Idle Leagues v2.0 – Leagues & Labs (M3)

Summary

A proposal to establish the next Leagues mandate structure and improve the operational workflow by introducing a refined organizational infrastructure to foster cross-Leagues cooperation.

Introduction

With the last mandate and thanks to the engagement of Idle community, we now have 3 different Leagues that work on protocol and strategy development, treasury and business management, and communication & marketing operations.

With the next mandate, we want to re-confirm this structure and the contributors working on it, and officially incorporate the C&M League body after the initial pilot program.

These Leagues are organizational units with different areas of expertise and responsibilities, but they all work together towards the same goal: making the Idle protocol grow sustainably for the long term.

Note that Leagues aren’t siloed, and teams need to coordinate and collaborate together to keep operations running smoothly. There are common tasks or responsibilities, and the workflow needs to be coordinated in order to maximize efficiency.

The way we see the relationship within the current Leagues members and their responsibilities can be summarized with the following visualizations (not-exhaustive list):

With the learnings from the last mandate in mind, we are amped to keep improving this DAO structure with more contributors and initiatives for our protocol’s community and ecosystem.

Leagues’ Responsibilities

One major insight we got from the last mandate is that it’s time to get granular and specialized in the roles and responsibilities of each League contributor so that we can more effectively drive high-value outcomes.

We started with a general-purpose Pilot League to bootstrap this structure and form an initial core group of community contributors that want to be actively involved in protocol and community development. After the initial success, we expanded the Leagues into Developer and Treasury Leagues. Positions within the Leagues, though, were still general, with Project Managers/Leads and Supervisors; the same was true for the community-formed C&M League.

We now propose new specialized areas of responsibility that can both fit the current teams’ skills and onboard new contributors that can help bring the protocol and DAO to a new level of coordination and organization to fuel growth.

The new teams’ structure will use a Contributors-Advisors structure (formerly PMs-Supervisors), and during the next mandate one of the main goals would be to coordinate contributors in order to fill up each responsibility and form teams around specific areas (suggested skills for each responsibility are covered in detail in the related application posts, which will be released early next week):

Treasury League:

  • Business development
  • Ecosystem development
  • Leagues finance and accounting
  • Token economy
  • DAO architecture and facilitation

Development League:

  • Smart contract development
  • Product management
  • Front-end development
  • Product and UI/UX design

Communication & Marketing League:

  • Product marketing management
  • Communication and social design
  • Community social channels management (initially via recurrent grants)

These roles can be partly covered by the current Leagues’ teams, but we encourage you to check the specific application threads (NDR: when available, exp. early next week) if you see a position that is a good fit for you.

As a Leagues member, you can choose 1+ of the above responsibilities according to the specific League you’re applying to.

We also want to change the role of Supervisor into Advisor, to allow the Leagues’ teams to still be able to count on additional feedback from DeFi experts while having more throughput for new initiatives.

The main differentiation in this role is on the activeness: Supervisors were more active and having a veto over Leagues initiatives, while now Advisors come into play to help with blockers/requests/insights that the Leagues members might need. This allows accommodating a higher number of Advisors within the same League that can give inputs and help through the mandate.

We will open up and give a more detailed description of every area of responsibility with specific posts for each League (as above, soon to come). Applications for new Leagues members will be hosted there.

Leagues-Labs Matrix

The Leagues-Labs model is focused on simplicity and cross-Leagues cooperation. When Idle DAO began organizing around their work, we identified a handful of important elements on how people and teams should be structured.

Leagues

Leagues are functional, autonomous teams that focus on one area of expertise. Each League has a unique angle and skillset that guides the work they do, and advisors for additional support. Leagues determine which agile methodology/framework will be used within their workflow.

Labs

When multiple and different Leagues members coordinate with each other on the same feature area, they form a Lab. Labs help build alignment across Leagues and aim to maintain it over the course of an initiative workflow (bearing in mind Dunbar’s Number). Each League assigns a member to a specific Lab’s initiative who is responsible for helping coordinate across Leagues and for encouraging collaboration.

A possible initial structure that we propose is the following:

That’s it. There are not a lot of practices that need to be followed or ceremonies that need to happen. Leagues may have ceremonies like sprint planning and retrospectives, but the focus of the Leagues-Labs model is on how teams organize around work. It’s up to Leagues to figure out the best way to get the job done.

In general, we suggest organizing each Leagues’ workflow over a 2-week timeframe for retrospective and evaluating reached goals, but it’s quite burdensome to apply the same agile process that we could be using with product/protocol development with business development or communication campaigns. Leagues will self-organize over these principles to find the most suitable framework, both according to members and initiatives.

Compensation Packages

We feel that the compensation packages proposed during the last mandate have been broadly accepted and helped us find great talents within our community.

Insofar, we would like to propose the same level of compensation, with the only addition of using Opyn Vesting Options on the IDLE bonus part. This would act as an additional incentive for Leagues members to reach major achievements, similar to equity options that startups typically use to incentivize team members.

More on the specific compensation packages will be published in the Treasury League, Developers League, and Communications League specific threads.

Mandate Budget and Duration

In early-May 2021, the Treasury League received 11k IDLE as a new budget and 5k IDLE from the past League mandate. During the last mandate, Treasury League allocated 5.7% of that budget to Dev Grants, 10.4% to Liquidity Mining, 6.3% to Liquidity Provisioning, and 77.6% to Leagues Compensation. The Treasury Multisig currently holds $41k in asset value, but almost the entire fund is already committed to refund past expenses and pay compensations.

In addition, at the mandate initiation, the Dev League received $20,000 in ETH for technical operations and deployments - the wallet still holds $18k (6.4 ETH).

Having Treasury League reserves entirely in IDLE has exposed the budget to extreme market fluctuations, underperforming during the past months. Furthermore, the counterparties we have been working with often accepted only stablecoins, and the sole workaround available to us was to have Idle Labs managing the payments.

This time, the planned Treasury League’s budget would use stablecoins as a unit of account for operational expenses and stablecoins/IDLE ratios for compensations.

The budget would include the following activities:

  • Leagues members compensations
  • Liquidity mining and liquidity provisioning
  • Operational partnerships
  • Dev Grants, hackathons, and events
  • Community engagement activities
  • Communication campaigns

Idle Labs would like to begin a process of integration of part of the core team with the DAO, merging the genesis team with the Leagues’ structure. Idle Labs members will forego the compensations for the next mandate and expenses reported below include only rewards for contributors not affiliated with Idle Labs. More details in the proposal to re-confirm the current Leagues’ team members.

The Leagues would like to allocate the following amounts to the respective Leagues’ multisigs:

  • Treasury League: $84.3k in stablecoins ($50k operational costs, $34.3k compensations) + 16’183 IDLE (compensations);
  • Dev League: $0, as the committee can self-sustain future expenses with current reserves
  • C&M League: $20k in stablecoins

A detailed breakdown of the fund allocation is reported here: Budget Projection Mandate #3.

To sum up, the expected total budget the Leagues would need for the next mandate is: $104’300 + 16’183 IDLE (this budget may be subject to adjustment according to new members that will apply and voted by our community during the next application window – in that case, community will confirm its consensus for the adjusted budget with a new signaling Snapshot poll).

Current Idle DAO reserves (non-IDLE assets) and final reserves after Leagues funding are reported below (with market values at the time of writing):

Additionally, consider the Rebalancer contract holds $35k in ETH. Despite a re-allocation of part of these funds might be discussed, this topic would be out of the scope of this proposal and would be better discussed in further governance threads.

Lastly, the proposed mandate duration is 3 months.

Initiation and Onboarding

IDLE token holders will vote to confirm the current teams, and then we’ll open up the application window for unfilled positions.

The current teams already coordinated over the possible positions that can be assigned to each member, and more information as well as the snapshot poll for re-confirming the teams can be found here.

New Leagues members will undergo an initial 2-weeks onboarding sprint, after which the related Leagues and the new members will give feedback regarding their willingness to continue the collaboration and all Leagues’ members will acknowledge the experience level for compensation. After that, new members will be officially part of the Leagues.

Closing Notes

Open systems do not necessarily make better systems. It’s just that they’re able to respond more quickly because each member has access to knowledge and the ability to make direct use of it. Open systems are able to quickly mutate.

If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world. Idle Leagues are an example of how a DAO and community can set up decentralized organizations where ideology is the glue that holds all the members together.

We have a common goal: give you the best place to keep your idle funds.

We have a common vision: with our protocol, money will never sit still.

Next Steps for IDLE community

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Both Snapshot polls approved! :white_check_mark:

Leagues members are already at work to adopt the new proposed structure and open the doors to new members soon! :open_hands:

The allocation of the mandate budget will be finalized via on-chain IIP.

The following are the results for “Idle Leagues v2.0 – Leagues & Labs (Mandate #3)”

And the results for “Current Team Members Reconfirmation”

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