Regarding the concern that “we” went from 1000, to 3,333, to 6,666 . . . I have to say this makes me laugh, and cry a little too. It just shows how different yearn is as an entity and how little it’s understood. And it seems no matter how hard we try to communicate and be transparent, there is still so much we all need to learn about this new form of organization.
Imagine a traditional company wants to print new shares. They come out with their messaging “we want to print 10,000 shares for x, y, and z reasons.” It’s a solid plan and sounds great. People vote yes and hooray! Do you think they didn’t consider other numbers? Do you think they just immediately created a perfect plan with no experimentation first or brainstorming? Of course not, they tried 1,000, they tried 5,000, they tried 25,000 and their models landed on 10,000. They just did it in secret.
We do it in the open. We do it in the open and some people are so used to being manipulated by media campaigns they see our sincere and open process as a scam. It’s disheartening, but in the age of conspiracy theories it’s something we all have to get used to.
Just to take it a step further, let me explain from my PoV how this process has gone.
We’ve been running yearn on a shoestring budget from the get go. I took a salary 1/10th of my previous compensation because I love Yearn and it’s literally the most exciting thing in the world to me. So have many others. We work nonstop. We ship like no one else. Do we make mistakes? Yes we do, and we learn, and we do it all messy in the open because we are something new, we’re a decentralized network, not a top-down company.
I’ve seen our team get poached. I’ve seen other protocols offer $90,000 PER WEEK to attract devs. We pay most of our devs NOTHING. Some get ~$10k PER MONTH. The fact that we have any team left is astounding, the people at yearn are not here for the money. But how is that sustainable? We are going to keep losing people. And we are burning out because we are under-resourced.
The amount of audits we are doing is crazy, some cost over 6 figures. These new bills come in and do you know what the discussion is on the ops team? It’s about giving up our ~$10k per month salary to pay them. We pay people out of pocket to make things happen fast and avoid worrying the team. We’ve paid the whole team a month late once.
In DeFi today, how does this make any sense to you?
In recent months we’ve seen the cracks forming. Money has become an existential problem for Yearn. How is YFI going to do with no Yearn team? Or a Yearn team of burned out underpaid workers doing 10 jobs and unpaid volunteers flowing in and out picking up the pieces?
So we came up with BABY. At that time we hadn’t even considered minting as an option. BABY didn’t get us to where the rest of DeFi is in terms of compensation or treasury, but at least it might help staunch the bleeding. And once v2 TVL kicks up it starts looking pretty good. But as you can see from the sensitivities in our proposal, it’s not enough.
We thought we didn’t have any other options, so BABY was it. Then @yfi_lit made his proposal for a mint. For the record, no one on the core team knew who @yfi_lit was. Then all of a sudden, while the BABY proposal was already in progress, minting was an option.
Why was it an option? Not because the devs decided to ram minting through – because we listen to the community and the community told us it was an option.
At this point, seeing the feedback we were getting, and the incredible amount of support we had, creative energy just started exploding. Why 1,000? Maybe 3,333 was better? 33,333 is a nice meme, boom, now there’s a meme. But then we set in for the hard work of actually crunching the numbers and it turned out 6,666 was a better fit (see our reasoning in the proposal).
Now while most things in yearn happen in the open, some do not. Yes, there are many private discussions in yearn, just like in any other network. One of these discussions is around compensation packages. I and a few others built a number of detailed models for compensating the team. We consulted top industry experts, some of whom are coauthors of this proposal. We arrived at a reasonable and face melting plan. We are not sharing it yet because it’s really fucking sensitive and not finished! It’s an estimate done to arrive at the mint number. It needs more work. I’m not going to share an estimate for how much each contributor is going to get paid before it’s ready to offer to each team member. They deserve to hear it first and only after it’s been fully vetted through a solid process.
That’s why we will do the Compensation Working Group. This is the way. This is how Yearn actually works: small groups of dedicated people doing the work, getting feedback, and submitting it to the multisig for approval. We are actively working on this plan. We can only do so much at once. We would love your feedback on this process. I am fine trusting our dedicated team and supportive community to do this properly after the mint has been passed (if it passes).
grow faster than 0.2 YFI/day? 
Likely. (Or make your own math/spreadsheet and share, love to hear other takes…