Summary
We request $86,800 to fund DAO-ops for October 15, 2026 through January 6, 2027 inclusive, covering six epochs: 12 weeks, or 84 days. This prorates the previous $93,000 request from a 90-day basis to the shorter on-chain budget period, preserving the daily funding rate. External audit costs remain outside this request.
We consider YIP-88 implemented, and the migration to on-chain governance complete. BR5 focuses on operating and improving these systems, helping teams use them effectively, and making the DAO’s finances and decisions easier to understand.
A major focus will be rolling out yETH yield auctions and redesigning the yETH interface around them, with the aim of reducing outstanding recovery claims and the associated treasury exposure.
Context
The published BR4 delivery report accounts for the previous term’s commitments, completed work and remaining follow-up. BR4 completed the governance migration, improved Teams and YBC, and delivered a working treasury dashboard, substantially exceeding the commitment to begin its implementation. It also covered treasury research, the Discretionary Fund proposal, production maintenance, alerts and SAM activity.
The core systems are in use, including the move to on-chain BRs for the new epoch. The work now includes making it easier to find the right app, study proposals, understand voting power, and connect governance decisions to budgets and treasury activity. We will continue iterating on YBC to make its membership and governance flows clearer.
Treasury research has put us in a strong position to track the DAO’s finances. We will continue resolving gaps, while recognizing that a complete one-to-one reconciliation of every historical record may not be achievable. Subject to approval of the Discretionary Fund proposal, its dedicated accounting deployment and integration into treasury reporting will follow.
Work tracking and priorities
The DAO-ops Tracker is our continuously maintained source of truth for tasks, status, order and priority. Its linked issues provide the detailed scope and discussion.
This request sets the direction for the term. The task list stays on the board so that it can reflect production needs, dependencies and what we learn from users. Some work is already tagged for BR5; other items still need triage. A target label is a planning aid, rather than a promise that every item will ship within the term.
We encourage voters to read the board alongside this request. Changes in priority will be visible there, and the term-end report will explain what we delivered and what remains.
Direction for BR5
Make governance easier to understand and use
We want participants to be able to follow the whole process: finding a proposal, studying its implications, understanding their voting power, casting a vote and following the outcome.
That means clearer proposal and voting experiences, better explanations of participation and vote results, and more useful information about who voted and how voting power contributed to an outcome. It also means making the connections between staking, YBC, team finances and treasury reporting easier to find and understand.
We will continue improving features and presentation based on production use. Across the apps, the aim is to reduce the effort required to make an informed decision and act on it.
Roll out yETH yield auctions
We plan to introduce yield auctions in which yETH holders can participate, receiving yield while reducing their outstanding recovery claims. We see this as an opportunity to accelerate the reduction of remaining claims and lower the associated exposure for the Treasury and DAO.
This will require auction deployment and a redesign of the yETH interface. Participants need to understand the auction terms, what they receive, and how participation affects their remaining claim. The interface and reporting will need to make those outcomes clear.
We will begin with an initial auction in the next epoch and review the results and iterate to decide how to develop the approach. We will examine participation, yield distributed, claims reduced and the resulting change in treasury exposure. Those results will show how effectively the mechanism reduces claims and guide changes to the auction design, timing and user experience.
Support teams in using the system and improving performance
DAO-ops serves as a support function for Yearn’s teams. We work with them on how they organize and structure their work, use the governance and accounting systems, and understand their financial performance.
During BR5, we will continue helping teams with budget submissions, revenue reporting, funding and bonus processes, and the operational questions that arise from using the system. We will use their feedback to improve the tools and help them identify practical ways to improve performance. Teams retain responsibility for their own strategy and decisions.
Strengthen the applications and their automation
We will continue hardening transaction flows, data handling, alerts and operating procedures. Reliability includes how the apps behave when data arrives late, a request fails, or a user needs to recover an interrupted action.
We also want to make the codebase easier to maintain and reduce avoidable manual work. We will review the application structure, improve automation where it helps, and keep the infrastructure and dependencies maintained. Production issues and necessary security work will continue to influence the order of delivery.
Improve financial visibility and continue daily operations
We will continue tracking transactions, budgets, treasury positions and outstanding obligations, and turn that work into useful information for DAO participants.
The treasury dashboard is already a working reporting tool. We will expand its coverage and clarity as more accounting and data become available, maintain the underlying records, and make the relationship between holdings, allocations and team finances easier to understand. The direction is broader financial visibility, without setting a fixed target to consolidate every budget, liability and program commitment into one view.
Once the Discretionary Fund proposal passes, we will proceed with its dedicated accounting implementation. After on-chain tracking is deployed, we intend to add its balances, allocations and spending to the dashboard.
Routine administration continues throughout the term: budget coordination, treasury and contract operations, monitoring, financial follow-up and support for teams and voters. The board will show both this ongoing work and larger improvements.
Raise awareness of DAO activity
DAO-ops is not responsible for Yearn’s marketing under YIP-88. Alongside our core work, we are opting into a contained awareness experiment because we believe the governance system and the DAO’s activity deserve a wider audience. This will complement Yearn’s wider marketing efforts and help people find their way into governance.
We will try longer-form writing about YBC, the proposal and voting design, and how the system works, alongside factual activity updates and automated messages. The focus is explaining what is happening and helping people participate. We will review what proves useful, the effort involved and where automation helps, then use those findings to decide whether and how to continue in a later BR.
SAM
SAM will continue to:
- Maintain and manage the Immunefi bug bounty program.
- Extend coverage as required for newly deployed contracts.
- Support audit coordination and security processes.
Building on the SAM activity report, the team will improve the Immunefi Agent’s review logic and duplicate detection using reviewer feedback. It also plans to make the agent reusable by other bug bounty programs and publish the shared software after review. Each program will keep its reports, history and rules in a separate private workspace, and final decisions will remain with its team.
Funding and rationale
On-chain BR periods cover six epochs, or 84 days. Compared with the previous 90-day basis, this is six days shorter, a reduction of approximately 6.67%. We apply the exact 84/90 ratio to both funding lines:
| Item | Previous 90-day basis | BR5: 84 days |
|---|---|---|
| DAO-ops development and operations | $90,000 | $84,000 |
| SAM-specific costs | $3,000 | $2,800 |
| Total | $93,000 | $86,800 |
The calculation is $93,000 × 84 ÷ 90 = $86,800, a reduction of $6,200. This preserves the daily funding rate; retaining the full $93,000 over a shorter period would increase it.
External audit costs are excluded and will be requested separately as required. The awareness experiment is included within this request, with no separate funding line.
BR4 required considerably more work than we expected. The hours needed to complete the rollout and address the financial, operational and usability details were substantially higher than we anticipated when setting that budget.
We propose maintaining the daily funding rate, with the reduction above reflecting the shorter period. The core DAO-ops allocation already fell by 40% between BR3 and BR4, from $150,000 to $90,000 on the previous basis. We expect the work to remain demanding, and believe this rate represents good value for the work involved.
Timeline
October 15, 2026 through the end of January 6, 2027, covering six epochs, 12 weeks or 84 days.
Team
Wallet
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Reporting
We will maintain the project board throughout the term and report against this request at term end. The report will cover delivered work, remaining work, material changes in priority, the results of the initial yETH auction and what we learned from the awareness experiment.
Proposed decision
Approve $86,800 for DAO-ops for the six-epoch period from October 15, 2026 through January 6, 2027 inclusive, with the scope above.