Overview
With the recent discussion of the Index master plan and the road to 1%, the next logical step we can take as a community is to create ways that members of the Index Coop can help contribute to the community’s goals. There’s a large opportunity for the Index community to seize the crypto index market as early movers, and in order for us to do that effectively, a contribution framework can help illuminate how each member of the Index Coop can participate in successfully reaching our goals.
As a refresher on the goals laid out in the master plan post above, success for the Index Coop can be broken down as:
- Focus on improving the Index Coop’s products’ success metrics, such as increasing:
- Market Cap (1% of the DeFi market as a milestone)
- Number of holders
- Trading volume across exchanges
- General awareness
- Achieve wider spread adoption of Index Coop products (e.g. the DeFi Pulse Index) through:
- Exchange listings
- Lending protocol integrations
- Wallet/DeFi dashboard integrations
- Protocol farming integrations
- Create, improve, and promote the best crypto index products in the market owned by the Index Coop.
By focusing on these few key initiatives, we can extrapolate the Index Coop’s success through the growth of the Coop’s products, revenue generated by those products, and the growth of our community.
Why Set Up A Contribution Framework?
There’s a lot of discussion happening around how each member can effectively contribute to the Index Coop, without a clear guide on how to take actionable steps with a clear reward. A framework on how each member can effectively contribute should solve these key issues:
- Members should have a way to contribute to high impact areas for the coop such as promotion, proposing improvements, developing, or creating/managing indices.
- Members should be rewarded for their contributions to the coop if the community believes the contributions are valuable.
- Members should feel a sense of ownership and belonging in the coop from the contributions they make and the reward that they get for the contributions.
What success looks like
In a world where we have a well made contributions framework, the coop would look like:
- High Retention - Retention is high for current and new members, and each member feels like they are effectively contributing as a member of the community.
- Effective - There is a vibrant community of Index members who effectively contribute and focus on the right goals. It should not feel transactional where contributions are solely made for the sake of rewards.
- Autonomous - Index members recruit new members and self assign each other to roles that move the Coop forward and doesn’t need direct intervention from the Set or DeFi Pulse team.
- Enticing - Incentives for joining the Index Coop are clear and enticing, which lead to high retention and member acquisition.
What failure looks like
In a world where we have a poorly made contributions framework or none at all, the coop would look like:
- Attrition - Members don’t know how to effectively contribute or why they would contribute, and the Coop slowly loses its key members.
- Unfocused - Coop members focus on the wrong things instead of focusing on the objectives that move key metrics that push the Index Coop towards success (increasing TVL, # of holders, volume, etc.).
- Dependant - Contribution momentum never takes off, and remains dependent on the Set and DeFi Pulse team for contributions.
- Fork - There is a contentious fork of the Index Coop which takes along key members of the Coop creating a divide in the community.
Community Roles
Creating the next crypto Blackrock is no small feat, and ensuring success means that we’ll need a range of different contributions based on the community’s current objectives.
The roles below are meant to act as a starting point for how members can contribute, and we can expect that the responsibilities and rewards associated with each role will change over time as new improvements are brought up through proposals.
Community Promoters
The community promoter plays the role of promoting, marketing, educating, and rallying the community using thought leadership, educational materials, memes, and other content. Great promoters end up becoming figureheads and icons in their community.
What the promoter does
- Promotes across all platforms
- Creates and fosters a community on Twitter
- Writes thought pieces on Index and the future outlook for Index
- Creates educational content for Index
- Advocates for exchange listings for Index Coop products
- Memes
- Advocates for Index integrations to different product teams
- Helps onboard top index methodologists
- Makes Index unignorable
Examples
- Chainlink - ChainlinkGod
- YFI - BlueKirby (Before the ENM hack and OFF—BLUE)
Rewards
Potential ways to reward promoters include:
- Rewards from the community treasury
- A proposal to pay YFI thought contributors based on the amount of engagement that they got from social media.
- Blue Kirby used to get paid $7,000 a month from the YFI payroll%20for%20his%20efforts.) for his promotion.
Community Delegates
Community delegates play the role of proposing new ideas, being thought leaders on how to succeed as a community, and acting as representatives for other community members.
What the delegate does
- Proposes new ideas on how to improve the Index Coop.
- Acts as the community representative.
- Gets delegated votes and represents the votes of other members who may not be as active in community governance.
- Proposes improvements in other communities, companies, or products that can push on the goals of the Index community.
- Helps spearhead thought leadership for the community.
Examples
- Current actively engaged members in the Index community.
- These posters vying for Uniswap vote delegation.
Rewards
Potential ways to reward delegates include:
- A portion of the community treasury paid out for each successful vote based on how many token votes they have delegated to them.
- Using SourceCred to track contributions for proposals and contributions.
- Proposal bounties.
- SNX pays out a $500 bounty for successful proposals that get implemented.
- Example of proposal bounties proposed by the YFI community.
Developers
Takes passed proposals and implements them for the coop. Acts as the technical leads on implementation details and shepherds proposals across the finish line into deployment.
What the dev does
- Implements the community’s passed proposals.
- Maintains the quality of the tech the community uses.
- Creates tools and improvements like analytics dashboards, alternative platforms to access Index products.
- Acts as the technical lead for the community.
- Gives clarity to technical details about passed proposals and existing code that’s been deployed.
Examples
- Bantg and other yEarn developers
Rewards
Potential ways to reward devs include:
- Bounties from the community treasury for one off contributions.
- Payroll program using the community treasury for continuous contributions.
Methodologists
Methodologists are the brains behind the indices created for the Index Coop. Methodologists create indices and methodologies, and continue to maintain their indices over time.
What the methodologist does
- Creates new indices with a high likelihood of product market fit.
- Creates a comprehensible methodology for their index.
- Continuously maintains their products to make sure that they maintain a high quality bar for their users.
- Provides detailed explanations of their products and helps handle questions related to their products.
Examples
- DeFi Pulse
Rewards
- Streaming fees
Conclusion
These are initial thoughts on how contributions and rewards can work for members of the Index Coop, and we invite discussion around how to better define contributions and the rewards associated with those contributions.
The Contribution Feedback Loop
If done well, we can create a feedback loop where each member feels like their contributions are making a meaningful impact, are recognized by the community, and rewarded for their efforts which feeds back into feeling a deeper sense of ownership and belonging in the Coop.
Each member of the coop has a vital role to play in contributing to the community’s success and any discussion on how we can continue to define these roles, contributions, and rewards is welcome.