HAUS Proposal: Burn Reduction & Focus
Forward: Written Sunday Night.
When we started the Sustainability initiative, Eth was floating around $2,000, and it seemed like a great chance to get lean, provided ETH didn’t jump off a cliff.
Things didn’t work out like that. It turns out that anything bad that could happen, did happen. Our runway is getting small, and it is likely going to get even smaller.
This proposal will use the same goals and criteria to arrive at decisions it did a few days ago–with a few distinctions. Those distinctions being anything regarding long term initiatives.
While that may sound gloomy, we need to understand that there’s still great, concrete actions that we can take as a DAO. Actions that can drastically change how we add value to the community in our final months, and afterwards as we hand off our products to the people who use them.
Goals
Here’s the criteria we used to determine what is a good solution and what isn’t.
- Immediately Actionable: This proposal addresses short term needs only. Can these solutions be implemented now or in the short term?
- Feedback-based: Are we incorporating the feedback of our fellow DAOmembers. If we deviate from the responses, we should explicity state as much, and also why. How do we minimize the social cost of this unpleasant situation?
- Minimalistic: What is the simplest, lowest-tech, lowest overhead solutions to some of these problems?
- The Lightest Touch: While it would be nice to have a good or better all-encompassing system for dealing with contribution, it would seem that we would not be able to build one fast enough to see any benefit. How do we make sure that we’re diverting the least resources from the core DAO mission as possible?
- Based in Reality: No tokenomic systems, no implementation costs. No unnecessary or untested software. How do make a few smaller changes that we can agree on and move towards the core mission.
Actions
Here is a list of actions. At this point, we have a few days to dicuss. After that discussion, we need to put these actions to a vote.
Action 1:
Discover the Core Product.
Better late than never. We need to discover what the core mission is, then we need to cut whatever is not core to that mission.
This would involve another survey (multiple choice; much faster than previous ones) to find out what members think should remain in scope. Then we ratify that scope to the DAO, agreeing that we commit to that scope until the funds are gone or the product is delivered.
Here’s why we should take this action:
- This allows us to deliver on what the DAO values the most.
- The DAO largely unfavoured pay cuts. If we cannot work for less, than we can at least control our focus.
- When we’re out of funding, we’ll still have the option to use the DH (product) in whatever form to either spin off new DAOs or bring this DAO back to life. The more product we don’t have to make for free, the better.
- Will also help us determine how much resources we need to devote to revgen.
- We can get people to focus on core initiatives instead of laying people off.
Action 2:
Get the burn down.
Most of the respondants in the survey favoured some form of budget, although many wanted a soft cap.
Here’s what we propose. Let’s make a soft-cap of what we’re currently burning and scrutinize any new costs that would put us over that cap.
Why would we do this? Why so soft?
- We do not have time to develop a proper value allocation system that doesn’t distract us from the core product.
- Which means that if we assign budgets, we’d have no way of knowing who (circles & people within circles) gets allocated less.
- Allocating less to people has an immense social cost at a time when we should be pulling together, so at the very least, let’s make sure we’re not allocating more.
It would seem that minimizing any new burn is the simplest, lightest solution to this problem. Higher impact solutions do exist, but not on our time-frame.
UPDATE:
We may not have the luxury of not reducing burn. We can only pull funds from the Yeeter in quarterly intervals. Those funds are denominated in ETH. Which means that what we pull may be below our current burn. We do have some funds set aside, however it is likely that this won’t be enough.
Actionable steps to deal with this problem:
- Get a full understanding from Alchemists about how much we can pull from Yeeter at different ETH prices (doomsday prices included)
- Once we understand this situation, we can make an informed decision on how we allocate funds to contributors based on:
- Action 1: What is the core mission? Prioritize based on scope.
- Should we decide to proportionally lower our pay?
- Discuss a circle-focued cap for retro contributions based on scope.
As far as we’re aware, the above options are the only levers we can pull without increasing our scope.
This situation is not ideal, but it’s better we have a plan for how to deal with this instead of making decisions on the fly. We propose that we use a combination of both actions (Prioritizing to the core mission and proportionally lowering pay) to help us deliver.
Action 3:
Remove the HAUS Limit:
We chose this action because DAO repsondants were largely responsive to this idea. It’s also a great way for people to voluntarly reduce burn.
While it is true that this could concetrate funds to people who can afford to take less DAI, we need to acknowledge that if we want more DAI in exchange for HAUS (in any form), the value is going to concentrate somewhere. This is largely to do with the current price of HAUS.
We believe that concentrating that value to help us deliver on core objectives is a small price to pay–especially if that person is within the DAO. We also believe that those who are willing to invest in us during these uncertain times deserve whatever upside they get.
We still have an ecosystem and plans for the token. They’ll definitely outlive this round of funding. Development will still take place after our funding is gone (even if we can’t raise for more). There’s still reasons to be positive about the future of HAUS.
Action 4:
Flag System.
This is one where we are deviating from the survey responses. Here’s why we went with this solution for the short term over more heavy solutions like routine reviews.
- Easier to implement.
- Does not require us to constantly rate eachother
- Does not require us to review each other
- Does not distract us unless we need to be distracted.
- Now is not a time to be distracted.
- Seeing major discrepencies could be a big distraction and demotivator. We need a way to address this if this happens.
A flag system could work as follows:
- Users can ‘flag’ a discrepency by passing on a message to Paladins.
- This message includes feedback that the member recieves
- We try to keep the flagger anonymous if possible, but given the time we have, we cannot build a system that is fully anonymous.
- If the flag goes above a certain threshold (maybe 3?), Paladins can meet with that member and provide the feedback.
This system allows us to focus in the vast majority of cases, while dealing with the only the loudest descrepencies. We’re not actively polling or reviewing as we feel that this would provide minimal benefit at a heavy cost.
If we do get options for mid/long term solutions in our future, then we could upgrade to some sort of review system. Many respondants favoured allowing circles to handle their own reviews. Peers within a circle have a more intimate knowledge of their peers’ contributions.
Action 5
Keep some cash aside for hosting costs and contract audits.
Find out how much our total hosting costs are and keep that aside (in DAI) and save enough for a year so that our users can continue to use DAOhaus longer.
What this is
This is just a post for discussion at the moment. We can iterate and refine these processes as we discuss and implement. We aim to vote within a few days in time for cycle 5. Let’s take the next few days to refine these ideas and decide on which ones we’d like to implement.
Ideally, we’d vote on each of these actions separately, so that we’re not blocking actions that we’d like to take with actions that we don’t like. But that depends on our current infra and whether the snapshot boost can handle it.
How we decide to use our remaining runway is going to have a large impact on DAOhaus through the bear market. We believe that we have an opportunity to at least position our users well and deliver on some core items that we’ve been planning on delivering. Dealing with these tough discussions, making some hard, pragmatic decisions early on will help us focus on those key deliverables as we move forward.