Announcing the Tornado Cash Community Fund Proposal

A proposal has been submitted to governance to create the Tornado Cash Community Fund. The purpose of the fund is to reward community members who make outstanding contributions to the development and adoption of the Tornado Cash protocol - any and all skillsets are welcome. You are now welcome to vote on the proposal.

The Fund

The Tornado Cash Community Fund is proposed to be seeded with 5% of the total protocol treasury. This includes an initial allocation of 22,916.66 TORN with an additional 4,583.33 TORN added per month for one year.

The purpose of these funds is to reward active community contributors who play a key role in the growth of Tornado Cash. Some examples of key contributor roles (KCRs) include, but are not limited to:

• Developers building on the Tornado cash protocol
• Auditors who review code and find bugs or vulnerabilities
• Proposal architects (folks who don’t code, but refine designs)
• Content creators (educational content, blogs, videos, memes, etc)
• Potential DAO hires

Getting Funded

Assuming the proposal passes, funding will take place on the torn.community governance forum. If you would like to request funding, nominate another key contributor for funding, or discuss additional KCRs which the community may be interested in incentivizing, you should feel free to create a new thread using the Funding category or join an existing one.

Funding will occur on an ad-hoc basis, but may be refined to a regular schedule, such as twice per month. All community members are invited to suggest appropriate funding reward amounts for each contributor’s efforts. There is no central authority responsible for determining rewards amounts.

Community funds are proposed to be held in a 2-of-3 Gnosis Safe Multisig Wallet at the address 0xb04E030140b30C27bcdfaafFFA98C57d80eDa7B4. Keys are held by peer-elected community members:

• @Rezan 0xd26BaA5F41CC7839CEdb020b6d98E1C6e1642D75
• @Justin_Bram 0xAf98Bb4bCeD00A17fFE020499C342CFC3511Fb10
• ethdev 0x0D5bbdBa8Fd6523102A0bb5a0E68b30441a3765F

The responsibility of these three key holders is to follow the will of the community based on discussions by forum members to sign off on reward payouts.

Fund Assurance

To ensure the multisig key holders are limited in their control of funds, some assurances have been made:

1. The proposal is only allocating 5% of total available TORN of the governance treasury to the multisig. 458.3k TORN already vested to the governance treasury. An addition 91.6k is vesting every month. This multisig would manages 5% of the already vested funds (22,916 TORN) and 5% of the funds to vest in the next 12 months (12 x 4,583 = 55,000 TORN).
2. The 55k TORN from future vesting unlock will be streamed to the multisig wallet on a per block basis over 1 year using Sablier. Tornado Cash governance will be able to stop the stream and be refunded at any point in time during the 1 year period.
3. Additional multisig holders can be added in time to increase the signature threshold from 2-of-3 to, say, 4-of-5.

Proposal Context

Prior to the proposal submission, a long series of discussions first took place on the forum to determine how the Community Fund would be structured:

• Feb 14th // Rezan consolidated various forum threads and compiled a poll to determine where governance efforts should be focused next. Community renumeration was ranked as the 4th highest priority

• Feb 14th // In the above conversation, Poma suggested opening a dedicated thread to discuss renumeration, which ethdev created. The bulk of the discussion that led to the formal proposal took place here
• April 20 // After months of discussion, Optionsmate then created a poll based on the action items from the above thread. Here the multisig holders were nominated and the 5% allocation of vested TORN was voted upon.

Please note: You are invited to join any of these thread if you would like to expand upon the existing conversations or to help steer the future direction of the Tornado Cash Community Fund.

Signer Obligations

Multisig key holders and signers are, themselves, KCRs. They assume the responsibilities of:

• maintaining active engagement with the forum to identify valid contributors and moderate fraudulent activity
• participating in communication with the community to receive constructive feedback and act upon it when appropriate
• enacting the will of the community when issuing rewards based on the soft consensus of the forum
• possessing a willingness to step down from their position if they are found to no longer be fit for the position by their peers or by themselves
• signing transactions in a timely manner

While not hard coded into the Tornado Community Fund Proposal, the multisig signers whom are included in the proposal are requesting from the community that they be permitted to issue themselves each 100 TORN per month as reward for their own KCR obligations and various other contributions to the ecosystem.

The multisig signers also request that the community permit them with the ability to sign for a transaction to cover any potential legal fees which may arise as a direct result of multisig involvement, although unlikely.

Voting

The proposal was developed and tested by @Rezan, it can be seen on the following Github repo:
GitHub - Rezan-vm/tornado-cash-proposal-fund-multisig.

It was deployed at the following address:

You can vote now for the proposal. If you need help for voting, consult this guide: Governance Guide — How to vote

If you’d like to discuss the details of the proposal with the community, please feel free to join the conversation here on the forum by participating in this official Tornado Cash Community Fund proposal thread.

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Thank you for reading, and may your anonymity set always be high

Post written by ethdev. Special thanks to @Rezan and @Justin_Bram.

Thank you so much for this excellent thread @ethdev, I am glad you have taken the lead on this during my break. I couldn’t have written a better formal proposal.
As said in the other thread, I would be very willing to be part of the initial multisig as originally intended, and am able to commit to dedicate time to this on weekly basis at minimum and come back to regular forum participation.
I am really thankful for those who have expressed themselves favourably on my nomination in my initial poll https://torn.community/t/setting-up-a-multisig-initial-eoi-and-preferences-survey
I would like, however, to make sure forum participants are still happy with me being a member of the multisig due to the last few weeks in which I have not posted on this board, so I would appreciate if you could indicate your preference here:

感谢Rezan、ethdev、Justin和bt11ba（WUtornado）的参与。
几个小时前，我刚刚锁定了一大笔钱来投票。

And it’s a pass! Thank you everyone for voting!

Thank you @ghozara for crossing the finish line

Congrats for this proposal !
Can’t wait to see an involved community working together !

I am a video producer, do you think that if I create a video related to Tornado, as we can see for some projects, it could be interesting for the project ?

Yes, you could for example make YouTube videos or whatever! The aim is to support the community and make the tool known.

Boom!
We made it, last moment 9000 votes inflow guaranteed the quorum. This is a very important step for TC governance, we will now have a multisig.

Congratulations ethdev, rezan, optionsmate, justin_bram, so 5% of the treasury will be distributed to the community and other activities, and to increase this ceiling there would be need for further proposals right?

Closing this poll and the other one in the original multisig thread as the proposal has finally passed.

Out of 20 total votes for “do you still support OptionsMate joining the multisig”, 9 were for YES (actually slightly higher than the original votes for my nomination in the old thread), another 9 voters undecided until return to a regular cadence, and 2 voters were against.
Looks like there’s enough soft consensus to justify my inclusion in the multisig with the condition that I would honor my commitment to return to a more frequent involvement as of before May (and in case this were discontinued, removal from multisig).
Discussed this privately with @ethdev to make sure the above reasoning was sound and he agreed on it being a reasonable compromise, but would love to hear also what @rezan and @Justin_Bram think about it.
In practical terms, my inclusion would mean moving from a 2-of-3 multisig to a 3-of-4, which would increase its inherent “cartel-resistance” as Poma corretly stated herein Setting up a multisig; initial EOI and preferences survey - #17 by poma in response to a reasonable concern raised by @bt11ba Setting up a multisig; initial EOI and preferences survey - #16 by bt11ba

Okay. Now that the multisig has passed a few orders of business:

1. Request for new signers - since the multisig has been created I’ve received quite a few requests from community members to be added to the multisig. @Rezan and @Justin have, too. The three of us have agreed that we will not be making any endorsements of users. It is the community’s decision, ultimately. If you want to be added to the multisig or want to endorse someone else, please create a dedicated thread moving forward using the Funding tag with the header format: Multisig Amendment Proposal: <Add @User> (alternatively: <Remove @User>; <Change to 4-of-5 Signatures>; or <Increase Treasury to 10%>). There must be a poll included in the thread in order to measure soft consensus

2. Adding @optionsmate as a Signer - before @Rezan @Justin_Bram and I discussed the no-endorsement policy, I did DM with @optionsmate to tell him that his above proposal in response to his own poll was reasonable. In the future, this type of conversation will not be had in DMs and will be directed to the forum. I will state that I will be willing to sign on @optionsmate as a 3-of-4 signer under the condition that he return to his old cadence. If he fails to uphold this responsibility, then I would be willing to sign with @Rezan and @Justin_Bram to remove him. I believe creating a dedicated Funding thread in the format described in order of business #1 is the best way to proceed with @optionsmate. @optionsmate, please be responsible for creating your own thread, linking to the poll you already conducted here

3. It would be useful to publicly identify the Tornado Cash Community Fund multisig address for easy reference. @poma or @rstormsf - would it make sense to add a community-fund.multisig.tornadocash.eth ENS Domain pointed at 0xb04E030140b30C27bcdfaafFFA98C57d80eDa7B4?

4. Can we create two pinned How to Request or Endorse for Funds and How to Amend the Community Fund threads to the Funding category forum, mods @poma @Rezan or @rstormsf? Unless someone else wants to author it, I can write the initial drafts. These will be living threads that will change as we collectively come up with more formalized processes

Thanks. Very excited the community now has an incentivized means to grow and develop further

You are correct. To make any changes to the ceiling there would need to be an additional proposal by governance (examples: to increase ceiling, decrease ceiling, or cancel the sablier stream altogether)

I think from now on we can’t rely on forum polls for voting. They are too easily gameable (Seen it in the past on the first multisig application thread) they are still fine for informal polls or getting a felling of the opinion of the community.

For the new members of the multisig, I would directly do vote on Snapshot to elect 2 members to increase to multisig from 2-of-3 to 4-of-5. I am aware of the interest of @optionsmate, @xgozzy and @bt11ba and some other on Discord not on the forum. If I forgot someone, please signal your interest

Would be honored to take the role, I do still think I need to prove myself. Which I am currently attempting to do through finalizing a design for an auction contract to recompensate individuals in TORN for updating the merkle trees.

I’ve done my homework on the TornadoTrees and TornadoProxy contracts and abstracted how the root updater works. Just trying to derive logic around issuing a proportion of the available rewards based on how many roots are updated out of the pending registered roots (nearly there on this). This contract would need the ability to adjust the rate at which TORN is available for redemption so that governance can modify to suit compensatory requirements with the ever-changing market for TORN.

I will post a rough mock contract and some alternative design suggestions this week that I’ve been in talks with @ethdev about, such as forking Sablier.

Thank you and once again I renew my committment to returning to ongoing cadence of participation moving on.
Opened a dedicated thread herein Multisig Amendment Proposal: <Add @OptionsMate> <Change to 3-of-4 Signatures>
@ethdev @rezan My understanding is that the community has already expressed soft consensus on the matter (twice) thus the multisig will execute their will, but from now on further nomination could require a bit of a harder consensus in the form of a snapshot voting; would this require also a form of quorum?

Agreed, but we do need to create some kind of formal process now for each amendment. That thread you started will act as the documented record of your multisig candidacy

One other thing. No need to include the < > characters in your post thread. That’s mostly to just illustrate <many different types of subjects can be inputted here>. You can edit your thread and remove them if you’d like

Updates to the Community

1. 100 TORN/month streams for each of the three current multisig signers have just been deployed for the next 1 year using Sablier: Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan

2. TORN has now been added to the official Sablier UI thanks to a $250 payment made by @Justin_Bram to the Sablier team

cc: @WUTornado for the next article

Hi @Rezan, I have been following this vote closely without registering on the forum. However, it is quite strange to see that a few minutes before Optionsmate closes this vote concerning his election, there was a massive influx of votes in his favour. The problem with these kinds of votes is that they are easily rigged. I don’t think it’s a good idea to elect by this means now. Thank you for your proposal concerning Snapshot.
I thought it was really weird that Optionsmate had so many votes at once just before closing, when no one commented. @Rezan, if you have access to the voting data, I’d be curious to see the creation date of the accounts that voted on the poll posted by Optionsmate.

It seems even more odd to me that he repeatedly presses the fact that he was elected twice, to avoid a snapshot

I don’t have any hatred towards anyone, the only thing I know is that the multisig is important and that it is out of the question to have a dishonest person elected. I hold enough TORN to want to avoid that.
I apologise for my directness.

I definitely agree with you. The polls on this forum are and were always only informal since the beginning. The formal voting was always on-chain with TORN. Since we now have to vote off-chain, using something like snapshot is unavoidable.

Nothing against @optionsmate, but his election will have to go through snapshot. I would personally not vet his election as of now. We can’t trust forum polls for anything beyond community temperature checks.

Thanks for raising your concerns on @optionsmate’s candidacy @naru and @Rezan. For the sake of maintaining good records, I would ask/suggest that comments be added to his dedicated candidacy thread. This will help provide more visibility to your concerns where further constructive dialogue can be had

I am supportive of snapshot voting for multisig amendments that are dependent on soft consensus only and not hard code