[Delegation Pitch] Bocconi Students Blockchain Association (BSBA) - Meta Delegate Program

🏛 Governance 🧩 Protocol & DAO
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Introduction - who are we?
Bocconi Students Blockchain Association (BSBA) is a student club founded in 2017.
At BSBA, we foster a community-driven approach to drive and motivate the adoption of Blockchain Technology. We believe that to make a change, we must inspire students to learn and understand the technological advancements around us.

BSBA was founded in 2017 and went through a rebranding and restructuring process in 2022. From this year onwards, the association will have a Research & Consulting division, to focus on commissioned research for our partners. The goal is to deliver quality and value to projects, companies and the broader ecosystem. The main activities vary depending on the type of Research commissioned and have guidance from the Board and the most expert members, but mainly focus on the following:

  • Market Research
  • Potential implementation and use cases
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Strategy, Marketing, and Growth
  • VCs pipeline and funnel

Moreover, we host several in-person events with professionals in the sector, and also online workshops and learning opportunities for our newcomers. Also, we are currently working on a DAO infrastructure ourselves to manage our activities better and properly incentivize users.

Through many different collaborations, BSBA provides its members with opportunities to work and consult with web3 and blockchain companies, providing them with a solid breeding ground for their knowledge. Our final goal is to support our members grow and experience the industry with hands-on projects.

The Meta Delegate Program aligns with BSBA’s vision and mission, and we think it is the perfect opportunity for our members to go hands-on in a real DAO. Our team for this program is composed of valuable members with several previous experiences in the industry, both in DeFi and NFT projects, who really want to have an impact and give the best contribution to Idle DAO and the community.

We want to build a long-lasting relationship with Idle DAO, where our members can keep learning and improving thanks to direct hands-on experience with a DAO, and Idle DAO can benefit from higher governance participation and commitment.

Motivation - why delegate to us?
Our goal is to work for the development of the DAO actively: on the first hand, as students, to have experience in the first person in the study, discussion, and creation of new proposals, and on the second hand to bring to the DAO new points of view from a university environment serious, ready, and capable.

By granting us the delegation, our members will actively work on proposals that will:

  • improve Idle’s protocol features and design
  • increase the activity of community members and the protocol’s awareness
  • change/implement strategies on yield optimization.

Idle DAO’s Meta Delegate Program will benefit our members as we will have an opportunity to get insight on both how DAOs operate as well as on the whole DeFi industry by working closely with the protocol on specific yield optimization strategies.

Delegation Address:
Gnosis Safe Wallet: 0x61f0b0daBe302c5952b7038ef42c2c4F1d69e3db

An idea we had:
Following discussions, proposals, and actions by Idle DAO surrounding various governance initiatives, BSBA felt it was to analyse the policies’ effectiveness in reaching Idle DAO’s long-term goals.

A policy that stood out was governance mining, where community members get rewarded for participating in the governance process, whether through discussions on the forum or on Discord, voting on- and off-chain, etc. Idle DAO currently has a total monthly budget of 2,000 IDLE to distribute to the top 5 wallet addresses as calculated through their scoring mechanism. At current market prices this amounts to around 600 USD.

While this may be a nice prize for those top 5 contributors, we feel like it is not sufficiently effective at promoting behavior that increases long-term value for the DAO.

This reward system, in our opinion, does not cover enough breadth nor does it adequately incentivize those who are trying to improve the protocol during this time of difficult market conditions and uncertain futures.

Therefore, instead of solely rewarding those already participating in governance, we propose that Idle DAO takes the initiative to onboard new community members through a more robust long-term incentivization scheme.

We propose modifying the reward system from liquid token to vested token issuance. We believe that this transition will benefit the project both in the short term and in the long run. The vested issuance system provides a greater incentive to stay involved in the project as tokens are released from vesting once a month. This also allows Idle DAO to dish out greater rewards in total; instead of burdening current supply levels, tokens become unvested in the future where market conditions may become more favorable.

Furthermore, current thin liquidity pools do not experience as much downward pressure in the immediate term. Again, when market conditions improve, LP liquidity increases non-linearly due to the wealth effect and greater risk appetites, thus allowing LPs to better absorb selling pressure.

For example, Idle DAO could double its monthly budget to 4,000 IDLE per month, where those that receive the rewards (could be 10 instead of 5 wallets) have a 6-month cliff and then linearly unvest their token supply each month for another 6 months.

This incentive scheme which couples greater, but equally as sustainable token issuance with a broader mandate will surely increase the quantity and quality of governance participation. We welcome further discussion on this subject, the broader theme of maximising participation during this crypto winter, and the broader topic of governance.

1 Like
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Hey guys! Welcome to Idle DAO :wave:

Happy to see you finally here.

To summarize your post:

  1. You proposed the BSBA multisig as a delegation candidate. I have added your pitch to the Delegation Board
  1. You proposed to adjust the current Governance Mining program. To help the DAO better understand your proposal, I would like to see some precise details about the overall IDLE budget that should be devoted to this initiative and its length. In addition, I think it should be also decided which metrics we will track to understand the outcome of the initiative.
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Hello @Biaf! Thanks for your reply, we are excited to be part of the Idle DAO!

In our delegation pitch, we proposed to modify the Idle Governance mining program as we believe it is not as effective as it could potentially be.
As of now, each month 2000 IDLE tokens are distributed to the top 5 contributors as a reward for their work, which is based on their score on Karma platform. We see an issue with this system, as it rewards only people which are already very active members of the DAO and since the gap between the top contributors and others is significant, it doesn’t incentivize new members to be more active and compete for the rewards. We expect that the addresses that receive the rewards won’t be changing almost at all over time. Additionally, since the rewards are given in liquid IDLE tokens, it creates selling pressure, which is not ideal in current market conditions. Lastly, current metrics that are used to measure the activity of members are not complex enough and therefore the ranking is being decided by voting activity only.

This post has been the result of long-standing conversations between the members of the Bocconi Students Blockchain Association throughout this period of deep market turmoil and does not necessarily pitch any one specific idea with exact parameters. Instead, it is there to spark conversation within the DAO so that the DAO can come to a decision when the time is right.
We believe that given the nature of the changes that we are proposing, timing is crucial so that any changes in IDLE emissions do not adversely affect the existing IDLE tokenomics. The final goal is to indeed contribute to net IDLE token value accrual.

Proposal I

Our first proposal covered the idea of increasing governance engagement using vested tokens instead of liquid tokens that winners can instantly sell on the open market. The idea is that more people should be receiving the rewards such that more people participate in the governance process. The current situation rewards participants that engage in governance anyways. Therefore, instead of diluting rewards for top winners, we propose that the IDLE rewards increase by a specified amount, perhaps to 4000 IDLE per month or more, and the number of wallet addresses is increased to 10 or more instead of 5. Now, to avoid selling pressure in the short term during this period of low activity, we incentivize contributors to push for changes in the protocol that accrue value to IDLE in the longer term by rewarding them with vested tokens - tokens that they cannot sell immediately in the open market. An example here can be doling out tokens that have a 6-month cliff with monthly, linear vesting thereafter.

Proposal II

Since one of the main goals of the Governance Mining Program is to attract new people into the DAO, a possible incentive for it could be to reserve a part of the total reward only for new addresses. The simpler way to implement it would be to make a separate ranking for new addresses and reward, let’s say, the first one (or more). This ranking could be done each month with the standard ranking, or alternatively could be also done every two (or more) months, in order to have more new addresses to rank and to evaluate the work done in a longer period of time.

Moreover, also extra ways of rewarding governance contributors are necessary, to increase the incentives to participate actively. Right now indeed, the governance mining program is only based on “how much” work is done by single addresses (in terms of proposals voted, actions made, etc.).

We believe that new ways to also measure “how good” members are contributing could be crucial for the further development of IdleDAO and its community.

A potential tool IdleDAO could test is Coordinape, which aims to make the experience of working for a DAO more dynamic, rewarding, and fair, given that it gives the possibility to the community itself to allocate extra rewards between governance players.

Coordinape has a lot of functions and can be adapted to the specific needs of the DAO, but generally:

  • A Circle (a sort of fund for each particular team) is created, and a specific budget is allocated
  • Inside the Circle, community members themselves can distribute rewards, allocate rewards, give feedback, and see value streams between members

For example, a community circle can input contributions and then give each other kudos and give tokens.

More technical information and features can be found in their docs.

Also, Coordinape is currently free to use, so it would not require allocating extra operating expenses, but only deciding a certain budget that could be allocated to the incentives of a specific Circle. So, it would be possible to test it without many complications.

Let us know what you think and if you have any further questions!

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I think the focus is here to much on the mining program instead of new ideas.

The mining program started experimental.
And yes, as 1 of the most active contributors, i benefit from it. But no sell pressure at all from my part.

Facts are still that there aren’t much active community members who anticipate, mostly the same, sometimes new ones.
One of the goals was to motivate people to being back active again and vote. Cos polls failed to pass before introduction of the mining reward.

If the bear market is over, and more community members enter the IDLE DAO , we probably won’t face this problem anymore.

Looking at my own activity for the IDLE community, it doesn’t feel weird to be in the winning reward list.
Others are free to do the same and therefore they also would be higher ranked, but not everyone does that.

Last month we faced only 3 people being rewarded, so there was enough space for others.

I think the research and focus should be a lot more one how to get more active community members. And not on pumping more IDLE in this kind of initiatives.
2000 is more then enough, and if that’s for 5, 10 or more people… that’s totally depending on the activity.

There isn’t any gab, cos the reward is based on activity of the last 30 days. So every 30 days new chances who everyone can anticipate in and can get the same or higher score for being active in voting and forum contributions.

The max. Score for voting is always 800.
500 on-chain
300 off-chain
So if a community members does both, he/she already would be in the top 5 at this moment.

Ask yourself, what makes this gab?
I think 2 of the biggest reasons…
Voting on chain cost (gas) money.
Voting on chain goes VERY slow in the current dashboard/app.

So if people don’t want to pay money (gas) for voting on chain, do they deserve a same high reward compared to those who do pay for it? I don’t think so. :sweat_smile:

Yes, mostly. And forum activity.

proposal 1

I literally don’t see any sell pressure at this moment.
At least not any that effects the price.
Why should rewards for activity now being locked for 6 months? So they can be dumped after 6 months, what’s the difference?
In fact, if the token price in 6 months is higher and 2000 idle would be sold at once, it would effect the price a lot more then if does now.

Don’t forget 2000 IDLE is based on the token price now.
If 1 IDLE would have been $10 , the montly reward would have been probably 50 IDLE instead of 2000.

@BSBA_Bocconi , as community member i really appreciate more brain storming.

But i think it should be discussed with @emixprime if you guys should focus this much on only this initiative.

Or

Focus on new ideas/initiatives.

Cos i think the focus should be on how to get more users without spreading rewards monthly.
And if we keep monthly rewards, keep it a fair play , cos those who do more, deserves more then those who do less.