CIP 7: reward Contributing Citizens

Proposing a tiered system to reward citizens working on specific projects.

We propose that up to 7.5% of the treasury at the time this passes can be used to pay for solidity dev, design, land research, and other specific projects.

We propose 3 tiers:

Contributing Citizen I

  • eligible for vesting of a standard citizen NFT
  • eligible for 0.1 ETH per week while working on an active, specific project

Contributing Citizen II

  • eligible to vest a founding citizen NFT over a minimum 6 month period
  • eligible for up to 0.2 ETH per week while working on a specific project

Team Lead

  • eligible to vest a standard citizen NFT every 3 months

Seeking feedback on these numbers and open to other reward mechanisms

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A few questions:

  • Are these as an option (choose the citizen nft or the eth) or would both be given on each tier?
  • How are team leads appointed?
  • What’s the math behind the team lead compensation? Compared to the level 2 being 0.2 ETH per week, a standard citizen NFT over 3 months would put the value of a citizen NFT at 2.4 ETH, why wouldn’t someone just take tier 2 and buy a citizen nft every other week? Or is the team lead compensation in addition to tier 2 (team leads get both tier 2 and an extra citizen nft every 3 months)?

We should give more details for:

  • What means eligible?
  • What means “working on a specific project”? How many hours/week?
  • We should change ETH to DAI. ETH is too volatile.
  • What is the criteria for the different categories?

More specifically, as I have stated in Discord, my thesis is that there are core-team members that have contributed tons (me, Casey) that for a number of reasons were not around during the auction time. Due to the contribution since the early beginning, I move to take that into consideration as well and not only the contribution thus far.

The difference with other core team members that have contributed tons as well, si that the other contributors are exposed financially to the results of the work, by buying a founding NFT early on.

I would like to see the group acknowledge our prior work.

1 Like

I like the idea of having tiers, more supporting learnings from dxdao here: DXdao.eth

Bridging thoughts from my comments on CIP 6: I don’t think citizen NFTs are the right compensation model for contributors. In this context for contributors, I think compensation should be:

  1. Liquid - ability to immediately exchange for value in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the economics of a small (but growing DAO). This is also important for contributors that want to offset some of their dependent income with work for CityDAO.

  2. Tied to Objectives - as the community grows, it will become more difficult to identify what priorities exist, and the value that each will add to the community. The best way to scale incentives is to tie them to very explicit objectives, vote them in, then let each group distribute them as they desire to allow flexibility, creativity, and experimentation without a City-wide vote each time. Just like any traditional team effort, we need clear objectives to hold each other accountable, as well as for contributors to know what’s most important and join the effort.

  3. Transparent - this ties to objectives, but rather than understanding what our burn rate is, I think more citizens care about what objectives we are aiming for (great job during town halls so far), what the cost of getting there is going to be, who is currently working on each part (again great job at town halls), and what opportunities are open to join.

I’d suggest something like a “season” budget, each season containing a timeline and a few tangible achievable goals tied to payouts, then leads that manage each of those payouts off-chain. We all vote on season budgets, and retro on how we can improve the following effort.

I’d love to hear some thoughts in agreement or disagreement on this :point_up:


I’d also like to +1 the comment from @odyslam - although I wasn’t an early work contributor, the teammates that did very early work deserve extraordinary reward and respect from the rest of the community. We chose to join CityDAO rather than create our own exactly for this reason, so let’s make sure to compensate them properly.

I personally don’t even have visibility into who has done exactly what, so I think the first step there might be getting together a contributions summary that details some basics like #of hours, type of work, objectives achieved, etc. for each contributor so far. If we don’t think we have enough capital to reward these folks now (I doubt we do), we should come up with a way to reward these folks with equity that will pay off their efforts plus interest for the risk they took later on.

One of the best parts of blockchain technology is its ability to tokenize efforts such as this. I love what we’ve done with Citizen NFTs so far, and think we might still be missing a way to create a liquid representation of value for the entire DAO. Perhaps I’m not fully up to speed, but would love to see that conversation evolve a bit more before using the Citizenship NFTs as the only hammer, and making sure that early contributors get a large stake of that equity.

7 Likes

0.1ETH sounds a bit low for a reward, especially something more challenging like solidity development or web app development.

A CityDAO ERC-20 would make more sense as it could be the same value as 0.1ETH now, but have the potential to multiply 5x in the future.

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Thanks Nicola,

There are a number of core team members that can attest for the work we did early on. I won’t be naming, but if they agree I invite them to do the public attestation here.

Personally, I would like to have a founding NFT (which I would have bought, but due t o severe burnoff and wildfires in my local community, I was offline for about a month, losing all the important dates.

The important for me to showcase that we a) need to rewards contributors and b) as a community acknowledge special occasions when they arise.

The reason I am pushing for a founding NFT is that it’s the only thing that I see with an intrinsic value. An erc20 speculative asset is of no interest to me.

As I said to the core-team discord, I think that whatever the DAO decides, it will be a signal for contributors. The citizens have an intrinsic value to give out Citizen NFTs (reg, founding) in a fair way, as if they give too much, they lose value, but if they are cheap, nobody will want to contribute.

Up to this point, all my work (discussions, architecture, etc.) is open-source, alongside the new NFT smart contract that is created to replace the opensea one. It has all been done in good faith, acknowledging that this reduces my leverage to absolute 0. These discussions though will be a powerful signal for future contributors and contributions.

I think you make a good point that the founding citizen NFTs have intrinsic value that other options may not. However, if “skin in the game” is the goal, wouldn’t that be the point of an erc20? It may be risky but it will tie the DAO’s success to contributors’ compensation, which is one of our objectives here.

On the other hand if it’s intrinsic value we want to optimize for, why not just be compensated in ETH?

Or what about a combination of the two? Best of both worlds?

Agreed with @nicovalencia here. The majority of the treasury ought to be in ETH or stablecoins, and payment should be in those currencies as well. Separately, there should be a marketplace (whatever replacement we find for OpenSea) for citizen / founding citizen NFTs where all NFT transactions take place. It makes more sense for contributors to be paid in ETH / stables, and they can purchase NFTs from the marketplace rather than in one-off negotiations with the DAO. Otherwise we end up with implicit non-market-based valuations of the NFTs, vesting schedules, etc.

Also agreed with @odyslam that it is important for the DAO to fairly compensate contributors, both for fairness and for maintaining credibility.

I’m not in favor of increasing the supply of founding NFTs proposal (different related CIP)

But I’ve seen first hand the contributions of @odyslam and we likely wouldn’t have smart contract solutions so quickly to the Opensea problem or solidity code for the parcel drop without his consistent contributions since time of taskforce start. The only other contributor applying massive lift on that workstream imo is @greg

Payments in ETH / Stables going forward or vesting an NFT is fine if that’s what we’d like (I personally don’t think ETH/stables are enough incentive and that tacking on an ERC-20 to our current structure is no easy feat but perhaps an important one to start working on.)

I think that instead of a one-off increase of the supply of founding NFTs to give to people who weren’t founders doesn’t make sense… But I do think that a one-off recognition of people who were providing contributions instrumental to the founding of this DAO who missed out on having access to a founding NFT, maybe for those one or two cases that can be made, we should make an exception OTC sale.

2 Likes

why don’t we authorize a ‘share buyback’ with treasury funds whereby the shares are the founding citizens that are for sale on secondary market (as soon as up and running). we can then use to pay the couple members who deserve them in the costs we incurred to buy back from secondary market

Hey everyone,

I am super grateful to see that my work is being recognized, alongside many great people who have been here since the beginning. Thanks @bpetes, @nicovalencia and @eugene for weighting in the discussion.

A similar notion has been shared by @alexthims here:

@bpetes how do you propose to continue? There has been a discussion recently about comp for contributors, but for a Founding Citizen NFT, I would be happy to forfeit that.