Thanks for this summary @Arcturus, I disagree with you on some points but very much respect your wisdom.
And hey @criptodee really thoughtful and helpful post as always, thanks for asking this stuff.
I can speak for myself and give you my perspective and ideas around this. Stick a bunch of IMHOs in everything I write below pls.
I wouldn’t say “pushed quite strongly” at all, though I can see how it might seem that way. As I recall at the time we were getting psyched about on-chain governance, and the idea to use it to burn the keys came up and it was exciting. Andre frontran us as usual and put out that poll, but it really was exploratory. Think about it, burning the keys is one of the most significant decisions we could make as a DAO—it wouldn’t happen with one briefly worded forum post. That was a post to gauge sentiment, the way we always do.
I was really psyched on it, then I let my mind be changed by the community! There was a really good discussion, I learned a lot, thought about it more, and changed my mind.
Re Andre’s change of heart, if you look at the tweet @banteg is replying to on that thread I assume he means Andre’s recent medium post Building in defi sucks (part 2) where he talks about the lesson he learned from giving away all the YFI.
I can’t speak for Andre on this. I trust his own unique principles and integrity around money. He will accept funding when he decides it’s the right time, or he won’t. For myself, I can say we are clearly not being compensated enough. I didn’t come here for money. I came here like most of you, because yearn is fucking awesome and I just wanted to be a part of it. There is nowhere else I want to be, nothing else I want to do. That being said, I made 10x my current compensation in my last position, and I could probably improve that if I wanted to. I have started a number of companies, I could start my own new defi thing and have a good shot at melting the shit out of my face. And this is true for basically every single person on our team.
We should not ask our contributors to sacrifice their financial future to work at yearn. We are better than that. And also some people do not have the luxury of working for 10% of their market value. Can you blame them if they go elsewhere in this climate?
Good opportunity to clarify something, often you’ll see yearn people write “devs” when they talk about this—that does not mean just software developers. It is short for anyone deeply engaged, actively contributing, adding real value, and developing yearn—designers, writers, comms, ops, etc.
Luckily there are extremely smart and experienced people in the yearn network who care deeply about this and are running numbers on what compensation should look like. It’s long overdue honestly. Most of the team, if you ask them, will not ask for more money. It’s deeply touching to me, and speaks to their character. But it also indicates a culture of humble olympics that I’d like to see us outgrow. It is ok to know what you are worth and go after that, there is nothing wrong with wanting money. It’s pretty useful stuff to have. But for now, we’ll do better by relying on the uber-pros in our network like Santiago, Vance, and Eli to draft up numbers. Our team deserves it. And from what I can see, the overwhelming majority of the community wants this.
As a coauthor on BABY (YIP-56) I can speak clearly to this.
The most important thing to know, is that we are all reacting and adapting in real-time. There is no master plan we mete out in drips. We are riding this tiger and doing the best we can. No one is in control. This is not like a traditional company where the executive team has grand private strategies they orchestrate over time. Yes, we each have our own visions for the future and things we’d like to do; we discuss things openly and in private (like anyone else)—but how things develop is super emergent. I think that’s a strength. I would also like to do some more common vision finding and am working on a project to collect that now—in a format authentic for networks. But that’s a tangent.
I’d been questioning the value of the current dividends program (staking rewards) ever since I read @RyanWatkins 's Proposal: Rethinking Capital Allocation. At first I didn’t like it—I made good income from dividends, it supplemented my low salary. But then I started to see the wisdom. I work on the ops team, we facilitate budgeting and grants among other things. For an entity with a billion dollar market cap, we operate on a shoestring budget. Read our quarterly report to see for yourself. That just didn’t make sense to me. Why couldn’t a system earning millions of dollars a year in fees properly compensate a team of only a dozen people? What could we do if we had a proper budget??
I realized we had made a mistake and we needed more money. Yearn needed all the revenue to invest in our team and growth. I reached out to Ryan about reviving his proposal, he was up for it, others on the team started to agree, and we made this new proposal.
I also coauthored YIP-54 and am very happy with the YIP trilogy (51, 52, and 54) that was a part of which did a ton to update our financials. Could vaults v2 provide enough revenue to provide for the team and do dividends? Maybe. But when? And more importantly, why? Maybe it would be enough for us to get by, but why just get by when we can eat the world? Dividends don’t make sense no matter how you slice it. Especially since opportunities for earning ROI on YFI outperform dividends elsewhere and we already have the code to enable voting from productive locations. What’s the point?
There was discussion about waiting to do BABY after we see v2 revenue, but why wait really when there is no point to dividends until we grow a lot. And if others disagree they can vote against BABY. Also we started realizing how dire our compensation gap was and how much waiting longer than expected for v2 vaults to be ready was costing us. Btw, it’s 100% the right call to get those right and wait until they are right and no fault of anyone’s—these things take time and I’m so so glad we have a culture that allows for things to take the time they need.
Is there an underlying issue that could come up again if BABY passes? Yes. And this has become more apparent just recently. @vsh_p2p framed it super clearly in a recent convo, it’s the difference between paying contributors just enough to get by, or giving them enough so that they are exposed to a decent amount of upside. (Apologies if I have misinterpreted you Vasiliy!) The issue is face melt, and specifically there not being enough of it with BABY.
We hadn’t even considered the possibility of minting when we published BABY, but then Andre wrote his medium which got people frantic as per usual and a random dude I didn’t know (the lovely @yfi_lit) posted this out of the blue [Proposal] Developer Incentives and all of a sudden minting was a possibility again. Just have to take a moment to appreciate how cool decentralized governance is, ideas literally coming from between minds, wisdom beyond any one of us… Gives me literal chills. But anyway, this changed the game.
I have come far around on this point and now am clearly in favor of minting. You can read more about my thinking here. It opens a whole new range of possibilities for yearn. This is a controversial topic being discussed at length. I trust the community to decide. We’re working on a new proposal backed by data and hard work and will present it when ready. At first I worried it would be at cross purposes with BABY, but now I see them working together quite well. More on this soon.
Sorry for the novel!!