In the month of January, 100% of moonshot pay was made using moonshot built products. This is a major milestone; all of our payment products are in a working state!
At the Collective we currently have 16 active contributor tokenstreams. While our compensation policy has not been completely ratified (see OKR’s and planned accomplishments here) these streams serve as basic income for our contributors. We target ~20% of total compensation with these streams. The other 80% of contributor pay comes from another product: Pay.party.
We have successfully coordinated and held many pay party elections, or voting periods where contributors select candidates and cast their votes. These votes serve as the peer to peer voting mechanics of Pay.party and determine what the payout will be to any given contributor in that election.
One property that was baked in is the ability to add voters that are not candidates, i.e. they can only vote on other candidates and not themselves. This allows us to add voters that may not be contributing to that product but have great insight into who did what work in the specified time period.
These elections can be tricky in an async, dao native environment. What makes this difficult? One major hurdle to overcome was the differing time zones of our contributors, it was hard to get everyone in the same place at the same time to nominate the ‘candidates’ to be voted on. As a workaround, we leveraged another one of our products, tip party, to aggregate all the appropriate contributors on a per project basis.
Elections can be created by any EOA (externally owned account; not contract wallet) rather than having to use the multisig and dealing with the complexities of asynchronous message signing.
Once everyone votes, which is usually capped at around 24 hours, we then connect the treasury multisig or the ‘baby sig’ and distribute the funds. It’s important to note that the description of the election should contain how the payout will be distributed i.e. quadratic vs linear. We have chosen to use linear payouts as quadratic tends to tighten the pack and that is not the intended outcome when looking to identify and compensate the ‘damage dealers’ of any given project.
In December, as we first started to form what our compensation would look like, a gap was exposed in that we would have to batch send transactions to settle up where the elections and streams fell short of total compensation commitments.
At moonshot we don’t target hourly rates per se, but behind the scenes we use spreadsheets to track how much USD our contributors are being ‘paid’ for their time. This is done to ensure that we are rewarding them fairly. To get these payments out, we had to use multisender(dot)app, the same app we had to use to fill streams.
Every transaction using this app has an added fee of .09 ETH, which our multisig does not natively own. While swapping into ETH has been done for this process specifically, anyone who has ever done this knows the challenges this poses.
It was realized that many had this need for an app which can bundle multiple transactions and send varying amounts of tokens to each user, however; no one had built it yet. Leveraging our connections to scaffold-eth the multidropper was quickly prototyped. This was the final piece in having all our contributors paid using only MC products.
As the person currently overseeing compensation and contributor success, this milestone was not only awesome, but for the team morale to validate that we can ship at this pace while also standing up a healthy workstream of a DAO was a major success from my point of view.
As we move into Season 13 it is becoming apparent that other workstreams in the DAO are starting to uncover the same needs that Moonshot had when starting to pay contributors. We are deploying resources now to bring these products and ideas to you and really dive deep into usability tests.
In these test sessions, we will uncover how these products could improve to suit your workstream needs while you are helping us to validate our products. Much of these needs will be fulfilled through our prototype budget to ship solutions as fast/safe as possible to meet the ever-increasing needs of other workstreams and DAO’s.
In addition to all of this, as we transform into our Target state we have a pipeline of talent coming up through Speedrun Ethereum and natively through GitcoinDAO. To attract and retain this talent we need to be quick to pay our contributors. The starting stream for contributors at moonshot is 120 gtc at a 4 week drip rate. We plan to bring on new contributors in the design, product and developer space. The intent of this budget is to do just that, while simultaneously being held accountable to our ratified OKRs.