Yearn recently announced it was cooperating with Pickle in a new blog post. While there is already a discussion thread about this in governance, no formal proposal has actually been voted on to determine whether YFI holders approve of this cooperation.
Specification
As Tracheoteryx has pointed out, there is nothing Yearn can technically do to stop Pickle from creating Yearn vaults or gauges that reward holders of those vaults in $Pickle.
However, Yearn does have the power to:
Refuse to commit Yearn developer time to aiding this project
Refuse to endorse those vaults or gauges using the Yearn brand.
If this proposal passes, the collaboration should continue as planned. If it fails, no developer paid using funds from the Yearn governance vault shall collaborate with or otherwise aid Pickle.
Yearn is governed by YFI, but YFI does not govern Yearn’s contributors. Holding YFI entitles you to signal for real, practical change that improves Yearn. It doesn’t give you the right to tell other contributors what to do. You want something done? Do it.
Holders of YFI have no say over how governance funds are used.
If this vote were to fail (and I expect it won’t), then funds from the Yearn governance fund would not be used in the future to pay developers who collaborate with Pickle.
This is a “real” change (spending of funds) that can be implemented in code.
There is also a “symbolic” change, namely “the yearn community endorses Pickle”.
Again, I doubt that your claim is holders of YFI have no right to say whether or not the Yearn brand is used to endorse something. If I as a member of the Yearn community endorse “IncrediblyDumbRugPullCoin”, surely other members of the Yearn community have the right to say “this is not a thing endorsed by Yearn.”
I strongly disagree with a retroactive vote from a general governance perspective. The developers are well within their rights to do what they are doing, and as Tracheo pointed out, there is no requirement for a vote in this particular case.
This is a vote for a votes sake, where a vote is not needed. YFI token holders should not second guess developer decisions at every opportunity, this sets a bad precedent and disincentives agile decision making.
If you have some actual problems with the merger, and want to lay out a logical argument why it should be abandoned. Do so.
Personally, I think this proposal could use a bit more clarification.
What kind of vote would you like to have? Just a signaling vote via Snapshot? Or do you want this to be a formal YIP?
Additionally, what exactly does this vote say? My best interpretation is that it’s basically:
For: Approve of what Yearn’s core team has planned with Pickle, continue to let the devs move forward.
Against: Condemn what they have done and move forward with plans to block it.
I think it’s tough to tell the Yearn devs to not collaborate or aid Pickle. This gets into an issue that’s tricky in normal business, but even trickier here—how do we tell people to spend their free time? How do we judge when time spent working on the Pickle collaboration impedes on a dev’s ability to maintain and develop Yearn? Additionally, the way grants work—you’re paid for the work after you do it. So we’d have to basically say that, moving forward, Yearn devs will only be judged based on Yearn-specific work, and not on anything they do with Pickle. But I really don’t like the idea of prohibiting helping out another protocol.
Furthermore, I would argue that this situation benefits Yearn immensely. Instead of our own devs having to launch another token whose emissions are granted to depositors in our vaults (an advantage that Harvest, Pickle, and most other yield aggregators had over Yearn), we are being handed a protocol with a token with remaining emissions that already has a community and demand. My point with this, being—if Yearn had decided to launch a gauge system like Curve, with a new token that you could vote-lock and was emitted, and there were some type of “protocol fees” that would flow to those who stake, then I think everyone would be stoked on it and no one would think twice.
Essentially, I think we trust Yearn’s devs, strategists, etc to constantly be producing products that are in the best interest of the protocol—how is this any different?
While the Yearn multisig is empowered to spend an operations budget on grants and hiring, many of the yearn devs don’t get paid – like Andre for instance. And all of them work for something more valuable than money, so that string isn’t such a tight one to pull.
YFI holders do have overarching authority to control things like the core yearn protocols and funds though. We could vote to do something like a cut off a grant to me for instance. Or we could vote to do something like “don’t spend any money on Pickle-related work.”
But we could not vote to control dev time because we do not control sovereign human beings here.
For: Approve of what Yearn’s core team has planned with Pickle, continue to let the devs move forward.
Against: Condemn what they have done and move forward with plans to block it.
Yes, that is the intention. It would be a signaling vote, since as @tracheopteryx has tweeted, there is technically no change if “no” wins.
The outcome of “against” would be:
Signal that YFI holders do not intend to collaborate with Pickle
Signal that no YFI funds will be paid on behalf of work involving Pickle
So we’d have to basically say that, moving forward, Yearn devs will only be judged based on Yearn-specific work, and not on anything they do with Pickle.
I think this is approximately correct.
Furthermore, I would argue that this situation benefits Yearn immensely.
I agree (and it looks like 3/4 of the people who voted in the poll do as well) that the Yearn Pickle “merger” appears beneficial. I also agree that generally speaking giving people who receive grants from YFI a wide berth of autonomy also benefits the protocol.
Essentially, I think we trust Yearn’s devs, strategists, etc to constantly be producing products that are in the best interest of the protocol—how is this any different?
I don’t think “we except the devs to do good things” and “YFI holders should have absolutely no feedback mechanism when devs make major decisions” are equivalent claims.
But we could not vote to control dev time because we do not control sovereign human beings here.
Agreed. The vote here is not to control how anybody spends their time. It is to control how money is spent.
In a hypothetical situation where “no” won the vote and a Yearn dev insisted nonetheless that they were going to commit 100% of their time to the Pickle merger, then they would not receive grant funding in the future. But I consider this an unlikely outcome.