Yearn Retention Packages

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Yearn Retention Packages

As per YIP-57: Funding Yearn’s Future, a Compensation Working Group has been tasked with allocating up to 2,333 YFI (2,222 with 5% margin) to retain key contributors.

Here is the relevant part of the spec:

The Compensation Working Group was approved by the multisig and is composed of:

  1. @srs-parafi
  2. @vooncer
  3. @ekrenzke
  4. @banteg
  5. @milkyklim
  6. @lehnberg
  7. @tracheopteryx
  8. @onlylarping
  9. @YFI-Cent

Retention Packages

The CWG has completed its work after conducting multiple interviews with team and community. Here is the result, which has been approved by the multisig and communicated directly to each recipient.

Total YFI Allocated to Retention: 2,317

Terms

General

  • Yearn Treasury has a right of first refusal to buy back YFI at the prevailing market rate at that point from team members who wish to sell. The purpose of this is to limit the amount of vesting YFI reaching the open market.
  • For a vesting package to activate, a recipient will need to sign an agreement with their private key, outlining the full terms in more detail.
  • Attestation of recipient address, i.e. linking it to the recipient, will be done either through a well known pgp key, or through a keybase account that is linked to trusted accounts such as Twitter, Github, or Website.

Vesting

  • 3 years linear vesting
  • 6 month cliff backdated to start date
  • With clawback (all unvested YFI returns to Yearn if someone leaves or is terminated)

Tiers

Tier Vesting YFI Count
1 275 6 people
2 140 3 people
3 40 1 person
4 25 1 person
5 13 1 person
strategists 150 total 4 people
community 12 total tbd
multisig 1 each 7 people

Misc

  • Community and multisig YFI will not be vested, but will be subject to right of first refusal like all allocated YFI.
  • While Yearn’s multi-sig has full visibility into who the recipients are, names are not published as part of this announcement as a security precaution for the recipients.
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Are you sure 275 > 6 people & 140 > 3 ? :slight_smile: Feels like that has to be the other way around, smth like 275 to 3 ppl & 140 to 6.
The rest looks ok I think.

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Holy shit, that’s like $120M at current rates for like 14 people lol

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Yeah but you have to remember that the correct way to look at this is a percentage of the protocol. The plan allocated roughly 6% of the protocol to the core contributors for roughly 3 years of service. The value accrual to date is solely due to the work of these folks. if we rewind YFI back to day 1 and said we were going to allocate 6% of the protocol as 3 year vested compensation to the core developers most would say that is more than fair (prob light IMO). This type of structure aligns to continue contributing for a long time where competing protocols are also offering significant compensation. This was the main problem with the fair launch. Devs can walk at any moment and aside from altruism have an incentive to do so. Now they are incentivized to stay. Organizational problem solved. Also most of it is deferred over a number of years so that will be realized over time and provides an incentive to deliver and keep the price high

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The allocations are correct as listed.

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The main question currently is: can people change anything in the proposed distribution?

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Wow that’s so lame, I’d swear that right now I’m wearing a hoodie with roughly 50 names in the back but of course a lot of those people didn’t do anything for yearn ( or only worthless work) since summer and of course all of them have been rewarded accordingly

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I have to say I’m also very surprised by those numbers. I was also expecting something more like 50-100 people. Basically 16 members is only the core team.

Guess the rest will share the community (12) part.

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Doesn’t this 6 month backdate effectively mean no vesting cliff period for the people who are getting the vast majority of these tokens? Linear vesting helps, but effectively no cliff is not great.

If YFI intention is to signal to the market that the team isn’t rushing to dump, increase this 6 months backdated cliff to 1 year backdated.

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I don’t believe there is additional signaling needed. These are people who gave their soul to Yearn, they’ve been incredibly helpful and loyal to the project, they weren’t ever promised any upside. Changing the cliff would send them wrong signals, same as saying we mistrust them. Yearn retains a right to punish misbehavior, terminate the package and claw back YFI to treasury, so there is no need to assume malice by default.

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If they dump, they’re dumping on themselves. The max anyone person is getting is around 50 tokens, roughly 2.5 mn. Vested over three years, that is exceptionally reasonable (very low tbh, but this is the first package) for the value that has been created.

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@cryptouf if they’re people you think are overlooked, DM me. Would love to hear more and help fight for them if 12 is far from sufficient.

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You might want to read it again. 275 each for 6 people with effectively no vesting cliff. Don’t get me wrong, I am very bullish on the project, but this backdating the cliff AND making it only 6 months is exactly the sort of thing that would’ve been broadly opposed if it were open for discussion in the forum. It should’ve been 12 months backdated

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Meh for so-called “trust” in crypto. It’s business and this was effectively an equity raise. Backdating the cliff so it’s nonexistent with no chance for the community to disagree is not exactly behavior that inspires trust.

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Hey all, I’m taking some time off to recover from an extremely intense couple months but just wanted to follow up here on a couple things.

First a bit about this process. It was really hard. I am not complaining, just want to explain a bit more. Trying to figure out proper compensation for everyone that had helped yearn grow would have been an impossible task — and also that was outside the scope of YIP-57 which was about retaining key contributors.

Our mandate was to make sure the people critical to yearn’s success, the people that could go off and start their own project easily, were properly incentivized to keep building Yearn. So we were limited to that which is a relatively small number of people. But that doesn’t in any way mean other contributors aren’t important.

Yes, we had to limit to the core team for this retention package—people that were full-time at yearn and critical contributors. I’m sorry that we couldn’t more clearly reward everyone else yet.

This process required discussions with each member of the team, getting their commitment to yearn, and making sure their role was clear. There was no way we could do that for 50 people in this timeframe, and tbh that’s not what this part of YIP-57 mandated.

So what about everyone else? What about you two, all the other names on the hoodie, and all the other people who have been spending their free time working their asses off for Yearn? We haven’t forgotten you.

First, we have a nice war chest for future hires. I welcome anyone who has been a contributor that wants to go deeper to reach out to me and we can talk about options. That’s a part of YIP-57 too, but not this part.

Second, the 12 YFI for the community. We have a list of about 20 people we want to give that to, but it’s not finalized. Rewards for all the selfless work that has been done.

Third, we are building Coordinape, a new tool to improve our community grant process. I have been self-funding a small team to develop it. It’s a way to fully decentralize the grants process where contributors themselves, not the ops team or multisig, will decide how to distribute a monthly budget of community grants. More on this soon. If you want to help with this, please contact @zem

Yearn is an emerging network. Some contributors need to be compensated in more normal ways, like those in this post. Others will float in and out, do things here and there, and the above model doesn’t make sense for them—but they still bring great value. For now I think we’ll continue to have two systems: community grants (soon via coordinape) and the core team retained here.

And last thing, about dumping — as described above yearn has right of first refusal. If people want to sell their vested YFI they have to tell us first and Yearn would buy it back OTC at market rates, so no dumping. We will be very strict on that.

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Is this correct? I’m reading 6 people are getting 250 yfi, each, I don’t disagree with these allocations, just want to make sure nobody is confused here. Seeing as you’re on the committee this is an odd statement to make.

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It’s @YFI-Cent on the CWG not @yfi_lit

Tiers 1-5 are YFI per person so eg each of the 6 people in tier 1 get 275 YFI vesting over 3 years.

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Ah I see that makes sense.

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Thanks @tracheopteryx for this answer.

Probably missed track at some point. Really thought those package were for all contributors. So thanks for this clarification. Need to go back again to YIP-57 :rofl:

Ho, good to know that. Happy to help @zem if needed

Yep sure, no problem about that. And nothing to say about the first message. It’s fair , and make sense. You guys need to be compensated properly for what you did, are doing and will do.

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Nice initiative!

Retention is really important and most of the people I know in yearn are really valid.

Completely supportive on this.

Who are the recipients? I am especially interested in the strategist ones

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