FIP-113: End Departed Rari Founders Vesting of TRIBE

Proposals
1

Back in December, the Tribe (Fei Protocol’s community) discussed and voted to pursue vertically integrating the entire DeFi stack as part of a broader growth strategy. The decision was made to merge with Rari Capital, a permissionless lending market protocol, after many successful protocol integrations. Both projects used on-chain token voting to approve the merger, with the intention of supporting each other and building towards the same vision while keeping the teams separate.

The merger of Fei Protocol and Rari Capital projects created the Tribe DAO. There were high hopes for the merger, but unfortunately things deteriorated.

The goal of the merger was to join forces and create synergistic products underneath the Tribe DAO. However, shortly after the merge, two of the Rari Capital founders and most of the core Rari Capital developers stopped significant contributions to the newly formed Tribe DAO. The vesting timelocks put in place to incentivize long-term commitment proved insufficient to keep them from abandoning the project.

The departure of two founders and other key core devs had a negative impact on the capabilities of the Rari Infrastructure team. The code forked by the Rari team is open source. The main benefit of the merger was the developer talent, who agreed to build for the benefit of the Tribe DAO, only to stop contributing shortly after the merger. To give perspective, 80% of the original Rari team departed shortly after the merger, and 100% of the original technical talent. As a result, other contributors stepped up to fill the gap they did not expect to be there.

It was agreed that vesting would stop for any Rari core contributors who left the project, which is a normal departure procedure for every core team member.

Given these circumstances, this forum post proposes to stop the vesting of TRIBE, which is currently vesting to the Rari founders and developers who have abandoned the project and Tribe DAO, and to put the Rari Infra timelock FEI & TRIBE in a vesting contract with a clawback.

Every other core team member, including the entire Fei Labs team, is on an aggressively back-weighted 5 year vesting schedule, and it was agreed that the Rari team would take similar vesting through a quadratic vesting contract or the same 5 year back weighted. Those who are no longer contributing will receive what has been vested until the day it is cut off pending a successful DAO vote.

Rari Infra’s timelock was incorrectly deployed during the merger and was supposed to have the clawback. This post fixes that error and also stops the vesting from those who no longer contribute.

Specification:

This proposal must execute through the Tribe DAO Timelock, so this proposal will go straight to an on-chain vote, and won’t attempt to go through the Tribal Council / Veto path.

Prior to the on-chain vote, the Rari Infrastructure Team set the pending beneficiary of their vesting contracts to the Tribal Council Timelock:

Then, the on-chain TRIBE vote would execute the following actions from the Tribe DAO Timelock:

  • Mint FEI and allocate TRIBE on newly deployed vesting contracts for the Rari Infrastructure Team, under the same conditions as the currently deployed contracts (these contracts are only migrating for technical reasons of not being able to clawback in the future if needed).
  • Clawback Jai Bhavnani’s and David Lucid’s TRIBE vesting contract (1, 2, and 3)
14 Likes
2

100% in support to stopping vesting to people who abandoned the project.

5 Likes
3

Full support for this action. The “merger” between Fei Protocol and Rari Capital was carried out on the expectation of ongoing business and technical development work by Jai, David, and other original Rari team members. As the Tribe DAO and those who stepped up on the Rari Infrastructure Team are left dealing with a legacy of security negligence and extravagant promises, recovering these funds is clearly the right move.

Furthermore, these individuals should return any TRIBE that they vested during the period while they were no longer active contributors, though that is outside of the scope of this vote and must be left to their own consciences.

10 Likes
4

Halting the remaining vesting is a normal procedure when people leave a project/firm as agreed. A huge shame but is appropriate.

3 Likes
5

Tribe community, supporters of the old Rari Capital DAO, and the Fei DAO,

I’d like to give my perspective on this matter and share a high-level timeline. I will focus on the challenges we faced and the team’s evolution over these past few months.

When the idea of a merge was first proposed, like many community members and contributors, I was intrigued and optimistic about its potential. Fei and Fuse complemented each other very well and the two highly talented teams got along well. We were aligned in mission and in culture.

In early January a new chapter began for Rari. A funding proposal allocating resources to the Rari Capital team passed, the contributors got together to discuss compensation, and we were off to the races. Not long after these discussions, it became apparent that the two Rari co-founders had little intention to lead the team, grow the protocol, and pursue the vision they presented to the community and contributors.

The team was left with a sharp void in engineering resources. Complex codebases were abandoned by their creators and left to newer contributors to pick up. Systemic issues within the Fuse protocol itself came to light.

While far from their original mandate, leaders stepped up internally to combat these issues. All still believe in the original vision for the Tribe and want to see it come to fruition. Contributors have grown into leaders and the team has made a number of hires. Myself and many other contributors are optimistic about the future of lending within the Tribe.

There will likely need to be significant changes to the Rari Capital team, its relationship with the Tribe DAO, and the Fuse protocol. These discussions will occur at a later date. On behalf of the existing Rari team, we remain strongly committed towards the future prosperous and multifaceted vision for Tribe DAO. Beyond safety and security for Fuse-V1, a lot of work has gone into the engineering of a next-generation lending market which we believe will be one of the most innovative borrowing and lending protocols in DeFi today.

10 Likes
6

While this is unfortunate to hear, I understand. I have given a detailed post (linked below) to explain the details to everyone. For the sake of disclosures I will also say: I have never sold a single RGT or TRIBE and the clawback contract holds 100% of the RGT/Tribe I have ever received. I wish all members of the Tribe DAO nothing but the best.

7

Why is it unfortunate to hear?

8

What are you even saying is unfortunate to hear? You straight up deceived everyone involved in the merge. Great things to come my ass. You did nothing but lie and once the merge went through, you took off.

I swear this was 100% an inside job just designed to steal from investors and dump their shitty “quarantine project” on everyone else. Great job.

@Jack, you might be a bit delusional if you think your product will be next generation DeFi. Get a grip and make something useful without all the grandstanding, then once it is finished, working and NOT HACKED… go ahead and do it. For god sake’s, leave behind the RARI CAPITAL name and everything to do with it.

@Brianna
“Those who are no longer contributing will receive what has been vested until the day it is cut off pending a successful DAO vote.”

Are you actually saying they are going to get paid out up until the day the vote passes to stop them being paid? IE. Some could be paid upwards of 3 months worth of TRIBE? What have they done to deserve that at this point besides leaving the project?

9

1.2% of the total TRIBE will have been fully vested when the clawback executes. They can claim 202K TRIBE total, and the rest will go back to the DAO.

1 Like