PTIP-53: Executive Team Budget

Governance PT Improvement Proposals
1

Summary

This proposal will fund the Executive Team for 6 months. The Executive Team will operate according to the structure outlined below.

Executive Team

The Executive Team controls key PoolTogether V4 smart contracts using Gnosis Safes that are deployed across Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. The members and required confirmations for each Safe are identical.

Current Membership

The current executive team members are listed below. You can download a Gnosis Safe Address Book here.

Discord Name Address
Gio.eth 0x1dBFBAeBC6070f14ae8294ab01252B36d962bf4E
Kames 0x21E8fFC0108B0cbA465E26cA0a0EA3955475e9b2
Aodhgan 0x3F0556bCA55Bdbb78A9316936067a47fd4C4C4f4
Pierrick 0x4D40eb12430A57965cEe3015348d490C6156dF20
underthesea 0x93146d9978d286EE085ba68eE1786a0b6EDA64EC
Brendan 0xA57D294c3a11fB542D524062aE4C5100E0E373Ec
TheRealTuna 0xa31c2232842e631cCb2d2E4110B356Bab21E6020
Leighton 0xa5c3A513645A9a00cB561fED40438E9DFE0D6a69
Hook 0xb9a28ce32dcA69AD25E17212bC6D3D753E795aAe
McOso 0xd095E0f8C72E22319846b643c4bac0caC1f67006
Lonser 0xe0e7b7C5aE92Fe94D2ae677D81214D6Ad7A11C27

Executive Team Responsibilities

The executive team has control over the V4 prize pools across all chains. This is so that we can quickly fix smart contracts and because PT governance does not currently extend to Polygon or Avalanche. The executive team must act in accordance with the wishes of governance. The wishes of governance can be expressed as an explicit order, or as a broader mandate.

Governance Orders

Governance can order the executive team to do anything. Practically, this will largely be adjusting prize distribution and replacing contracts.

For example: the prize distribution was changed recently in PTIP-47: Prize Adjustments. POOL token holders signalled they wished the prize distribution to change, and the executive team followed through on the order.

Governance Mandates

The executive team has several broad mandates from governance, which include:

  • Distributing prize liquidity to Prize Distributor contracts
  • Taking emergency actions with the smart contracts

The executive team can be proactive here and act unilaterally to fulfill its mandate.

Executive Team Lead & Members

The executive team will appoint a lead that is in charge of ensuring orders are executed and mandates met. Team members will be required to verify and confirm transactions set up by the lead.

Team Lead

The executive team lead’s current responsibilities include:

  • Executing explicit governance orders
  • Re-balancing prize liquidity
  • Requesting more prize liquidity with proposals to governance
  • Removing team members
  • Distributing compensation
  • Ensuring Gnosis Safe wallets are identical across all chains

If a team lead ceases to fulfill their role, then the executive team will need to appoint a new one and (possibly) remove the old one.

Team Members

Team members will do their best to verify and confirm legitimate transactions. The team lead will contact them when their signature is needed.

Managing Membership

It’s very important that team members are available and actively participating, otherwise the executive team will cease to function.

Removing Members

Executive team members may decide to leave, ghost, or misbehave.

  • If a member wants to leave, then the lead can remove them from all Safes.
  • If a team member has not signed a transaction in two months, then the lead must remove them from all Safes. This is the Ghost Rule.
  • If a team member misbehaves, then it is up to the executive team how they wish to handle the situation.

Whenever a member is removed from a Safe, the confirmation level is adjusted to maintain an approximately 2/3 ratio to membership.

Ghost Rule

If a member has not signed a transaction in two months, then they are removed from all Safes. The Ghost Rule should be checked once per month before members are paid out. When the ghost rule is activated the member does not receive compensation for that month and they are removed from the team.

Adding Members

New members of the executive team must be voted in by a governance order. This helps ensure the team doesn’t become a cabal. Confirmations are adjusted to maintain an approximately 2/3 ratio to membership.

Compensation

To ensure we attract high-quality members, compensation should be robust. It should also be split between POOL tokens and stablecoins, so that the member earns ownership but also has cash to spend.

The Pool Grants committee has based their compensation on a rate of $100 / hour. We will do the same.

I estimate that the team lead will need approximately 30 hours per month to fulfill their duties. Some weeks will be less, others more. Until we have better tooling, the lead will need to navigate explorers to calculate liquidity levels, view member activity to check the Ghost Rule, and potentially construct complex transactions (among other things!).

Team members will need to be available for signing, which can take several steps. In addition, they should take the time to verify the transaction validity (when possible). I would estimate they will need approximately 10 hours per month to fulfill their duties.

Role Monthly Hours Monthly Compensation
Team Lead 30 $3000 USD
Team Member 4 $400 USD

The compensation will be split 50/50 between USDC and POOL, for simplicity.

Compensation is paid once per month after the Ghost Rule is applied. The team lead sets up the payouts. This can be done efficiently using the Gnosis Safe batching mechanism.

Gas

The Team Lead will be the person that executes the Gnosis Safe transactions. These transactions can be costly, so the Team Lead should be compensated for gas in either USDC or POOL.

Communications

The Executive Team has a Discord channel, a Telegram Group, and we’ve privately exchanged email addresses. We have multiple lines of communication in case one goes down.

When new members are added these channels will be updated to include them.

PTIP Specification

Overview

This PTIP will transfer POOL and ScUSDC to the Executive Team Safe on Ethereum:

  • 2748 POOL
  • $16,800 ScUSDC

Rationale

Team Costs

Team members are paid $400 USD / month split 50/50 between USDC and POOL. Team lead is paid $3000 USD / month split 50/50 between USDC and POOL.

Role Monthly Hours Monthly Comp USDC Monthly Comp POOL
Team Lead 30 $1500 USDC 404 POOL
Team Members (10) 4 10 x $200 USDC 10 x 54 POOL
TOTAL $3500 USDC 540 POOL

Gas Costs

For the month of December Exec Team gas costs were about $1100 USD.

Totals

Description Monthly Cost 6 Month Cost
USDC comp $3500 USDC $21,000 USDC
POOL comp 540 POOL 3240 POOL
Gas $1100 USDC $6600 USDC

Total Ask: $27,600 USDC and 3240 POOL

Status

  • Yes, let’s do it!
  • No

0 voters

1 Like
2

I support this but have two remarks.

1. Hour validation

As there is no timesheet used I think the assumed monthly hours should be validated regularly and adjusted to fit actual workloads.
Does anyone have a suggestion for how to do this without actually tracking hours?
Maybe track them one week every 2 months and then compare if it seems like an average week? There’s probably a better way.
Just paying out 30/4 hours without validating that those hours are close to reality doesn’t feel right to me.

2. Gas costs

An ERC-20 token transfer on Ethereum costs around $20 nowadays. That’s 10% of a team member paycheck!
I don’t think it makes sense to do monthly payouts of that size on Ethereum.
At PoolGrants we have moved to paying out all wages on Polygon instead. I think that’s a good option here too.

1 Like
3

  1. I kind of had this same thought with the coordinape program. I think leaving it the team members above to decide if they’re being over paid or under paid is fine in this case because they are clearly very committed to the protocol and trusted members. This doesn’t need to be the precedent going forward for new groups of course, but if we can’t trust the team members above to be honest/diligent about their compensation for this exercise, we probably shouldn’t be trusting them to perform the exercise itself.

  2. Fantastic point. I’m guessing the POOL is being given on Ethereum to allow voting rights. If that’s the case, and we are truly trying to push for an L2 voting mechanism, I feel this is all the more reason to compensate in mPOOL as rewardees will hold until it’s able to be used to vote. As far as paying in USDC on Ethereum, I agree that could be done on Polygon or another available L2.

1 Like
4

Note: I noticed my math was off this morning. I calculated for 1 Team Member, not 10. I’ve updated the numbers above. They haven’t changed too dramatically.

Timesheets, unless they are automated, is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Ultimately it comes down to trusting the person (as DaBoom has noted). Additionally, it’s very well known in the agency and dev shop world that you should bill by value, not by time. Time is helpful as a way to estimate, but ultimately it’s about the value of the deliverable, not how fast the person works. Otherwise they’d work slowly and take forever!

This is also why the hours are locked: it makes it clean and simple to administer. Imagine bookkeeping a variable number of hours! It would be difficult to track, let alone the DAO to audit. Too much overhead.

The team lead and members are both happy with their outlined compensation. If the workload grows or shrinks we’ll need to revisit. And that’s okay.

I want to stress that we don’t need to define every detail up-front. We just need to ensure the big pieces are in place and agreed upon. The team has already spoken internally about payouts on Polygon. We’re thinking about it.

Given the scope of responsibilities for the executive team, it’s going to evolve rapidly. We should all have the expectation that changes will occur and should be embraced.

1 Like