**[Proposal]** Developer Incentives

I really like the idea if giving more to the team. But minting tokens is going to be seen very poorly in the general ecosystem.

Some amount of people, I don’t know how many, are most certainly going to take on the opinion that, “the core team minted themselves tokens, and they did it once, so they can do it again”…

I see minting new tokens as a bad publicity move, but rewarding the devs as essential.

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Thanks for putting this forward, but I’m strongly against this proposal. Minting additional YFI tokens of any number is a very bad idea for the president it sets . If a ‘one off’ minting of tokens takes place it would signal to the market it could happen again and again. The value of holding the YFI token would evaporate. I’d have to reconsider my position if this passes.

Buy back and build is a much better option for giving rewards to developers which I firmly agree with.

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I don’t think this is wise, after all, it opens the door to even more dilution. The ‘equity’ part should be fixed (for ever), no inflation. I do agree part of the yield or ‘cash flows’ (or part of the future buy back) should be labeled for developers.

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Nah, this is not the right route. Buy back and build makes more sense and is more credible.

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Great arguments and thoughts on how the YFI ecosystem should be focused on developers, and you are absolutely right. BUT there are other ways to find $ and incentivize your and everyone’s work.

*adding more fees
*distributing profits to developers funds
*going after big holders for grants
*and we can think of more ways to get that $

But increasing the supply would do more long-term damage to YFI ecosystem because this could be happening again, and again, and again.

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I agree with the final goal of this proposal, but not with minting more tokens. 30k fixed supply is a well-established characteristic of $YFI.

Economically speaking, I don’t know. And won’t argue about it. I’m more concerned about the negative hit in Yearn’s Community that minting new $YFI will have. We must never forget that one of Yearn’s strongest pillars is the community.

Instead, I strongly support the BABY proposal.

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Personally I don’t feel strongly that the exact hardcapped number has to be maintained but I know that the psychology of others is different and think there are better ways of paying our devs. I think even a system that requires a tribute of YFI tokens that must go to the core team would be better received in general than minting more. That being said it’s not like the mint function was killed now and if it grows the community and rewards the builders I’m actually for that and discussing that. But this way seems suboptimal unless it was fleshed out more and ironically included minting even more YFI. Or had a vesting period to encourage people to consistently participate in governance that way it couldn’t be seen as the devs and the largest token holders pushed this idea down everyone’s throat. But not paying our team would be egregious if we were a regular corporation and at least in my opinion we are trying to retain the best parts of those systems and structures and build onto them and improve them. Also I own less than one token as I market bought it from Coinbase, but I really think that we can collectively find a way to incentivize the builders without risking any undue criticism and see this proposal as suboptimal.

Why not set up a limited time core dev donation fund? I’d gladly donate .1 YFI and so would many others. Much better than minting new tokens.

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I am strongly against minting new tokens. Like many have mentioned above, it sets a bad precedent. It would damage the reputation of yearn after having already voted to burn the minting keys.

Additionally, changing the already mentally anchored, round number of 30,000 tokens to the seemingly unusual/random number of 31,000 tokens is terrible optics.

Should we reward and incentivize the devs? Absolutely. Reward them from the income the protocol produces. Isn’t that how it is already set up? Aren’t they are already getting paid in yUSD (except Andre, but that’s a different story). They can choose to do what they want with their salary. If they want to buy YFI with their yUSD, they have the freedom to do that. You could argue they should be paid in YFI instead of yUSD, but that would just mean that the protocol would be the one to buy the YFI from income the protocol produces.

The real questions that need to be dealt with are:

  1. Are the devs adequately compensated?
  2. In what “currency” do the devs want to be compensated? yUSD, YFI, etc.?

If no on #1, then raise the salaries and grants.
If YFI on #2, then use the fees already accruing to the protocol to buy back YFI on the open market. (This is exactly what the other proposal suggests.)

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Yes agreed! Lets not print more yfi. But divert a considerable amount of revenue to the developers.

I support this.

Let’s share the wealth with the builders that even make this project work in the first place.

Happy developers not stressed about operations costs > 30k supply meme

If you are a long term holder of YFI I don’t see how you can vote against this.

Look at AAVE and UNI they are building their treasure chests of funds so that they can be a long-term sustainable quality project.

There is a middle ground here, but when our guys say they need something lets hear them out and do what we can to help. Building decentralized apps seems very stressful.

EDIT: I would also be willing to donate 10% of my current YFI holding to a dev fund if this doesn’t pass

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I dont see what is wrong with minting new tokens and burning the keys right after?
However, do we really want to mint new YFI + redirect all the fees to operations? IMO it’s one or the other

We should figure out the best way to setup the dev fund. MInting more yfi out of thin air might hurt everyone(including the devs we are trying to help). Better to divert fees from yearn ecosystem to fill up a dev fund and use that for compensation?

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Use buybacks to distribute yearn to devs / pay them more out of the treasury.

I am against minting new yfi since it’s already been so ingrained that there will only be 30000. There are other ways to compensate the developers such as using revenues to buy back yfi and pay to developers as stated above in many posts.

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I would vote FOR and I agree we should not be selfish … investing in YFI is an ecosystem investment and I would be happy to invest some of that wealth into the YFI dev’s I do believe it as an investment in a long-term future.

It would be smart to make some sort of a DEV fund with minted YFI in epocs (Of 6 mohnts±) … then also have a build-in clear idea for devs that build protocols that then instead of getting paid by TX fees that will be paid by grants?

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Just printing 1k YFI makes no sense as a long term incentive. Why not take the revenues to fill the treasury until it has ~2 years runway, then distribute the remaining to YFI holders. And use e.g. 10% of the revenues to buy back YFI and distribute to devs with 2y vesting.

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I suggest we see how v2 fees start looking before we go minting new tokens. A lot of changes have been made recently to help compensate developers: (1) New fee structure, increasing compensation to Strategists, (2) permanent Operations Fund to help compensate contributors, (3) a new potential buy back and distribute plan for contributors.

Why not see how all these things progress? If it is still insufficient we can re-evaluate. Governance is meant to be an ever changing, evolving, and fluid structure. If things are not working, we can always change them, but let’s give some time to analyze how the recent YIPs will affect everything.

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I see that @banteg and @tracheopteryx @milkyklim are on opposite sides of this proposal. Is there a version of this which the team would unanimously support? Maybe pairing a one-off mint with a burning of the minting keys?

Not sure if this current version will end up motivating the team if they themselves are split on the idea.

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I think 99% of us support the developers immensely and would like to see them paid more but minting more tokens is a bad idea and a slippery slope.

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