Proposed: October 13, 2021
Status: Passed
Link: GitHub PR
As the Beanstalk community expands, the Silo should start coordinating continued development of Beanstalk and the Beanstalk community. Beginning the process of establishing long term support for the Beanstalk ecosystem independent of Publius is essential to the long-term success of Beanstalk.
We propose Beanstalk mints and allocates 200,000 Beans to start this process. This budget should fund dev and marketing needs through the end of 2021.
We propose minting 120,000 Beans and allocating them to a dev budget to fund a concerted effort to attract high quality front-end and back-end developer talent to Beanstalk.
We propose minting 80,000 Beans to establish a well-funded public relations operation for Beanstalk.
The initial dev budget should be used to attract quality developers to Beanstalk on both the front and back ends.
Upon passage, we will add Taiki Lee, a front-end dev, to Beanstalk Farms. We were approached by Taiki to work on Beanstalk and have had multiple positive conversations with him over text and audio. We anticipate Taiki will improve the quality of our output on the website and expedite open sourcing its code.
Taiki has agreed to be paid on an at-will, month-to-month basis for 10,000 Beans per month in a full-time position. 30,000 of the 120,000 Beans from the initial dev budget will be allotted to making payments to Taiki for the duration of Q4.
The initial dev budget is intended to cover the end of 2021. Assuming a similar rate for similar work, this initial budget will allow us to hire additional developers to work on Beanstalk until the end of the year.
Additionally, community members are welcome to propose allotments from the budget in exchange for contributions to Beanstalk that they want to see. For example, this can be used create bounties to encourage specific contributions to Beanstalk, make one-time payments in exchange for work, and more. Some ideas for proposals are to add a telegram event bot, add Beanstalk to vFat, and add Beanstalk to Zapper.
Upon passage, we will open a #dev-budget channel in the Beanstalk Discord to facilitate discussion on potential proposals.
This initial marketing budget should be used to attract quality eyes to Beanstalk.
Upon passage, we will add the Bean Merchant, an active member of our Discord community, as a part time community organizer. The Bean Merchant has been a high quality, active participant in our community thus far and has expressed a variety of ideas to help Beanstalk continue to reach a new, high quality audience.
The Bean Merchant has agreed to be paid on an at-will, month-to-month basis for 3,000 Beans per month. 9,000 of the 80,000 Beans from the initial marketing budget will be allotted to payment for the Bean Merchant for the duration of Q4.
We propose using a portion of the marketing budget to incentivize various protocols to start a) accepting Beans on their protocols and b) adding Beans to their liquidity pools.
We welcome the entire community to discuss and propose allotments of the marketing budget to fund activity they want to see. Having a wide variety of input on the use of the marketing budget is important to the long-term decentralization of Beanstalk.
Upon passage, we will open a #marketing-budget channel in the Beanstalk Discord to facilitate discussion on potential proposals.
To ensure widespread and inexpensive participation in allocation of the budgets, we propose leveraging Snapshot (https://snapshot.org/#/beanstalkfarms.eth) to vote on specific allocations of the budgets.
We propose the following rules for Snapshot voting on allocating funds from either budget, which have been designed to best complement the on-chain governance structure for approving BIPs:
Upon commit, Beanstalk will mint and send 120,000 Beans to the Development Budget smart contract and 80,000 Beans to the Marketing Budget smart contract.
Publius has deployed 2 smart contracts: 1 for the marketing budget and 1 for the development budget.
The Development Budget contract is deployed here:
0x83A758a6a24FE27312C1f8BDa7F3277993b64783
The Marketing Budget contract is deployed here:
0xAA420e97534aB55637957e868b658193b112A551
These contracts are intended to hold the funds for the corresponding budgets and therefore only contain 1 function which is used to make payments and can only be called by the contract's owner. The contract is upgradable. The source code for the budgets is here: https://github.com/BeanstalkFarms/Beanstalk-Budget
Publius will custody the budget contracts and will be responsible for sending the payments determined by the proposals. In instances where the intended recipient of a previously allocated portion of a budget is not able to meet their expectations as outlined in the proposal, Publius has discretion to withhold payments. Our goal is to further decentralize this process for future budgets over time.
The proposal to use off-chain voting for allocating these budgets is to make participation free for Farmers. Voting on-chain on Ethereum costs money and can get expensive. Given that there may be numerous and frequent proposals to spend these funds, we don’t want Farmers to be deterred by the cost of voting repeatedly. Accordingly, we decided to propose a single BIP to mint the funds to the first budget contracts and then allow for the funds to be allocated via Snapshot.
Snapshot is used throughout the greater DeFi community as a trustworthy and inexpensive voting solution. For example, it would be cost-ineffective to have an on-chain vote to allocate 3,000 Beans for a marketing proposal: the gas cost for Farmers would almost certainly be more than that.
The proposal to give Publius custody of the budget contracts is primarily a function of time and convenience. Snapshot does not have native a way to trustlessly make a smart contract function call. Beanstalk does not yet have a publicly trusted team that could take responsibility for managing the budgeted funds through a multi-signature wallet. Thus, the simplest and most logical option is to give Publius custody of the funds.
The proposed budget contract is upgradable so in the case we find a better solution we can improve the allocation process. For example, we are looking into using Aragon's optimistic voting solution but have not yet had enough time to thoroughly test and vet the solution.
The budget contracts were deployed ahead of time by Publius and will therefore not be directly deployed by the BIP. Because the Bean contract was deployed through the Beanstalk diamond and not directly from Publius, Etherscan has given us a hard time getting ownership of the Bean contract to properly update the contract page. We don’t want to have this problem happen here. By deploying from a wallet, we can easily have control of it on Etherscan. There is no advantage to having the budgets deployed directly through the BIP.
In general, we are opposed to creating a large omnibus Beanstalk treasury. We believe a default treasury that is funded through a portion of all Bean mints is a) an inefficient use of capital, and b) a permanent tax on every member of the Beanstalk ecosystem. This is unattractive. Proposing one-time Bean mints to target specific causes is a preferred cost-effective alternative.
This proposal will mint 200,000 Beans that will be spend over the next 3 months. Given the average weekly volume in the BEAN:ETH pair, an average of ~15,000 Beans sold per week is unlikely to make a significant impact on the price or the optimal Weather.
The Weather will adjust such that the TWAP = 1 and the Pod Rate = 15%. Beanstalk does not care what the Weather is. In theory, this additional spending will slightly raise the Weather necessary to have the TWAP = 1 and the Pod Rate = 15%, but is not otherwise expected to affect Beanstalk in any way. Given that Beanstalk is generally in a period of rising Weather, this slight raise of the necessary Weather will not have a meaningful effect on the state of Beanstalk.
Effective immediately upon commit.