Idle's Leagues extinction

These past few days, a significant representation of the Idle DAO has gathered in this Forum to review the latest proposals coming from the Idle Leagues.

Following these conversations, I propose that the DAO votes on the immediate extinction of the current League model and cancellation of all ongoing paid collaborations with non-Core Team and non-Developers League contributors/advisors.

The outcome is to build a more agile, empowered, focused, and efficient operating structure with full interim control by the Core team (Idle Labs) and a reduction in expense layers.

Following the release of all non-programming League members, the Core Team would assume interim management of the DAO until the economic sustainability of the protocol is improved, and new Governance and new Tokenomics are proposed and approved by the DAO.

This action will allow the Treasury to adjust to the current market conditions and restructure the DAO governance and tokenomics in the face of evident and irreconcilable differences in working and execution methodologies between League Members and a significant part of the community.

The $IDLE price has changed, the market conditions have changed too, but the Idle Finance mission has not.

Immediate extinction of all Leagueā€™s structure will align the Treasury with current market conditions and $IDLE token price. Doing this will ensure we can continue to provide the best support possible to the Idle ecosystem throughout this bear market, re-create ourselves and emerge as the leading ecosystem once again:

  • Make sure we have the right resources available across liquidity, founder community, and composability categories per the current roadmap.
  • Embrace frugality - every $IDLE matters.
  • Runway - ensuring 24-36 months of operating runway for Idle Core Team and key initiatives

For all League members affected by this re-structure, the Core Team can consider deploying in the future, programs that I believe can also be a helpful toolset to bring payroll expenses more in sync with web3 cycles:

  • One-time salary swaps for locked tokens.

  • 3-day work week for equivalent adjusted pay.

  • Introducing sabbatical programs to allow people to take a break for 6 months up to 1 year and recharge.

  • Support for League members looking to start their own ecosystem project.

  • Support for League members that propose initiatives and reward them with grants, facilitating a more agile collaboration with the DAO.

I am incredibly excited for the opportunity ahead and to continue to grow the Idle DAO alongside all.

Adaptive DAOs build resilient communities, throughout all market conditions.

Whatā€™s ahead is a time of incredible opportunity for the Idle DAO.
This is the time to build: the DAO, the Governance, and the Tokenomics.

Next steps

I would like to gather the sentiment of Idle DAO toward this proposal.

This post will be open for discussion and in about 3 days, if there are no objections, I would like to proceed with the Temperature Check.
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5 Likes

Iā€™m supportive of this proposal to vote on rethinking / reshaping the operating model, and specifically the role of the leagues.

I believe itā€™s critical to streamline forward plans in the spirit of agility and efficiency with a lean & effective structure and sustainable operating model.

I view this as a positive opportunity to stop / think and set a fresh course to refocus;

  • An effective & agile operating structure
  • A focus on driving sustainable protocol revenues
  • Reshape token model in service of the Idle mission
  • Set a compelling growth agenda for the future

Iā€™m particularly interested to hear feedback from DAO members who have been involved in the leagues and their experiences (good and bad) that can help to sharpen & establish a more prosperous forward road map for Idle.

5 Likes

I am certainly in support of anything that will bring about a change both is mindest and strategy

5 Likes

I support this proposal

4 Likes

Iā€™m sorry, but why core team / Idle Labs should agree on this fantasy? Moreover after saying that leagues are a disaster while me and Matteo are the coordinators? I would rather leave and let you guys ā€˜buildā€™ and ā€˜mantainā€™ the protocol than work under these assumptions and in this toxic environment

4 Likes

Hi William,

I think youā€™ve taken this extremely negatively. Holding a team / league to account for performance isnā€™t toxicity.

Given that by any KPI I can see the current state of the protocol economics arenā€™t great. Do you agree?

:small_red_triangle_down: TVL
:small_red_triangle_down: Treasury Funds / Runway
:small_red_triangle_down: Protocol Revenue
:small_red_triangle_down: Token Price

These arenā€™t solely due to 2022 current market conditions, the trend was the same when the market was strong 2021 H2.

Isnā€™t it sensible to stop & think about the right operating model and leadership to refocus effort / resources? In any regular business KPI trends like this would force a stop and think / shift in strategy. Why would investors in the protocol evaluate this situation differently?

Or do you think itā€™s all ok the way it is, we just need to slash stakers to fund the treasury and maintain the existing league structure the way it is?

Personally, I still believe in Idle. And actually Iā€™m ok with diverting staking revenue to the treasury if this were coupled with a more holistic plan to address the performance issues.

There are plenty investors here with the capital that could be directed to help grow Idle. But at this point there is not a compelling case for growth to deploy more capital on a model that isnā€™t performing.

3 Likes

Would love to hear from these guys too. So far youā€™ve got input from 4-5 Community Members.

Why donā€™t we hear from the Industry Pioneers backing Idle? Are they happy with performance?

3 Likes

Happy to see you having some bandwidth to this situation.

The initial proposal reflects that in reality, several in the community agree that in fact the core team is the ONLY one we trust at this point.

Thatā€™s why Leagues and coordinator roles can be switched off.

Back to basics, thatā€™s how we started in December 2019.

What is being proposed is that leagues turn off the lights. Everyone takes a chill pill for their ego: community, Leagues and core.

William goes back to do what he loves: code.
Matteo goes back to do what he loves: structuring operations.
Davide goes back to thinking about Governance and Tokenomics.

Personally, I will play ball with you 3 only at this stage.

Like @Coinballers said, would love to hear if seed investors are happy with the League performance.

3 Likes

:point_down:Time to speak (these replies are on my own and Iā€™m not speaking on behalf of Leagues)


Iā€™m against this proposal: as a person who is used to working in teams and seeing products grow, this is a nonsensical proposal, without clear goals, and given mainly by regressed frustration because of the price of the token.

If you wanted contributors ready to shill the project for the sole purpose of seeing a token price go up, then you voted wrong (at least I speak for myself).

TVL, as in the rest of the protocols during this bear market, has dropped dramatically, we are not the only ones. Iā€™m writing this not as an excuse, this is to properly contextualize events.


Confusing proposal: what are the real outcomes?

@unicorn What is the goal here with this post?
Reduce expenses during hard times as centralized companies do in the crypto space?
Suggest different approaches in organization and ways of working for contributors?

Rather than a proposal, it seems to me to be a mix of venting and suggestions, which is unclear to me as a final voting purpose.

By the way, these two sentences sound like:

  • Youā€™ve created Idle DAO from scratch now;
  • Until now the Leagues didnā€™t work on anything.

ā€¦Seriously? :thinking:

In general, a person should be incredibly enthusiastic about continuing to grow the DAO always, not at the time when is doing a proposal (which is to remove small groups of active contributors who have contributed to the various activities of the Idle ecosystem to date).

For example, none from the community (except @AllinCrypto) gave feedback or suggestions about the Governance Mining proposal (p.s. Iā€™m still awaiting a reply from you here). If you were so enthusiastic about being an active DAO member as you are saying in this post, you would have left suggestions and reasoned opinions on the proposal, no?

Have you ever heard of low bandwidth right? Because what youā€™re saying, in the current state of the protocol, with the products offered and the partners to handle that joined the Idle DAO ecosystem, is a bit weird thinking that only 3 people can handle all this work.


Suggestions on the current models, rationale with (real) outcomes

Now, finishing with personal responses (of which I am not a fan but in fairness about some things you have to respond to), I would like you to somehow, as DAO members generally do, suggest changes to be made to the current Leagues model.

Because you should be aware that, proposing to eliminate the subDAOs and start over with the team that originally was there before the Leagues, means having delays in the coming months on many activities, a greater heavy load than the current one towards these people (@Coinballers if you wanted some feedbacks, hereā€™s my first thought on that).


DAO Members activity

I would also like to know if you have a plan for the active participation of DAO members: what strategy do you have in mind following this ā€œproposalā€? Because a DAO without participation is very complex to scale in the long term.

By eliminating the Leagues will you (the DAO members that actively commented during these 3 days) be active in chatting, discussing, suggesting ideas, and voting proposals? If yes, well this really doesnā€™t have a meaningful correlation :man_shrugging:

3 Likes

I believe that blaming and proposing to extinguish the Leagues structure for the current results is missing the forest for the trees.

Every single major DAO in the space has adopted a subDAOs/PODs model over time, while we decided to do it from the beginning, anticipating that a disorganized DAO wouldnā€™t work. And now we need to get rid of it? Simply put, if a football team doesnā€™t win the championship, it changes players/coaches, but it doesnā€™t erase the actual football club or remove it from the tournament. Itā€™s no sense.

I see and second @williamā€™s point to chose violence for the reaction youā€™re having, I agree with it because this way of ā€œparticipating in governanceā€, but not in the trenches helping fight, instead on the throne as a dictator simply shouting orders while plebian developers need to execute must end.

There is no value at pointing fingers, generalizing everything to price performance (which solely show speculative participation, and btw, have you seen whatā€™s happening in the WORLD and not only in DeFi?), and scapegoating the Leagues structure (which is the only way for this DAO to build growth and scale).

We are open to public (as always, and we were actually in the process of, as we did at the end of every single mandate) the priorities and goals, the roadmap, and the composition and expenses of the Leagues.

It was in program for next week to discuss other 2 main initiatives with the DAO:

  1. IDLE liquidity mining reduction: @Biaf wanted to present a review of the current liquidity mining to give some next steps on its reduction and discuss a possible adjustment for the one dedicated to Gauges;

  2. M3 Leagues goals and structure definition: @william and I wanted to propose a review of M2 mandate and changes that could be applied for M3, keeping in mind that we need to review expenses and focus the efforts on what is generating value for the DAO. A non-complete list of goals/improvements is:

Renovate dashboard

Simpler, faster, and more intuitive dashboard, reducing maintenance and overhead costs. This will allow product suite users to really enjoy using BY or PYTs every day.

Prepare BY/PYTs next iteration

Simplify the product offering. Continue iterating, testing, and experimenting with the new PYTs design (Adaptive Yield Split), taking new yield sources to production, and ultimately implementing into the current BY a wider yield spectrum (thanks to PYTs Seniors, which will maintain BYā€™s high-security standard).

Build up B2B audience

Keep focusing on automation and support for integrators, both downstream and upstream. Build better tools, documentation, and tracking. Restore and grow TVL from there.

Update tokenomics

It was already in the plan for M3. Actually this/next week is planned to give a good adjustment to IDLE liquidity mining. But you know, all of this drama require time, and the process of drafting/reviewing/finalizing it get delayed for this kind of things. We also want to rethink the Gauges model, possibly assigning more weight to it as different partners are willing to participate.

Maintain our high security standards

Of course, continue building a resilient product suite to provide the most attractive risk-adjusted yields in the market. A DeFi protocol operating since 2019 without any hack/loss is a unique phenomenon. And we will keep maintaining it via monitoring, peer reviews, audits, risk framework, testing, and simulations.

Grow brand and community of users

Focus on Twitter communications with small, contained research efforts to explore new channels, continue with B2B series (like the Treasury Mgmt article, or Olympus Twitter Space). And grow a community of users.


Side note but I want to reiterate this, USERS! One of my core motivators is having users use what we build, and we can build even superior products with them, with their feedback, with their needs. From there we can understand their appetite, and build products/partnerships/integrations that feed their needs. If you are not a user, why are you even here with a governance token that allows you to have a voice in the product suite development? Or maybe youā€™re just here to speculate on the narrative? Do you think that Mr Elon Musk gives more shit about a user that wants to improve UX for the latest self-driving software or someone that bought TSLA and is complaining itā€™s not going to the moon? Again as I already wrote, bull markets teach bad lessons.


@william and I have identified inefficiencies that accumulated during the last mandate, and examinated how we work and on what. We can do more with less. Less initiatives that are not directly contributing to the product suite and its expansion. More focus on product development and B2B partnerships. We will be making changes at the current Leagues structure for that.

However, we know the runway and funds available to the Leagues. While Iā€™m personally proud that Leagues have been 100% funded only via revenues in the last 2 years, we are in a situation where this is not possible anymore. Growing organization retain proceeds when they need to invest in what itā€™s making them grow, the human resources. The first step is to understand that the market condition has changed, but then the ā€œchill pill for egoā€ is also to understand that the current fee distribution needs to be restructured.

But if the reaction to ā€œletā€™s adjust the fee distribution because itā€™s not sustainable nowā€, is this one, I donā€™t see who will be able to take care of the above initiatives. And what do you think is the working environment youā€™re creating for this DAO? Do you think people will be willing to work for community members that are just saying ā€œhey shit, look at the priceā€ instead of giving useful feedback about the products?

Getting back to the root of this drama, IDLE staking rewards, as we saw, havenā€™t the desired effect (otherwise all these KPIs listed should have been different no?) and are dampening the growth of the part of the treasury that would fund more developments.

I suggest to all of you to re-think about this, and about the things that all of us (Leagues and DAO) should focus on: building a DeFi product suite that allows users to optimize their yields and minimize risk.

3 Likes

I am expecting that next week, after a few more days of discussion and after all sides have expressed their views, the Leagues can setup a snapshot with 2 options:

  1. End the Leagues
  2. Do not end the Leagues.
1 Like

Hi Matteo,

Key to the allergic reaction from the community to the original post from @biaf was that it centred on the adjustment of revenue distribution without building any confidence or outlining the future growth plans that could turnaround performance.

To use your football analogy, itā€™s like asking shareholders in your football club to take a pay cut; after losing the tournament & being relegated without a compelling case for the changes that will be made (to players, coach and game plan) that would enable a winning formula.

Why would they accept a pay cut to fund the same formula failing by any reasonable metric?

I take your point that perhaps the staking rewards havenā€™t helped grow key KPIā€™s / support development of the product but what else is being done to fix the root cause of the issue?

Elon may prefer to engage with someone developing a new UX, but if his shareholders / investors had taken a 99.3% decline they might also reasonably expect to get a straight answer to what changes to strategy, staff, leadership or product suite was going to be implemented to address the decline.

As per my last post, if what was presented was a holistic & compelling growth plan, with fresh ideas, improved operating approach that necessitated adjustments to protocol revenues to fund that plan, I donā€™t think you would have got the same allergic reaction to the proposal

2 Likes

I think this conversation got heated up extremely fast and ended in some finger-pointing at each other from both sides.

I would love to encourage everyone to try to make something useful out of this conversation.

Removing the league immediately doesnā€™t seem to be the right solution and will not fix current issues. I assume the Core Team would be highly demotivated by this action. I would rather focus on making contributors more accountable or reducing the current workloads to reduce costs to a certain level if this is needed.

The current League funding is not sustainable and this maybe could have been pointed out more clearly in the latest proposal that lead to all of this. We should also remind ourselves that the community is the highest good in a DAO and whoever these users are we should work/collaborate closely with them as the power is with the community!

We should gather proposals on how we wanna fund the current league and also reduce the treasuries expense. We see many DAOs in the space taking action to remain sustainable and adding fees is just one possible solution. Another idea is to try to restructure the current IDLE emissions and reduce yield farming incentives. I think changing the staking rewards is not fair as we have users and contributors committed with capital and can also not unlock. Therefore I think cutting idle rewards on some of the strategies is a possible solution. Many times we heard our community complaining that users who only look for a higher yield and then dump the token as soon as they get itā€¦ Also, our current B2B program can be reduced for example or stopped for a certain period. This might result in losing some TVL howeverā€¦ What I wanna say is that there are many possibilities about how we can possibly solve this.

This proposal and the communities feedback clearly show that they are not satisfied with the deliverables of the Leagueā€™s. Transparency is always a topic that pops up in these discussionsā€¦

A way on how we could improve this is by introducing a more agile reward system. Where league members have a fixed lower salary that is applied and adding a deliverable-based incentive mechanism. Meaning that each League member has a clearly defined role with day-to-day tasks (something we do not officially have yet) and separate specific initiatives which are rewarded accordingly. These initiatives can be defined by the coordinators at the beginning of a mandate and be opened up on Dework for example. So in case, we do not have the necessary capacity or expertise to execute them external resources can come to help out.
This would make League contributors more accountable and the community can see clear deliverables from specific League members. It also motivates and incentives each League member to take on additional work or have weeks/months where they can ā€œrestā€ or focus on other priorities if they wish.

These are just some initial ideas and am happy to brainstorm with everyone on how we can improve the ecosystem and keep Idle sustainable.

4 Likes

Exactly!!!

I already mentioned somewhere else, cos of a well deserved holiday on the canarian islandsā€¦ i wonā€™t do much crypto/idle related in the next 2 weeks.

Would love to see new worked out well proposals, who everyone can live with.

This one, and the other one, isnā€™t going to work in my humble opinion. So, come onā€¦ brainstorm on things like @Salome wroteā€¦ TOGETHER! :muscle:t3:

1 Like