Hey Spencer, as always appreciate the coordination of yourself and the metagov group. Just wanted to highlight one key number within this post, the ENS token distribution.
Steward incentivisation is incredibly important and we want to ensure we have the highest value contributors to the project - Incentivising with a monthly USDC balance ($4k) is something we fully support, as well as getting ENS tokens in the hands of these stewards, however the current budget is proposing a huge number of ENS tokens distributed to stewards.
Denominating any incentive in strict token amounts rather than a USD amount always leaves a risk of token price having massive impact on these rewards (this applies for strict onchain incentives (liquidity incentives), let alone a contributor incentive).
With these current numbers, the 9 stewards receive a total of ~$2.3m dollars worth of incentives for 12 months, ~$250k each. (On top of the $48k in USDC incentives).
The proposal also outlines incentives for the next ~9 months - Our thoughts would be that this timeline is too long; is there any change in token price that would change this proposal? If the ENS token was to 10x in value, would we still be comfortable giving each steward $2.5m worth of ENS tokens? Again this highlights the issue with assigning incentives in strict token numbers.
Considering how much, time, DAO energy and due diligence just went into the ENS Service Provider Streams that distributed a similar amount of value - Assigning that same amount to 9 individuals rather than 9 whole teams feels like a misaligned incentive.
This reply aims to highlight possible next steps given this large allocation;
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Only assigning the first 6 months worth of steward incentives, with the remaining incentives to be discussed by the wider DAO (Distribute 5k ENS tokens to each steward, with the second half of the allocation to be thought through more purposefully) - Especially given that the term was increased from 6 months to 12 months in the last term.
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Adding vesting to these tokens to ensure longterm alignment. We’d suggest a 1 year linear vesting to these tokens post distribution.
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Reducing the allocation for the current (and future) terms based on DAO & steward discussion.
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Start denominating any ENS incentive amounts in USD as opposed to tokens.
I know this is a hard topic given it involves stewards discussing steward incentivisation, I will be joining the next metagov call to discuss further and happy to make this a more formalised proposal if that is required. But hoping there’s a way for this to be addressed without needing to be a contentious discussion, there’s no real precedent for how this could be updated, but with metagov & wider steward consent, updating this shouldn’t need to be a whole proposal. As mentioned above, having incentivised and aligned stewards is incredibly important to a successful DAO, however over incentivisation without proper consideration can easily lead to resentment from other DAO contributors and mis-aligned contribution to the project.
Interested to see any thoughts from delegates, stewards and Labs as always 