Fund the Rari infrastructure team with the specifications outlined in the merger forum post.
Specification
The Rari Capital DAO has officially merged with Fei to create the Tribe DAO. The infrastructure team is the backbone of Rari, whether It’s development, business development, community management, design, or strategy. Up until the merger, contributors have been compensated in RGT. In Joey’s initial post to the Rari Capital community (https://forums.rari.capital/d/177-feirari-token-merge), he proposed the following long-term payment plan that would provide more structure to contributor compensation.
“Establish a joint task force to build cross-protocol integrations and keep long term roadmap alignment, and provide additional treasury resources for the existing Rari Infrastructure Task Force, 6M TRIBE and 6M FEI to vest linearly over 3 years.”
Unfortunately this element of the merge was left out on the Snapshot and the on-chain DAO vote, which is why I am revisiting this topic and proposing it once more.
Motivation
As the infrastructure team grows and expands, I would like to revisit the conversation that was once had in the original proposal. Having this allocation of resources from the Tribe DAO would allow us to retain all of our amazing talent and grow to the next level.
So would this team essentially operate separately to other FEI groups like the proposed tribal force or OA groups? Or will they all be under the same structure?
My understanding is that Rari Infrastructure will be an independent sub-group within the Tribe DAO similar to Fei Labs, OA, or Tribal Force. This proposal would provide a steady stream of capital roughly 166k FEI + 166k TRIBE per month to fund the Infra core team. Some baseline transparency around how these funds are used would be helpful.
I believe infra is a pivotal contributing team to the merged DAO and am fully in favor of the proposal .
Would also be good to revisit Tribal Force proposal now that the merger is operationalized, curious if any of the Rari folks have insight there
Hey all, I’m here from the Rari infrastructure team to shed some light on the breakdown of these funds. First, these funds are intended to last at least 3 years and there are 3 main areas where we intend on using these funds.
Current contributor compensation
Operational expenses
Growth and future contributor compensation
Contributor compensation will be the largest expense. We currently have 12 contributors on the infrastructure team and are in the process of onboarding a handful of new contributors. We intend to use the vast majority of Fei in the form of monthly salaries and Tribe to provide 5 year back weighted vesting packages for contributors that were not a part of the founding of Rari Capital and do not have significant vesting tokens.
We also will use these funds for various operational activities including travel expenses and audits. Finally, we intend to reserve a portion of these funds for the growth of the team and for future vesting packages to new contributors.
As this can be a model for funding independent teams within the Tribe, I would like to raise some points.
Transparency and Goals: How the teams will be held accountable to the DAO during 3 years? How to ensure transparency on the deliverables? How can we define KPIs for team activities? What is the frequency of reports to community? Where we will find it? (a notion page would be good)
Budget and Compensation: Which breakdown we will require from teams requesting funding from the DAO? The number of current members is enough or we need a breakdown for the payment of each member and the budget for other expenses? Do we need to present benchmarking about contributors compensation?
Conditions: Approving a budget for 3 years seems a long period, this would be the rule for team funding? Is there a clawback?
Structure: do we need to know how the team is structured? who is composing the team? And what is the role of each one?
Track record: what infos should be require about track record of the team and its members and the contributions to community?
Note that all my questions aim to help creating a model that can also be used by other groups being formed. It is about what infos the DAO will request to approve the budget. The decision here can set this model.
All of these are certainly good things to know when coordinating across independent teams within the Tribe and great questions. I think many of these have been answered throughout the merge process but I’ll do my best to answer them briefly now.
This is a difficult question because it is difficult to identify the correct KPIs that demonstrate the type of growth we are trying to achieve at Rari Capital. TVL is a solid metric to look at but imperfect in many ways. The number of DAO operated Fuse pools is another metric to keep your eye on but still doesn’t tell the full story. I can say that amidst all metrics, the Rari and Fei teams are currently working very closely together and holding each other accountable for their performance.
I think my response above should be sufficient for budgeting purposes. While it is somewhat broad, it shows that there are good intentions and necessary uses for the funds over the next 3 years.
The Fei and Tribe is vested linearly over 3 years and there is a clawback. So if necessary the Tribe DAO can take back some of these funds.
I don’t think this is too necessary to understand. At Rari we have a very flat and dynamic organization. The structure of the organization shouldn’t be nearly as relevant as its performance.
I believe our track record should be obvious to anyone who followed the merge. We have built a number of products over the past year, achieved 1.5 billion TVL, and become an integral part of numerous projects. Many of our members are well known talented individuals and developers in this space.
What’s the relationship between this new vesting and the existing RGT vesting contract ? I see there still are ~8M$ there, and I thought all vestings were transferred to TRIBE timelocks during the merge
How did you use to operate, request funding from the RGT DAO at regular intervals ?
I’d like to urge everybody to consider for the purposes of this proposal the funding mechanism I suggested a couple of weeks ago
It allows to fine-tune flexibly parameters like budgets, comp size, KPIs to track, to allocate funds in tuneable batches with a decision provably optimal on the space of viewpoints of all stakeholders , while governance is run at the sweet spot between DAO vote (too bulky for frequent/complex financial decisions) and some centralised body vote (nimble, but with limited legitimacy).
Productivity: 6M over 3 years for ~12 people seems reasonable from annual salary perspective (~167K/HC). If the team expands or shrinks and we face surplus or shortage, what would happen then? I see that there will be a clawback for potential surplus but how about shortage? I am just afraid that we might face growing budget demand.
6M in TRIBE: I guess this could also happen in traditional companies with equity but I see TRIBE going at least 10x from here. Do we believe 6M TRIBE with 3yr vesting is reasonable? I support giving upside to the team, just doing sanity check here.
I was thinking that the funding would replace the old vesting contract that @Eswak mentioned, in which case the 8.4 million should be funded without asking too many questions. But if the infra team is requesting additional 12 million USD from the DAO, we should have a clear justification for why this is needed and how it will be used.
For example, it could be that the old vesting contract is not enough to fairly compensate existing Rari founders and contributors. If this is the case, it would be useful to compare the vesting RGT with the compensation for members of Fei Labs, which has not received any funding from the DAO after the initial allocation of TRIBE at Genesis. If the funding is intended to compensate new hires, it would help to know the intended compensation and responsibility of each role, similar to the information provided by Tribal Force applicants here. In this case, we may also want to consider a shorter duration, such as an annual renewal of funding.
Open to a shorter duration I think that may make the proposal more palatable. Perhaps 4m/4m over 2 years or 2/2 over 1 year.
I’ll let the Rari team respond as well but from what I understand many contributors there are underpaid relative to industry standards and the dev fund is about empty. It is very much in the DAOs interest to fund the org to keep the contributors incentive aligned and executing at a high bar.
I would really like us to follow the initial proposal made to the Rari community (amount + length). The Rari Infrastructure team includes the founding team as well as contributors that have joined throughout this past year. I have spoken with all the team members and everyone is just as motivated as I am and are here for the long-term. We have had minimal resources in the past and having this allocation from the Tribe DAO will significantly help us. If there is anything I can do to be more transparent with the funds, please let me know. For context, here is our initial funding proposal to the Rari DAO back when the infrastructure team was created: https://forums.rari.capital/d/160-infrastructure-task-force/5
I actually prefer the 4m/4m over 2 years option as it gives us a shorter timeline to reassess the needs of the infrastructure team. It gives us a better opportunity to react and scale accordingly. It should also make Fei Labs contributors more comfortable as it is a lower upfront cost and commitment.
The vestings will be transferred to TRIBE timelocks very soon. We will keep everyone updated on this. We used to operate by requesting funding from the DAO every quarter.
I’m very unhappy with the level of transparency here. For a start :
I think this should be sorted at the same time as this proposal, because this is related to the infrastructure team funding too. If there are already 344,625 vesting x 27 TRIBE (peg exchanger) available for the infra team, these should be used for contributor back-weighted vestings, and only a linearly vesting amount of FEI should be granted.
Moreover, this is a DAO, not a private company, transparency is key. We should at least agree on reports for :
amounts of people hired and their involvement (full/part time, etc). Can be pseudonymous
compensation of various contributors, and their tasks/roles
rough roadmap
report on exceptional expenses (audits, travels)
It’s not only important because we are spending the DAO (community)'s money, it is important also because it gives reference points to organize other DAO activities
I really appreciate your response here and I believe in full transparency as well. All of your questions are extremely important and should not be left without a response.
@JackLongarzo and I co-authored a Google Document that answers your questions as well as other goals we wanted to share with the community.
Please do not hesitate to ask any questions regarding the content that we wrote. I want everyone here to be on the same page, and if there is anything I can do to improve transparency, please let me know.
Do we believe 6M TRIBE with 3yr vesting is reasonable? I support giving upside to the team, just doing sanity check here.