faucet gives out about 10HNY every 2 days, or 35 HNY/week, for which little has to be done.
So do we value the devs, writers and active community more, equal or less than that?
Exactly, I think more HNY should be distributed to people that actively engage with the community and help build the product. 50 HNY seems fair for now but I think a framework should be established to revisit this number every month by distributing more HNY when prices go down and less HNY when prices go up.
Revisiting this every two weeks would not be a bad idea in the beginning. The official launch of Honeycomb should bring more liquidity and will create volatility in the price of honey. This being said, it would be wise to not commit and leave the door open for adjustments.
I’m too new here to feel that I have enough stake or even information to vote on amounts, but as a person who briefly traded and likes to hold tiny diverse bags I have noted the volatility of HNY, as well as that it “seems” to be settling down… for now.
This is why I voted for a two weeks interval.
Shaft’s idea of dynamic allocation based on price is interesting and I thought “Of course”!
But I haven’t yet done reading deeply on the thoughts behind the distribution.
It might make more sense to keep the amount of HNY the same and make the volatility a feature not a flaw?
As a member of the SourceCred community, I’m obviously biased, but hopefully also in a position to offer some useful data points and observations here.
The general approach @befitsandpiper is proposing makes sense to me. As I’ll address below, I think there are interesting approaches that are less “heavy” and trustful from a governance perspective. However, these approaches are relatively untested, and fragile in the face of the high volatility 1Hive is currently experiencing. The general process here (Discourse polls->on-chain voting) seems to mirror the way MakerDAO works. Which is unsurprising considering @befitsandpiper is a regular contributor to Maker governance. I am also involved with Maker governance, as I run the SourceCred instance that pays contributors to their discourse (I’m basically the @befitsandpiper of Maker ). IMO, while the Maker approach is relatively “heavyweight”, relying more on humans judgement than algorithms, it is proven and generally more flexible (i.e. humans can do whatever they want with funds, algorithms typically have hard-coded constraints). This approach also allows 1Hive to leverage “in-house” expertise. For instance, revisiting the distribution amount monthly feels about the right cadence…
As for amounts, and alternative methods for determining that, here are some data points and my 2 HNY.
SourceCred data points
There are currently three projects distributing significant amounts of money using SourceCred:
SourceCred: Over $700k worth of SourceCred’s token (Grain) has been distributed according to Cred scores in the last year or so. Grain is pegged to USD. Currently, ~$25k/week of Grain is distributed to contributors. SourceCred has a Temporary Benevolent Dictator (TBD), @decentralion (SourceCred’s founder), who determines the amount, with input from the community. The project started out conservatively, distributing $500 of Grain a week, and slowly built up to the $20-25k/week “sweet spot” over 8-9 months. SoruceCred is following a plan of progressive decentralization that will put determining this number and other major decisions in the hands of the community.
MakerDAO: Maker has been paying contributors to its forum since June. It started conservatively, paying $5,000 worth of DAI too all contributors. It was determined this wasn’t enough to incentivize many contributors, so it was upped to $10,000/mo, with payouts going to only those that opted in. This appears to have been enough to spur participation, as detailed in a recent report.
1Hive: ~$60k worth of HNY was distributed in the 1st week using SourceCred This was due to an unexpected spike in the price of the token. At the HNY price at time of writing ($841), the 50 HNY being distributed this week is worth ~$42,050. This is the first time a volatile, floating price token (Grain and DAI are both pegged to USD) has been distributed in large quantities via SourceCred. My (again biased) observation is that Pollen has been generally well received and created excitement with new contributors. Though there does appear to be a fair bit of confusion, some light gaming, and straining of the SourceCred software (thanks @befitsandpiper ! ). SourceCred is currently receiving its normal 5% tithe and an additional 5% for active support, including building features to mitigate gaming (e.g. currently implementing Cred minting only for users with certain discord roles, etc.).
Alternative mechanisms
Was encouraged to see the alternatives proposed so far in this thread. All have promise. Some thoughts on those.
In SourceCred, we’ve discussed this a bit. One obvious indicator would be Cred created (a proxy for value created). I did a thought experiment actually where I imagined Cred as a substitute for PoW in Bitcoin, with Cred acting as Proof-of-Labor,
This isn’t likely sound from a cryptoeconomic perspective, but perhaps good fertilizer for thought.
An issue here is it incentivizes gaming where people “Cred farm” with low-effort posts and/or emoji collusion to increase payout amounts. I think this is even more likely if social media posts are directly incentivized, and may lead to externalities for the culture. Nonetheless, I think this approach is promising, if gaming can be addressed.
SourceCred has also discussed this possibility a bit, typically in the context of providing stable income for contributors. I’m personally conflicted on this. I want contributors (including myself) to be able to sustainably make a living doing this work. I also generally like the idea of quantifying people (some may squirm at this, and for good reason, but I’ve come to the conclusion (as have many other humanist technologists) that quantifying only capital just leads to valuing capital and its artifacts over humans, oppressing humans further). You can only value what you measure. However, this approach implies exclusion, making the DAO less permissionless. It also raises the challenge of defining the threshold for what a “qualified recipient” is. It does seem though that 1Hive has lots of high signal for determining this well, between its various existing roles (BrightID verified, holding 1 HNY, SEED) and now Cred scores. This may also be more robust to gaming than using pure Cred scores alone, as presumably qualified recipients are more trustworthy.
Had not thought of using price volatility as an input. This will obviously be considered when voting on proposals, but wonder if it could be a good input to an algorithm too
Contributor "Dumping"
As someone who has been working in DAOs for the last couple years, I sometimes get annoyed at this question. Hey, I’ve got bills to pay here! But, it’s a valid concern. And something that needs to be addressed in any sustainable model (what I ultimately want as a contributor). In my personal experience, I’m seeing a couple truths emerging from the haze…: 1) people value what they work for much more than what they receive for free, and 2) people are emotionally attached to their project’s tokens.
The main DAO I worked in before SoruceCred (Decred) did some chainanalysis on this recently. They’ve been paying contributors considerable amounts every month since the blockchain launched in 2016 (~200k/mo when I was there), so had a relatively large dataset. The analysis showed that only ~%23.7 of tokens sent to contributors were sent to exchange addresses. In comparision, PoW miners sent ~60% of tokens received to exchanges.
I suspect 1Hive will see a considerably strong “HODLer effect” for tokens distributed for actual work (via SourceCred or other mechanisms).
). IMO, while the Maker approach is relatively “heavyweight”, relying more on humans judgement than algorithms, it is proven and generally more flexible (i.e. humans can do whatever they want with funds, algorithms typically have hard-coded constraints). This approach also allows 1Hive to leverage “in-house” expertise. For instance, revisiting the distribution amount monthly feels about the right cadence…
This was due to an unexpected spike in the price of the token. At the HNY price at time of writing ($841), the 50 HNY being distributed this week is worth ~$42,050. This is the first time a volatile, floating price token (Grain and DAI are both pegged to USD) has been distributed in large quantities via SourceCred. My (again biased) observation is that Pollen has been generally well received and created excitement with new contributors. Though there does appear to be a fair bit of confusion, some light gaming, and straining of the SourceCred software (thanks 
). SourceCred is currently receiving its normal 5% tithe and an additional 5% for active support, including building features to mitigate gaming (e.g. currently implementing Cred minting only for users with certain discord roles, etc.).