Remunerate key contributors from the community

Of the 8 current suggestions for what ought to become Proposal #3 (vote now if you haven’t already), one of them in particular is very interesting:

Remunerate key contributors from the community. (Only possible starting from mid-March when the cliff period of the DAO treasury will have passed)

Because it’s anticipated that the community will generally support a proposal that rewards them for their ad-hoc contributions, we should begin discussing what it means to be a “key contributor” now so that we can set community expectations early

Some key contributor roles (KCRs) may include:

• Developers who work on passed and deployed proposal contracts
• Auditors who review code and find bugs/vulnerabilities
• Proposal architects (folks who don’t code, but refine designs)
• Helpful forum member who go out of their way to help newcomers
• Community organizers who mobilize action (conversations, votes, etc)
• Content creators (blogs, videos, memes, etc)

Please feel free to respond to this thread with:

1. Additional KCRs we might identify
2. Constructive criticism of any KCRs (listed above or proposed below)
3. Suggested descriptions of KCRs to define the scope of their work

These funds would come from the vested TORN allocated for community development by the Tornado Cash team. The first vesting cliff of TORN becomes available in March. So we may want to also discuss the method of distributing TORN to remunerated KCRs. A couple options might include:

• Delegation to a trusted community/team member multi-sig to distribute TORN on behalf of community (loosely supported by social consensus on the forum)
• Batched governance proposals trustlessly distribute TORN (a single proposal would reward X KCRs)

This seems like a decent list to start with.

Have the Tornado.cash auditors already received payment for their work, though? In my experience auditors often charge a high fee, so could already be considered remunerated if that is true here.

I think root updaters should be paid first, some dude pays more than 10ETH for the community

The categories looks good me. However, this is a very broad distribution where many smaller contributors would get remunerated. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s harder to coordinate. Something like this would require a community multi-sig with maybe between 3-5 delegates members. Multisig singers could be added/removed by on-chain governance.

The alternative would be a less broad distribution to remunerate only a few full-time/part-time devs.

Personally, I like the first approach as it gives a lot more flexibility. However, I am expecting that some community members will be against.

For regular contributors (AKA employees) using Sablier would make sense. It unlocks linearly over time and can be revoked at anytime if the multisig/Tornado governance is unsatisfied with the service (AKA fired).

So far auditors were handled by the Tornado team. Proposals #1 and #2 did not require an audit given their simplicity. However for upcoming more complex proposals, we will have to figure-out an audit budget our self.

I actually included the root updaters in the original comment that led to this thread, but @poma brought up the point that root updaters could actually be compensated trustlessly at the contract level

So they wouldn’t need to be included in this set of key contributors. We can create a proposal exclusively for their contributions

3-5 delegated member multisig elected by governance feels correct

Then including multisig-managed sablier streams for regular contributors is a brilliant idea. I would support this

Good to know on proper auditors. But what about just for whitehat bug bounty hunters who discover a vulnerability in the wild?

However, I am expecting that some community members will be against.

Everything is up for friendly debate here. Would love to hear a contrasting opinion

This can happen in the future, but the community can also chose to reward addresses that uploaded root updates in the past.

We probably need to do a proposal for bug bounty pool, or at least arrive to consensus that if someone founds a critical bug the community will vote in proposal to reward him with X TORN.

Tornado is the leading privacy solution on Ethereum, rewarding contributors should be a no-brainer. So a great effort and exactly the right way to go!

This could be managed by creating bounty boards and scope actionable tasks which can be picked up by community members for an agreed compensation.

Projects like YFI paved the way with transparent treasury reports for community contributors.

I like the idea of a governance-elected 3-5 delegated members multisig allocating remuneration to KCRs. Sablier would be nice because it propels long term commitment as governance could easily revoke anytime incentives for non-consistent contributors.

Since March is around the corner, we could start discussing who the candidates for the multisig could be. Other than the obvious @poma @rstormsf @ethdev, shall we make a separate thread in which community members put an expression of interest and then a multi-choice poll to screen out everyone but the 10 most voted who are then chosen by a standard proposal voting? I can see this taking some time but not sure how to condense the process.

Yeah. However, there are several questions that still need an answer.
First, does the community really like the idea of having a multisig treasury ? It seems like yes but I haven’t seen a vote yet.

Second, does the Tornado.cash core team want to be part of the community multisig ? They are off course prime candidates if they want to be signers. However, they might no want to for legals or decentralization reasons.

Thrid, we need to implement this before any funds can be spent or transferred to the multisig: Proposal to move locked TORN from governance to a separate vault
I could volunteer to implement it, Let me come up with a deisgn. It will require a proposal to be activated. However, since this is mostly an obvious technicality we could add it to the proposal that setup the multisig.

Last point, beside having to vote the members of the multisig, a budget also needs to be voted. The DAO treasury has 55% of the TORN supply vested over 5 years with a 3 month cliff. Mid-march, the cliff period will have passed and 275k TORN will be unlocked which at current price is $85m. After that 91.6k TORN or $27.5m will unlock every month. Obviously, these are crazy amounts and not all of it should be transferred to the community multisig. Maybe something like 50k TORN for a first year. Additional funds would require a follow-up on-chain vote.

1. Yes. We could run a simple poll to check the waters around the multisig (and other matters being discussed e.g. ethdev’s idea for a meta-protocol).

2. Good point. Would be good to hear what they say. I personally don’t mind anon multisig holders but would prefer if at least 1 or 2 aren’t.

3. Great - yep the two proposal (multisig + moving locked TORN) could go together. @poma already opened a thread on mvoing the locked TORN from governance to a separate vault and there were no objections anyway.

4. Not sure if I follow you here. Vesting and cliff were originally designed in this way, what is the reason you find it “obvious” to reduce it significantly? From my calculations we would have 5.5M $TORN which divided by 5 years (5*365 days) amounts to a total of 3013 $TORN per day, which shouldn’t be significantly detrimental to the token price I believe? Of course we want to make sure the price does not plummet otherwise those of us who hold locked $TORN to participate in governance could be punished by a price drop, however dropping from 1.1M to only 50k for the first year seems an overkill to me - or at least the matter shall be discussed by the community.

3. I just had a chat with @poma he agreed with me that we could move forward without. I think it’s not worth the hassle. We will just have to take additional precautions to not spend voter’s token.

4. Sure, my point is that 275k TORN is already a lot of tokens. The current circulating supply is only around 300k. You are suggesting to almost 4x the circulating supply in the first year. TORN voters will likely be against. Plus, does the community multisig really need that much tokens to fund community initiatives ? 50k TORN is a random number that I picked but that’s already a supply increase of 16% and currently worth 15 million USD. To me it sounds that there is already a lot you could do with that much cash.

3. Without multisig or without moving the governance $TORN to a separate vault?

4. It is not just me who is suggesting to 4x the circulating supply in the first year; this was the original plan as per TC Medium announcement, therefore any possible modification of it shall be discussed and agreed upon by the community. Do take into account that
   a) current market cap is anyway incredibly tiny; anything turning $TORN into a revenue generating assset (likely at some stage, they were discussing it already in some thread) will propel the price higher and also
   b) $TORN will likely never get listed by CEX, which is actually a great thing for its price since it won’t be shorted by the “usual suspects” (see the letter soup whale who said “this is alt season” then crashed the whole defi depositing his exchange’s token as collateral on CREAM… which ok isn’t a CEX but you get my point).

3. without moving the governance $TORN to a separate vault

4. I am not suggesting that funds not sent to the Multisig have to be burned. They would stay in the governance contract. If the community want to use them (e.g: some liquidity mining, an airdrop or whatever) you would need to pass an on-chain proposal. My reasoning is that if you give all funds to the multisig, they would have too much power.

3. Got it. I wonder what made him change his mind.

4. Ok thanks, now I start to get your point @rezan.
   I do agree on not giving the multisig excessive power.
   Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be too conservative on the budget allocation since most other DeFi projects have been very generous and still got considerably successful.

Thoughtful discussion @optionsmate and @Rezan

3. Got it. I wonder what made him change his mind.

Also curious

4. … My reasoning is that if you give all funds to the multisig, they would have too much power.

Agreed

Additionally, it’s worth considering that if we pursue a multi-sig delegation for KCR remuneration, then we should discuss upfront if multi-sig holders qualify as KCRs themselves, and therefore if they should then be remunerated from the same pool of TORN which they are responsible for distributing

It’s a fine line between an alignment of interests and a conflict of interests

Multisig signers and key contributors will likely overlap. I think they won’t chose themselves how they are remunerated but the remuneration would come form the multisig. A poll on the forum would decide how much for who.
Of course the signers could still collude and remunerate themselves whatever they want but it’s unlikely.
I would personally vote for signers that commit to execute the will of the community. I would also prefer a majority of non anons signers.

Agreed

I think it’s a safe assumption that they’ll overlap. And that remuneration budgets will be approved by forum members first. And that it’s especially unlikely that collusion will occur. Esp if governance can vote out multisig holders at any time and cut off their allocated vested TORN with a relatively quick vote

+1 to a majority of non-anons multisig holders

So some action items now might be:

1. Create a new post with two polls
2. The first poll is to vote from a list of the top 10 most active forum members to be nominated to be a multisig holder
3. Include an 11th poll option to veto a multisig altogether (presumably to opt for the alternative batched governance proposals option from OP)
4. The second poll is to vote on the budget as a percentage of the 275k initial TORN + 91.6k monthly TORN vestings (eg, 5%, 15%, 20%, 25%… 50%) - maybe allow multiple votes to be cast so community members can upvote a range of %s that they’re comfortable with
5. Wait a week or two for polling
6. Submit an official proposal with a 2-of-3, 3-of-4, or 3-of-5 multisig of the top nominated forum members (depending on the weightedness of the votes) with a %-of-vesting schedule budget allocation (based on the most upvoted single %)
7. Begin on-chain voting

Edit - additionally, if the tornado cash team wants to nominate any trusted, non-forum participants to be part of the vote, that’s great, as well. For example, maybe another founder, like Robert Leshner of Compound, is a good fit as a multisig holder

Or someone from the group of people having developed the ZK Proofs, as an homage? Or someone from another anonymity based project, to form a synergy, like from Tor Project, Tails, Qubes?

Sure

They just have to be available to sign txs regularly (weekly, bi-weekly) and track community activity to verify remunerations are accurate and reflect actual efforts and contributions

It’ll be a decently active role to be a multisig signer. Not just a role to give to someone as an honor