Bounty to Emiliano – a chance to setup a Developer Mining program?

[Teo]

A few weeks ago, we published the post “Set up an initial Treasury Committee” to start a discussion about the conception of a framework to reward value creation in Idle. In that post, we quoted a couple of examples, featuring some key members that stood out with their contributions.

This time we would like to be more specific and point out how @emilianobonassi contributed to expanding the Idle’s ecosystem.

These are the main initiatives led by Emiliano:

• Yearn V2 USDC Idle strategy (in production);
• Yearn V2 WBTC Idle strategy (in production);
• Yearn V2 sUSD Idle strategy (testing phase);
• Curve and Harvest accounting bug report;
• IdleTokenHelper, a tool to simplify Idle protocol integration for third-party services.

The deployment of such contracts cost him approximately a few thousands of dollars - bearing this cost in mind, we can then look at his commitment in terms of knowledge, time, increased visibility for Idle and TVL. The Idle protocol is benefitting from Emiliano’s dedication and the Governance should evaluate to issue a bounty to compensate this value creation. We suggest a range of 1000-2000 $IDLE, but it’s the community/Pilot League that should take the final decision on that.

This would not only work as a recognition for his efforts, but it might be the first step towards a structured approach to attract and reward developers that are building on Idle.

Initiatives related to product and strategy creation can help the protocol scale exponentially, and some other DeFi protocols have tailored specific programs called Developer Mining. Some examples are UMA ($ 250M), BadgerDAO ($88M). On occasional events, other protocols issued top bounties to past contributors, such as “CREAM that rewarded 2 two Yearn strategists 700 CREAM each (~$133,000) for the significant work they’ve done on Iron Bank” (source).

The Idle Governance has currently more than 4 million $IDLE (Ecosystem Fund + Long-term LP program) and part of those funds can be reserved for dev-oriented programs. The Pilot League’s mission is set on generic-purposes grants and bounties, while this initiative might work on a parallel track.

We would love to hear what our community is thinking about this. Any thoughts/inputs on this?

[tom]

Thanks @emilianobonassi !!!

@Teo or @emilianobonassi
Can you give some more context on how much this work contributed to TVL, Avg APY, reduced dev time?

At current price 1000-2000 IDLE =~ $15,000 - 30,000 USD.
Certainly people should be compensated for the work and the money spent.
We should also pay higher than fiat wages due to the lower liquidity and higher risk of IDLE vs fiat and also to incentivize others.

However without a better understanding of the time/effort of the contributions or the value they brought to Idle, I don’t have a clear way of gauging if the compensation is appropriate.

[Coinballers]

I am very supportive of ensuring that we offer appropriate incentives that encourage the best developers to help expand the ecosystem.

Ensuring the work of devs like Emiliano is really important, and I hope that the League Committee looks to use structured mechanisms like this to speed up innovation & encourage more developers to contribute to the ecosystem.

Let’s build

[emilianobonassi]

Thank you @tom @Coinballers for the appreciation!

Your point @tom is legit and I like you pointed out.

I think that’s the scope of the Pilot League with the community feedback to defines criteria and processes.

From the participation I had in other grants I’ve seen that usually you go through a proposal with two things. First, how your idea will bring value and then what’s the budget.

For the former, the KPIs you indicated are a good start, feel free to expand! (Anyone)

For the latter, you should highlight the time material cost and the operational expenses you as developer have.

Anyway, not everything could be quantified. I would say that you should reward the idea also with some intangible values which most of the time are qualitative. This should be at discretion of the Pilot League, obviously with boundaries. But ultimately, it’s the community which counts, Pilot League is a temporary proxy the community trust. If it will take wrong decisions they won’t be voted anymore and will change.

Getting back to numbers, honestly I did not take count of the hours I worked on it. I would say after dinner and during the weekend. I started in the middle of December and then had a full stop in the middle of January (3 weeks).

Regarding the operational expenses I used those two wallets for deployment and until today I spent the following

2.463 ETH - https://fees.wtf/?address=0x6388b1d7e235f68c7ec326e4eb22c1da14497652
1.971 ETH - https://fees.wtf/?address=0xd0579bc5c0f839ea2bcc79bb127e2f39801903e2

I had recurring fees for maintaining the strategies for this week after that they will be self sustainable, let’s say another 2 ETH. Total ~$12k

Last but not least currently

USDC strategy manages $1M - Contract Address 0x414d8f5c21daf33105ee6416bcda99a50a47c0e5 | Etherscan

WBTC strategy manages $560k -

Contract Address 0x71041489ddab466de443ec4ea39d60b54193bca1 | Etherscan

Looking forward for your and community feedback on this! (And what you would like to see next)

[Teo]

Thanks @tom and @emilianobonassi – definitely need more quantitative data to assert if the compensation is appropriate, and I think we have plenty of good data point to get there.

I agree this would be Pilot League’s scope, and we should set up a framework to handle dev flow.

If we look at UMA’s framework, ideas (which can be taken from our roadmap) are “up for grabs”, but there’re no limits of what a developer could build or receive rewards for. This way, developers are encouraged to create their own ideas and, when ready, follow the governance process (which would be lighter if there’s code attached). We can even have the Pilot League recurrently proposing grants to develop the most requested features (eg community snapshot to select 2-3 features → dev grants applications → [eventually, gov process to set parameters] → features release).

I’d say that the time and effort required to build those strategies would be comparable to the Smart Treasury development&deployment (reward there was 1000 $IDLE). If we then account for deployment cost, I think we can nail the reward down to a more specific amount. But remember that, overall, we’re rewarding the contribution here, not only opex. And having yEarn using Idle is reflecting also in terms of ecosystem awareness.

I think something useful could be a good Dune dashboard to monitor referrals’ performance, with the KPIs mentioned by @tom. Something like a referral TVL/fees leaderboard might be interesting to see (with Harvest, and other integrators ofc).

To start, I’ve set this simple dashboard up to see deposit/redeem events and referrals for Idle (Best-Yield only currently):

Idle Best-Yield strat – Referrals & Deposit/Redeem

If you filter for 0xd0579bc5c0f839ea2bcc79bb127e2f39801903e2 (Emiliano’s referral address, which is in the strategies’ contracts) you would see multiple deposits that lead to ~1M USDC and ~11.5 BTC mentioned at the time of writing.

We can def get to a more structured dashboard, and keen to hear more suggestions on KPIs/datavizs.

To move forward with this, we would like to come up with a Snapshot poll for our community and get a consensus on the amount. We’d be waiting few more days to see if other community members want to share more inputs on this.

[tom]

Based on all this discussion above (and extra detail about costs, i feel that 2500- 3500 would be more appropriate.

[Teo]

I’d move forward with this bounty and create a snapshot poll to officialize the size of the bounty.

The previous comments underlined the value brought by @emilianobonassi. As an update on Emiliano’s contributions, you can check this Dune Dashboard for the liquidity that yEarn is currently deploying into Idle. At the time of writing, it’s ~17M idleUSDC, and ~20 idleWBTC.

Since this post’s kickoff, Emiliano developed other integrations (Yearn V2 USDT Idle strategy, Yearn V2 TUSD Idle strategy) and contributed to the security peer review for the Aave V2 wrapper.

Considering the available ranges, this bounty would have an excessive impact on Pilot League current budget. Therefore, the next on-chain proposal would also include this reward, tapping from the Ecosystem Fund.

The snapshot poll has been launched here: Emiliano Bonassi’s Dev Bounty Sizing

[Teo]

Thanks to anyone who voted on the above snapshot!

The poll has resulted in 3500 $IDLE as a reward for this dev bounty

Last step: We will proceed with the distribution of this reward with the next IIP on-chain proposal, transferring it from the Ecosystem Fund to Emiliano’s wallet.

[Coinballers]

Personally, I’m very glad we are duly rewarding the best developers to build with idle to help attract the best talent.

Emiliano is a boss deserves every penny