GIP-27: Gnosis Guild đŸȘ Treasury Allocation to Gnosis Ltd

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GIP: 27
title: Gnosis Guild Treasury Allocation to Gnosis Ltd.
author: @keikreutler,  @auryn_macmillan
status: Phase 2
type: Funding
created: 2022-02-02

Simple Summary

The proposal would fund Gnosis Ltd. to support the Gnosis Guild team’s operations and startup costs for one year. The Gnosis Guild Treasury Allocation would foster needs-driven development of the Zodiac DAO tools at a total of USD ~$2.9 Million equivalent, paid in 56% GNO for a contributor incentivization plan, administered by Gnosis Guild with a two-year cliff followed by a one-year vesting period.

Abstract

Gnosis Guild is a core contributor to the Zodiac open standard for DAOs, developing, maintaining, and promoting governance tools built around programmable accounts like the Gnosis Safe. The proposal to fund one year of the team’s operations includes a detailed budget on how the team plans to allocate the requested funds USD ~2.9 Million equivalent. Through funding the Gnosis Guild Treasury Allocation to Gnosis Ltd., GnosisDAO would establish a clear alignment of incentives with the team building core infrastructure critical to GnosisDAO operations.

Motivation

Gnosis Guild is a society for interdependent software with the values of conviviality, co-ownership, and experimentation at its heart. A small team incubated by Gnosis Ltd., we aim to operate using the governance tools we build. Since its formulation in late 2021, Gnosis Guild launched the Zodiac open standard, a composable design philosophy for DAOs, and already released four tools available through the Zodiac App on Gnosis Safe. This launch garnered significant attention from the DAO ecosystem, and today, mainstays like yearn.finance, GnosisDAO, and Shapeshift DAO all use the Zodiac collection of tools to underpin their operations, plus forthcoming strategic collaborations. In addition to shifting the technical paradigm toward composability, Gnosis Guild also changed the culture, for example establishing our blog as home to the top 2021 essay on DAOs.[1] In short, Gnosis Guild assembled an extremely well-positioned team to develop, maintain, and promote a new foundation for DAO tooling.

Gnosis Guild approaches its mid term development through establishing a revenue-generating “pathfinding” practice to advise DAOs on how to evolve as organizations. This enables the team to combine their deep knowledge of the ecosystem with needs-driven development, and beyond the scope of most consulting practices, actually deliver technical solutions to common and novel problems faced by emerging and established DAOs. Gnosis Guild seeks to work with values-aligned DAOs as partners rather than as clients, in their willingness to accept payment in project tokens, with GnosisDAO as the initial, core partner. This includes working together to find answers to questions like:

  • What types of social consensus strategies are best suited to different types of proposals?
  • What does the most efficient monitoring process for Gnosis Improvement Proposals (GIPs) look like?
  • What Zodiac mods could improve the facilitation of GnosisDAO governance?

Given GnosisDAO’s transformation into a network of teams and Gnosis Ltd.'s focus on Gnosis Chain, the proposal includes minimal startup costs for Gnosis Guild to spin out of the core team, creating a more efficient organizational structure while remaining a contributor to GnosisDAO in its long term development.

In summary, through the Gnosis Guild Treasury Allocation to Gnosis Ltd., Gnosis Guild can continue to expand the Zodiac collection of DAO tools while maintaining infrastructure critical to GnosisDAO operations.

Specification

Gnosis Guild Treasury Budget 2022

Rationale

The Gnosis Guild roadmap is public, and its chief priorities for 2022 include cross-chain, -platform, and -framework composability for DAOs as well as supporting novel mechanisms such as private voting. With the all-encompassing aim to support our roadmap development and adoption of Zodiac DAO tooling, the Gnosis Guild Treasury Allocation Budget has the following categories with their rationale described below:

  • Core Contributors: This budget category refers to the salaries and token plan for 11 full-time contributors (7 developer, 1 product, and 3 community strategy roles). The contributor incentivization plan is intended to double contributors’ salary, with a two-year cliff followed by a one-year vesting period.
  • Stewards: This budget category refers to part-time payment for a “pod” (4 steward roles) to extend outreach, education, and documentation of Zodiac DAO tooling plus a fund for maintenance of the Gnosis Guild Library Wiki.
  • Brand Design: This budget category refers to contract-based payment for visual communications.
  • Grants Program: This budget category refers to the amount allocated to support initiatives building on Zodiac DAO tooling, such as current requests to establish a cross-DAO venture studio.
  • Ops: This budget category refers to operational costs related to administration, services, and subscriptions.
  • Cultural Program: This budget category refers to what would traditionally be construed as a marketing campaign. The cultural program is intended to further establish Gnosis Guild’s reputation as a creative, editorial, and experimental team, while seeking to meaningfully broaden discourse.
  • Startup Costs: This budget category refers to the potential costs of soliciting legal advice as well as establishing a legal entity within the next two years to increase autonomy from and decrease overhead for Gnosis Ltd.

All funds not spent will be at Gnosis Ltd.'s discretion.

Implementation

There will be transaction data corresponding to funds to be transferred here when this proposal moves to phase 3.

GnosisDAO Snapshot

There will be a Snapshot link added here when this proposal moves to phase 3.

7 Likes
2

Probably goes without saying, but I support this proposal :sweat_smile:

4 Likes
3

Does this make sense? This would mean that you have all your tokens after 1 years, but only get access to them after 2 years, in this case no vesting would be needed.

Which of these roles are already filled and which ones are still open? Also do we expect the tokens and salary to be applied equally to all of the employees?

There seems to be a calculation error: $100,000.00 * 11 = $1,250,000.00

Additional to that I was wondering what the relation of Gnosis Guild and Gnosis Ltd/ Gnosis Services GmbH is. Would Gnosis Guild be a separate entity?

3 Likes
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  1. This would be the same as the current Gnosis token plan, with two years of staff requirement followed by a one year lock. I can edit this: “followed by a one-year vesting period” to make this clearer.
  2. The developer and product roles are currently all filled, although 3 dOrg contributors will be shorter term, with those roles to open in the mid-term. There is one community strategy role for which we would begin hiring after this proposal.
  3. $100,000.00 * 11 = $1,250,000.00 refers to the salaries line item, where it is noted to the right that this item amount ($100,000) is averaged due to some variation, with 1.25M being the accurate amount. We intend the token plan to be roughly equal.
  4. Gnosis Guild would remain staff at Gnosis Ltd./ Gnosis Service GmbH for the duration of this funding period.
5

I support this proposal. Just one minor comment regarding your answer above.

4. Gnosis Guild would remain staff at Gnosis Ltd./ Gnosis Service GmbH for the duration of this funding period.

What is the $100k “Startup cost” planned for if there is no incorporation required?

And one more question just so I understand properly. As far as I understand, the average compensation per contributor is aimed for $213,636.- for 11 months, right?

I.e. $1.25M fiat salary + $1.1M token bonus = $2.35M total compensation for 11 contributors. With the sheet mentioning this is for Feb-Dec.

Not judging whether this is too high or too low, just wanted to understand.

3 Likes
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The startup cost was derived from seeing how other Gnosis teams devoted significant operational work to their plans to spin out over the last year. We similarly plan to explore options for establishing our own entity after this funding period, while remaining a “pathfinding” partner with GnosisDAO and Gnosis Ltd. as needed in the longterm. To make this explicit in case it is needed, the $100K startup cost is meant to cover any operational, “potential costs of soliciting legal advice as well as establishing a legal entity within the next two years to increase autonomy from and decrease overhead for Gnosis Ltd.”. Ultimately, all funds not spent will be at Gnosis Ltd.'s discretion.

Yes, this is the planned average compensation amount for 12 months including salary and GNO contributor incentivization plan. I removed the “Feb-Dec” mention on the sheet, because it was a holdover from a previous version, and corrected it to Feb 2022-Feb 2023. Thanks!

1 Like
7

Hi! Just curious why not fund through GnosisDAO directly? but use Gnosis Ltd as a middle man?

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Because Gnosis Guild is currently evaluating the best organizational structure and/or independent entity for the team, especially as to how it relates to the Zodiac DAO tools development. This proposal allows us to maintain our current structure with staff while considerately deciding on a new structure.

2 Likes
9

After having to review and approve/deny a great many budget requests with Maker my questions are as follows:

  1. I honestly had to ask a bit to understand what Zodiac is so some introduction to Zodiac would have helped people here. GitHub - gnosis/zodiac: A library for composable DAO tooling built on top of programmable accounts If this is not correct then please explain

  2. If this is a budget request for Zodiac (1) above perhaps it would be helpful to explain what exists now, and what this specific budget request is for and why GnosisDAO should bear the 100% cost. Is this to create a product that GnosisDAO will own or will get revenues from or is it something that others benefit from? EDIT ADD: Reading further there is no long term timeline for the Guild activities under this budget request. While there is revenue sharing - unclear how this will manifest or plays into aligning long term incentives between interested parties.

  3. Not having looked into (1). Is this a chain specific product or something that can be used on any network? EDIT ADD: looks like intention is to be cross-chain but this is not entirely clear to me if it is a proposed work, or already exists.

  4. If there is a specific product being built that would yield revenue then why wouldn’t this team take part of the ownership in exchange for lower GNO rewards. What I don’t see here is any sort of development team alignment incentives in the success of the project or the timely completion of its goals other than holding the more general GNO.

  5. Lastly, is this intended to be a 1-time budget request or to be an ongoing development effort which will need to be supported in the future at the same level.

1 Like