[BIP-347] Fund Balancer Maxis for Q3 2023

Service Providers Funding Proposals
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PR with Payload

Introduction

There are some significant changes compared to the last funding proposal and I welcome community feedback as always.

Now that the treasury has a healthier supply of stablecoins and the DAO’s ongoing stablecoin costs look to be significantly lower in Year 2 I think it’s prudent to start paying the liquid portion of salaries in USDC. Thus the breakdown below will look a bit different from last quarter.

We’ll also be discontinuing Coordinape and adopting a bounty board for community contributors (this is based on feedback from the community and contributors themselves). We will share our learnings from our Coordinape experience soon. Previously 5000 BAL per month or $33,750 was allocated towards this, using last quarter’s BAL price of $6.75.

10,000 USDC per month will be allocated toward the community bounty board. This is expected to compensate regular contributors with clear roles like Cosme, Gleb, and Dubstard for their ongoing work while allowing the opportunity for others to also pick up tasks. The Maxis will own the setup and management of this board and also provide a report on the spend in the monthly forum update.

Previously we requested 8550 BAL per month for salaries or $57,712. For Q3 we request 31,210 in USDC and 8475 in BAL per month or $68,500. The increase is driven by two factors:

  • Tritium’s salary is increasing a little over $5k vs last quarter - this better reflects a market salary for his skill set and his growing importance to the various operations of Maxis.
  • To partially make up for the loss of Coordinape each Maxi was given an additional 200 BAL or 1000 USDC (aside from Tritium)

This does mean each Maxi aside from Tritium is taking an effective pay cut as average Coordinape rewards per person exceeded the above figures. I believe this is prudent given the challenging market conditions where we must be trimming costs as much as we can.

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Last quarter we asked for 1500 BAL for dev bounties. 875 BAL of that was spent, the details of which you can find in the below table. From this the Maxis have decided to pursue a retainer for Shakotan in the amount of 3000 USDC per month and 600 BAL to be max locked for the quarter. He will continue assisting us in our various Github repos to ensure our automated processes work as reliably and accurately as possible.

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Finally, we’ll ask for an additional 20 ETH from the treasury for gas expenses. You can check out this dashboard we commissioned to track gas spending. This may require supplemental funding during the quarter depending on ETH gas prices and if gas intensive activities increase, such as poking additional layer zero cross chain rate providers.

Service Provider Name: Balancer Maxis

Leader(s): Solarcurve, joined by the returning cast of Mike B, Zekraken, Xeonus, Zen Dragon, Danko, and Tritium.

Pledge to abide by the DAO’s Code of Conduct (or link to your own): Yes

Pledge to abide by the Accountability Guidelines: Yes

Domains of Operation + Key Objectives & Success Metrics:

As Balancer pursues its path for further decentralization, the Balancer Maxis workgroup presents community contributors aligned with the protocol’s future and long-term sustainability. Whether proposing and executing innovative ideas, or protecting the interests of the ecosystem and helping third-party projects, Maxis have proven to be a key component of Balancer.

Our Q3 proposal is effectively asking veBAL Governance the continuation of this decentralized collaboration group, and reading on previous Q2 funding post might bring some additional context to the present proposal.The following will be kept brief and at a high level. More granular metrics can be found in our monthly updates for April, May, and June.

Multisig Management

  • Linear (boosted) pool settings
  • Swap fee and amplification adjustments
  • Adding newly approved gauges to veBAL
  • Adding new reward tokens to gauges
  • Withdrawing and distributing protocol fees
  • Verifying and queuing all transactions before execution by the DAO Multisig
  • Together with Balancer Labs we operate the Emergency subDAO Multisig

These are some of the basic functions required to ensure smooth operation of the Balancer Protocol for all its end users. We believe the best metric for success is that most users are not even aware that these tasks exist – they simply observe a new gauge being approved by voters then appearing on the voting list or find protocol fees in the claim section every week, etc. Maxis ensure that the various multisigs and their relevant functions are used properly and promptly, and all transactions are verified for accuracy by at least two people.

Governance

  • We act as verifiers of last resort for BIPs that require on-chain execution and we post BIPs ready for a vote on snapshot - though anyone with 200k veBAL can also post to snapshot.
  • Active participants in Discord and the Forum on governance topics
  • Several of us are delegates
  • Advise projects on Balancer’s governance process
  • Manage admin of the Governance Forum
  • We will pursue various strategic initiatives (such as BIP-19) at our discretion, either individually or as a group.

Automation and Tooling

  • We work with Mimic to sweep and process our collected fees into USDC.
  • We run scripts that collect data and redirect fees to vote markets for veBAL holders to collect with their votes.
  • We build, deploy and fund [Chainlink Automation Upkeeps](multisig-ops/chainlink_keepers at main · BalancerMaxis/multisig-ops · GitHub) which handle regular operations for veBAL, and incentive management for our strategic partners.
  • We continue to develop more reporting to help validate and verify submitted multisig payloads.
  • We track and organize governance operations through the transparent and open Balancer Multisig Operations repository.
  • We build and maintain internal tooling complex and common tasks such as pool creation and linear pool management.These tools are not polished/require some knowledge to operate, but we share them with some support in our bizdev and community support conversations.
  • Members of the Maxis, often supported by external grants, build and maintain analytics for the Balancer ecosystem.

Maxis spend a good deal of time developing and conducting operational processes to keep fees flowing and governance systems operational and accurate. In 2023 we have started flexing our coding skills more and working to automate governance and partner liquidity management support operations in ways that are more “no-stop” and permissionless when possible.

Partnerships

  • We manage Balancer’s Discord and ensure questions or concerns are addressed
  • Help projects use Balancer by offering advice or answering questions
  • We often deploy new pools for other projects
  • Whitelisting and maintaining token lists
  • We help with UI testing for Balancer
  • Seek out new opportunities to apply Balancer’s technology, primarily in the DeFi realm
  • Manage relationships with partners across the entire lifecycle from initial conversations to implementation to final results
  • Coordinate partner needs with other teams in the Balancer ecosystem, e.g. integrations.

Maxis took the lead on partnerships in the Balancer ecosystem during Q4 2022 after the biz dev team at Orb was dissolved. The primary near term goals are expanding boosted pool offerings focused primarily on Aave v3, encouraging adoption of ve80/20 or similar systems, making Balancer the hub of LST liquidity, and increasing utilization of the veBAL flywheel (projects bribing, parking POL, etc). Generally we believe Balancer has made solid progress over the last few months on these initiatives.

Community

  • We manage a bounty board, open to community contribution
  • Onboarding framework for new contributors
  • Discord moderation and security
  • First responders to user support
  • Bridging the community inquires to other Service Providers

This quarter’s proposal represents a big shift from the framework inherited from the Ops subDAO and the Coordinape reward system. Having an open community for new contributors wanting to join the Balancer ecosystem is a great concern for us. However, we have learned that bounties can attract higher quality and project-oriented contributors that might be more likely to be retained. Soon we will share more about our experience using Coordinape.

This new approach will allow the community’s marketing efforts currently under the Maxis to be handed out to Beethoven’s team plans for community developments.

The legacy onboarding program will still be running, reaching every applicant through discovery calls to help contributors understand the DAO operating framework (BIP-1) and set in motion their ideas for Balancer.

Project Management

  • Lead weekly meetings with team leads across the ecosystem to align on projects in flight
  • Be the driving force behind the ecosystem’s top roadmap priorities and be accountable for their delivery
  • Track project dependencies across the teams and coordinate among relevant parties

Maxis assumed the role of project management for the ecosystem in Q1. We are well positioned for this as we are the point of contact for outside teams & projects and we have established working relationships with all internal teams. Our experience in executing various initiatives in the last 9 months means we have a lot of insight into what it takes to take a project from start to finish.

Record Keeping

  • We will maintain a notion page detailing the activity of each of our controlled multisigs. Included will be documentation on how to use the powers of the multisig so a future SP can easily take it over in case we are off boarded.

Length of Engagement & Budget:

3 months.

Budget of 34,210 USDC per month for salaries and 8,475 BAL per month, plus Shakotan’s 600 BAL for the quarter. We also request an additional monthly allocation of 10,000 USDC per month for the bounty board and a quarterly allocation of 20 ETH for gas expenses.

Total for 3 month engagement: 132,630 USDC and 26,025 BAL and 20 ETH (ETH is excluded in the following comparison).

Comparison against last quarter: Using today’s BAL price of $4.4 we’re requesting $247,140 this quarter. Last quarter we requested 42,150 BAL at a price of $6.75 or $284,512. Thus this quarter’s funding proposal represents a reduction in costs of $37,372.

Funds to transfer: 132,630 USDC and 25,400 BAL and 20 ETH (to reflect the unspent 625 BAL from last quarter’s dev bounties)

Impact on the Treasury: The Treasury currently holds ~4.5M BAL. Funding the Balancer Maxis for Q3 would cost around 0.5% of the treasury’s BAL holdings, which annualizes to ~1.5% of the treasury’s BAL. The Treasury currently holds ~4.5M in USDC. Funding the USDC portion would cost around 3% of the treasury’s USDC, which annualizes to ~12%.

ETH Address to Receive Funds: 0x166f54F44F271407f24AA1BE415a730035637325

Link to SLA (if going through the Foundation: N/A

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Thanks for the post, Solar. Aura is fully supportive of the work that the Balancer Maxis are doing–great job as usual.

Just dropping a quick comment here as well to follow up on Tritium’s request to move discussion to the forum.

@Tritium, perhaps you could speak a bit as to the following:

  1. It’s probably best for the public record to lay out your reasoning as to why you elected to receive stables and not locked veBAL to demonstrate alignment. It’d also be great for you to explain why only your salary increased while the other Maxis demonstrated leadership by reducing salaries. A healthier treasury doesn’t necessarily mean that salaries should be expanded.

  2. Can you speak a bit about the additional $40K you received as a grant. Are there any protocols in place for contributors receiving compensation from multiple sources?

  3. What are your thoughts on an independent compensation committee that makes salary suggestions across the ecosystem?

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Generally speaking, I don’t think it is appropriate to expect individuals who are part of a service provider to justify their individual pay in a public forum. It creates a toxic work environment, which makes finding and retaining great people very hard.

I am personally delighted to do so :). Please don’t take this as precedent setting…

First some context, and a bit more about me:

I am a 43 year old Tech Professional with 25 years of experience doing Technical Operations DevOps, Management, Management consulting and advisory in and around technical organisations. For the last 10 years I have worked as a freelancer in high growth startups finding traction for the most part.

From an Amerocentric point of view I have the skills and experience to take beyond this kind of a salary. From a more Eurocentric point of view, I’m at an age in my life where my salary should be reaching “max output”.

Furthermore, I am a very idealistic person about DAOism, and the trust put in me by the token holders/voters who grant my pay. It personally delights me to ask every 3 months for validation and the continuation of my work.

In the same vein, it weighs very heavily on me to sell gov tokens paid to me for my work at a DAO. Due to holding too many gov tokens in the past, my personal runway is a bit tight right now, so I need liquid pay. The last 3 months has involved selling more BAL than I feel good about. I will sleep much easier not having to do so next quarter.

So to answer your questions:

1: Why have I asked for this pay?

  • I think I am worth it.
  • It seems like all of my peers agree enough to take a pay cut to support it.
  • I need to save up for retirement to not be a poor old man.
  • I got rekt once by trying to HODL all the gov tokens i got paid, and I don’t want to dump BAL. That’s why I’m asking for USD.

My salary increased in the bera because I was being highly underpaid for most of the last year. I have demonstrated my value to my peers, and I am at a point/age in my life where I need to be making decent money. I know that I can get it somewhere.

It’s a real shame that other Maxi’s took a cut for me. I offered to give some of my pay up to balance it out, to take the same cut from my new pay that everyone else did in order to even things out. No one took me up on the offer, because they all agree that I should 100% be getting paid this much.

It should say something that all of my peers are willing to take a personal hit, even when offered a way out by me, in order to support this…

I personally feel that the Maxi’s are a very high performance team, and the place the DAO should be looking for savings is not our SP, but this makes an important point that we do what we must in bad times. That’s what makes us a great team. We are self-aware of our costs, our contributions, the state of the DAO, and the business/market environment around us.

2: The “40k” Grant

  • I was getting paid part time and working 60 hours a week in Q1.
  • My original mandate with the Maxis had to do with governance process on the forum and facilitating the human side of it.
  • I started doing a lot of automation and documentation and everyone agreed it made sense to ask the grants committee for some extra budget for this work that sat outside my remit, and was not clearly the responsibility of the Maxis at that time. Documentation was a key initiative.
  • A total of 22.5k USD worth of BAL was paid out. Here are more details about that work and the result.
  • I consider the maintenance of this work as part of my ongoing duty with the Maxis, until I can find someone else who takes it off my hands.

3: Performance Management in DAOs

I think pay/performance is a topic that needs a lot more thought at Balancer/with Balancer SPs, but is better handled for the most part at the SP level, and not focused on individuals, other than leaders. I think the Orb BIP was a very very loud shot fired that governance notices waste and that SPs need to be more self-aware.

I think a lot of people who hadn’t been thinking about that so much before are now trying to figure out what this means. The pressure is good, but we also need to give people some space and time. So let me make a few statements here.

  • SP’s should be independent and autonomous and able to make their own choices. They should also “live and die” autonomously by them.
  • Guidance about what we pay people, and a matrix to evaluate SP’s against such makes sense.
    • Compliance should not be required by any means, but SP’s that sit far outside guidance should also be clearly high performance teams that are self-aware enough to not need said guidance.
  • SPs need to be accountable to their stakeholders, of which Governance is a big one.

Great engineers, leaders, thinkers and tech teams cost good money. I think it makes a lot of sense to scale back salaries now (IMO my current pay is still scaled back), but I also think to balance that there needs to be a sense that in good times the money really flows. If your pay flexes based on the market/org then it should flex both ways.

The problem is, many people here still seem to be clinging for dear life onto their Web2 wagie comforts and high salaries established during better times with less concern for runway. When everyone can see that the employees in these SPs are doing better than the web3 contributors who take on more risk, it’s hard to imagine people spending much energy thinking about different kinds of employment structures that flex.

I wish all SP’s would move to quarterly(or semi-annual) budgeting until we figure that out. The Maxi’s continue to lead by example.

Balancer still has a ways to go to find the future of work… Getting together some non-binding guidelines that helped people understand what to expect and helped governance to assess SP proposals in the future is something I support. We just have keep moving, but also take our time so this can be handled in a way that is not-too-toxic, doesn’t kill the morale/productivity of most of the people working here, and is decided by a number of independent thinkers with good business sense who provide clear reasoning and at least some debate in a public forum. We also need to be mindful of being able to attract the best and brightest web3 native people to ensure the long term success of the protocol and the DAO.

A Final Statement

When running this by my fellow Maxis, they suggested that I highlight the transformation the Maxi’s have gone through over the last 6 months and how I helped to enable that. I don’t think this is the place to tute my own horn so much, so let me just talk about transformation at Balancer:

Over the last 6 months, as new pool types were deployed and composable pools became possible, the rate of change at Balancer ramped up very quickly. At the same time the regulatory environment around our industry is also in a high energy but somewhat chaotic and unclear state. It has been a real challenge for every team at Balancer to deal with so much rapid change while also ensuring the security and smooth operations of the protocol.

For the Maxi’s this has primarily presented itself in these ways.

  • The number and complexity of BizDev convos we have/DAOs we have to support getting spun up on Balancer has massively increased.
    • The number of operations we have to help them run to succeed (handling direct incentive plans, or pool design for example) are also sky rocketing.
  • The volume and complexity of governance topics that we must validate with very very very high certainty and execute with absolute operational accuracy seems to be constantly accelerating.
    • In the last 6 months since we enacted the new governance process we have tracked our work in this Github Repo.
      • Over 150 BIPs have been posted, voted on, and accurately executed on time.

In order to deal with this, the Maxis have started adopting more of a DevOps culture and ethos, focused on lean processes and automation. This is highlighted in the Automation section of this Funding Proposal. The Maxi’s have gone from being World Class Etherscan Surfers, to DevOps Wizards. Before long, we hope to be able to leave most of our regular operational duties for the bots, and move to educating about, implementing, and monitoring our automations.

In short: It’s crazy out there. The Maxis are keeping up. We are rocking and rolling. We’re feeling good. We’re learning. We’re growing. It is what it is, and we do what we must.

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Just wanted to pop in and say that I believe Tritium deserves this amount and as far as I know the other Maxi’s feel similarly. He has pushed the maxis forward so much in terms of dev ops and he has been helping with pretty much everything the maxis have to deal with, from multisig management, biz dev, devops/automation, partner assistance, etc. I’m very confident is saying that the Balancer ecosystem will be getting a greater amount of value in return than what he’s being paid.

Also, being on the grants committee, I can speak on Tritiums grant. It was approved during a time when he was getting paid like 5k a month and the grant was to do some work that was outside the scope of what the maxis were responsible for at the time. We (grants) later encouraged Tritium to aspire to raise his base salary so he doesn’t have to go to grants anymore, and it was unlikely we would have approved an additional grant.

As evidenced by the above post, he talks a lot. Some might take that the wrong way but I can personally vouch for Tritium’s value to the ecosystem. Just gotta learn to put his essays into chatgpt for summarization.

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small change - increasing our request for gas from 10 ETH to 20 ETH as we’ll be taking over funding the L2 checkpointer every week. This is what bridges BAL to all the L2’s every week and costs ~0.5 ETH weekly but that will increase as gas prices increase and as we add more L2 gauges.

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This response is odd–not quite sure if this is what the community wants to see from the Maxis.
The Maxis are supposed to be the most loyal group in the Balancer ecosystem. Historically, they’ve taken their salaries in fully locked veBAL. This demonstrates a great deal of alignment w/ Balancer, and makes budget requests seem very reasonable. This was a point that was reiterated again and again during Solarcurve’s tenure. Since you’ve arrived, we’ve gone to fully locked to 60% locked to now, 0% locked. You seem to be more focused on personal wealth than understanding the nature of this group. If you don’t have enough faith in Balancer to at least hold some veBAL, why should anyone else?

You repeatedly mention throughout your response that you were underpaid. I don’t see how this is the case. You were paid a part-time salary for part-time work–fair compensation. You then did additional work for which you received a grant–fair compensation. You now seem to be taking your part-time work + the grant work together to signal that you were underpaid for just that part-time work, then using that to justify an increased salary that exceeds compensation for the grant + part-time work together. It’s fine if you want to calculate it this way–I would acknowledge that you were underpaid if you return the grant funds. If you don’t, then you were fairly compensated, so your salary range should say the same as the prior period. More importantly, why was this not disclosed to the community?

This feels a bit tone-deaf. You’re calling on all other SPs and everyone other than yourself to be fiscally responsible. Yet when everyone around you has demonstrated great leadership in taking reduced salaries, you not only stubbornly refuse to budge, you argue for an increase rather than a decrease. At 15K/month + a 40K grant, your total compensation is 220K/year. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Maxis, you need to lead by example. If you can’t, then step aside and tone down the rhetoric, because you have no high horse to stand on to criticize others.

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I am as loyal as they come ser, and I don’t really care about personal wealth. I do care about having security, and at the moment I need liquidity for that. I don’t want to have a long conversation with you about my loyalty to Balancer or my personal finances. Do you question the loyalty and judgment of the Maxis? Have you heard any questions about my loyalty from them? If anything I’m loyal to a fault ser.

I’m an open an honest person. If the community at large has issues with that… hmm? You seem to be focused more on loyalty, then the functional needs of the DAO and all of the work that the Maxis do. That’s why we get paid… to do necessary or important work. Loyalty helps us do it with pride and excellence.

If the community at large is so concerned about my loyalty, maybe it should revisit the decision to add me to the dev multisig. That is all about loyalty and honour and character. It’s also interesting, that the community and team felt it was safe to put me in the most trust demanding role there is in our DAO. It appears to me like again this is a single voice stirring up a bit of a fuss in a way that can feel a little too much like a personal attack sometimes. I hope you have a lot of little birdies telling asking you to be their voice here.

I don’t even understand what you are saying here. The grant was public and made in Q1. It was mentioned as part of my Q2 pay. I don’t want to keep talking to you about how much I’m worth. That’s not for you to unilaterally decide. Work on a matrix or something if you want :slight_smile:

The grant was 20k in Q1 when I was getting paid 5k a month, so that is about 12k a month. My salary in Q2, was 8,775 k a month (cut a bit due to the Q1 grant still being worked on). Since you seem so focused on this.

5k *3 months , 9k*3 months, 14k*6 months = 126k + 22.5 K = 148k that I currently stand to be paid by balancer in 2023, 15k of that is locked in BAL. That is less than I will have been paid for a year of work for any of the last 10 years, barring 2 when I was on a sabbatical/focused on a hobby business, but I am cool with that because I love my DAO, my community, my work and my team.
Edit: Just remembered, I also got paid like around 5-10k on coordinape over the last 6 months, so maybe 158k.

I told you the grant was 22.5k. All of this has been laid out, you sound like a broken record.

Now it almost feels like you are in attack mode coming at a single contributor about their livelihood, without even taking the time to arm yourself with the facts. Still enjoying this convo, but almost no one else would, which is why we need to be careful ser.

SP’s need to get their act together, and be things that are fit for the environment we are in and highly performant in measurable ways. Individuals shouldn’t have to undergo this kind of public scrutiny or a regular basis to secure their livelihoods for the most part.

If it would make you feel better, I am happy to hop on a call and take you through the changes I have led and why they are worth money, but that’s a long conversation, especially for someone not in the context. That’s why it’s good to have some layers between governance and individuals when thinking about performance management.

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The concrete responses are helpful. The snarky ones are not, especially the ones you edit in after the fact to make yourself look more clever.

You’ve been very critical of other SPs and their salaries. That opens yourself up to scrutiny as well.
Those living in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones. Not every comment is a “personal attack.”
Not every question is “undue public scrutiny of individual livelihoods that requires layers of governance.” You yourself requested that this discussion be moved to forum, and volunteered to discuss your salary and work product. Transparency doesn’t mean that it’s a virtue only when it suits you. Instead of being defensive, perhaps try to think about why these types of questions might arise, and why your answers are insufficient.

Regarding your response, you miss my points.

Regarding loyalty, this is something subjective that can’t be measured–your three paragraphs on this subject just make it more murky. Taking a portion of salary in locked veBAL accomplishes 2 things. First, it objectively demonstrates alignment. You will be around for at least one year. Second, it sends a good signal to our community. Our leaders have enough confidence to lock and hold, therefore, we should as well.

I took issue with the tenor of your answers, because they revolved around your personal needs, and mentioned personal wealth more than a few times. I believe the community should be led by a leader that’s socially cognizant of the signals that his actions send. Solar’s salary was almost always in line with the rest of the Maxis. He took his salary in locked veBAL. When everyone was cutting salaries, he did so as well. These types of actions are what I expect from a leader. Instead of morphing the structure of the group to meet your personal needs, cutting salaries of others to increase your own, it would seem to be much more preferable if you bring your salary down in line w/ others and general social norms, and for the Maxis to continue to receive the majority of their salaries in locked veBAL, say, 60%+. That preserves the founding spirit of the Maxis, demonstrates equality and solidarity w/ your peers, signals confidence in Balancer, and creates a true example for other SPs.

If you have additional personal needs beyond your Maxi salary, it would be preferable for me if you lay out the work that doesn’t fall within your current work duties, and just apply for a grant. However, as I mentioned in my second point, there should be a clear delineation between the work that you do as a Maxi and any additional work that you do to meet the qualifications for that grant. I took objection with your second response because you repeatedly mention that you were underpaid, which is just not the case. You were fairly compensated for your Maxi work, and you were fairly compensated for your grant work. You can make a strong case for doing a good job without overinflating your effort or importance.

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I’ll let @solarcurve speak to his decisions about his pay and locking if he wants to.

I made it clear to Solar, the Maxis, and others in the Balancer org that I expected/needed my liquid pay to go up to about this range since the beginning. It would have not been possible for me to pursue full-time work with Balancer otherwise, and I had other offers. I was patient due to the current financial stress the DAO was under and my commitment to the Balancer Ecosystem and desire to remain involved and influential in it.

Why are you coming at me and the Maxis when we are quite cost effective, and take more of our pay locked than anyone else?

The example I want to create for other SPs is that if you do a good job, you can make good money. That being a “freelancer/independent” can pay as good or better than a job with more benefits and security. If you are sensitive to the market and don’t take wagie securities, can you actually do better at Balancer or is it just a raw deal?

I also want to signal to some other Maxi’s who I think are great that Balancer can be your “day job”. I think there could be a couple of us who are working part time at Balancer because they don’t feel they can make a living wage and create security for their families otherwise. If I succeed, there may be more of us that need to get paid more dollars. I think that’s ok, even gud.

In terms of other SPs: You and other members of the Aura Delegate Council have asked repeatedly for more details on individual pay from SPs. The Maxis have always provided that. Imagine how this conversation is going to make other SPs feel/think about providing the transparency you have asked.

How much money do you make Franklin? What have you done to justify it? Can you provide details of every bonus, grant, incentive, extra payment you received and why and add it all up? Do you think that is a good use of your time? How do you sustain yourself on that? What does your personal runway and net worth situation look like? How do we know you are ethical and where your loyalties lie?

Is this not an industry that can provide secure, liquid, competitive pay to it’s contributors? Is that going to allow us to grow into mainstream adoption?

I’m happy to get into more of a conversation about my ethics and loyalty, but not if you’re the only person who has questions. So anyone else?

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^

Here’s what Bard thinks:

image
image1932×305 33.3 KB

No more comments on my end.

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Thanks @Franklin and @Tritium for bringing more arguments and clarity to this discussion.

It seems the maxis are unanimous about Tritium deserving this high pay which is reassuring, but I do have to agree with Franklin’s points about the signal/message that receiving and locking BAL as opposed to liquid compensation (BAL or USDC) sends.

DAOs are all about long-term alignment of incentives: I wish more SPs were to request funding in the form of BAL they are going to max lock, which has been a great example the maxis have been giving since their beginning.

In the discussion this point was lost:

IMO we as a DAO should experiment with this idea. It’s a very complicated and hard topic but in a bear market where the DAO treasury (considering all tokens including BAL) has almost never been so low and uncertain times are still ahead, we have to be as controlled as possible with expenses. Maybe that’s something related to your work with the treasury @Xeonus? That committee would also require HR skills if anyone here has experience and could help out that’d be great :slight_smile:

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I worry these discussions are focused on individuals, rather than ideas and outcomes. I don’t see this much passion on monthly updates. Given the scrutiny the SPs are facing, I also worry we eventually embed the toxicity in our culture, that could better benefit from accountability mechanisms that go beyond forum text walls.

There’s a clear history between Franklin and Tritium that shouldn’t be dominating the debate. I think everyone would appreciate it if you’d both professionally learn to say your piece and let others chime in as well before going at each other. I fear the constant text-walling is diminishing plural and decentralized participation.

There’s no harm for governance/stakeholders to debate costs and apply some pressure for trimming. This is healthy. But I think we would be better by evaluating cost/benefits of the teams and leaderships (both here and on monthly updates), rather than public discussions about salaries. Being DAOs a social experiment that they are, I doubt any good will come out of it.

All things considered, I would then support the “compensation committee” as a better alternative.

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I’ve stated this before, but I don’t think there’s any need to engage in “text-wall shaming.” Overall participation is important, but I fail to see how this is accomplished by stifling individual voices. Tritium makes some good points, above, and while I don’t agree with him on all of them, I still think that his comments are valuable in demonstrating his demeanor as a leader and one of the highest paid individuals at Balancer going forward. Tritium writes a lot, we get it–let it rest.

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Thanks for your comments. I’ve gone ahead and put up a Temperature Check to explore this subject:

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Taking compensation in locked BAL is admirable but extremely redacted. no serious FT contributor would ever agree to this as the sole form of comp. The people that work with Tritium every day all agree what he’s asking for is fair - but our overlords still feel the need to come harass the guy about it.

You can imagine my thoughts on a comp committee.

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https://snapshot.org/#/balancer.eth/proposal/0x4d288492f433afb8309209c22e556d4edec7f42e41ff966c8c41b1b043823735

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The final Maxi Gas reporting dashboard is complete:

https://dune.com/scoffie/advancedmaxigasstation

Updates will be made in Q3 to support allocations by the gas station to other keepers/automations such as OZ Defender.

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