Yearn Governance Roundup #13

Week Ending January 17, 2021

Nomad

Published in

Yearn Governance Roundup

4 min readJan 16, 2021

Welcome to the Yearn Governance Roundup — a weekly newsletter covering everything in the Yearn Governance pipeline.

Quick Hits

Hi everyone! The Governance Roundup is back, but with a new schedule. I will now be posting Roundups every 2 weeks. This is to keep the content fresh and read worthy.

⚖️ Governance Summary

Make sure you join the governance forum if you want to get involved with these discussions!

Active Votes

🗳️ None this week.

Proposal: Buyback and Build

What a week it has been! Yearn’s governance community is back in the spotlight, and it’s mostly due to this proposal from banteg, lex_node, lehnberg, milkyklim, RyanWatkins, and tracheopteryx on Jan. 13. Here’s the summary:

Use YFI staking rewards to buy back YFI on the open market. Use bought back YFI for contributor rewards and other Yearn initiatives. Retire the YFI governance vault as it no longer has a use, opening up for it to be replaced in the future with a regular vault. Make it possible to participate in Governance even if one’s YFI is being used elsewhere.

The hopeful benefits of this proposal — if passed — are:

Simplifying Treasury design and operation.
Simplifying YFI token mechanics to equally align interests across Yearn stakeholders.
Builds up a treasury of YFI that can be deployed through Governance for various uses.

While the proposal itself is straightforward, it sparked a much broader conversation about incentives in the Yearn ecosystem. How do we build a larger, healthier treasury? What does our treasury look like and how is it managed? How do we better incentivize talent to join and stay in the Yearn ecosystem? What do those incentives look like? I could go on, but there’s too many angles to cover in one newsletter.

Another related proposal ([Proposal] Developer Incentives) calls for a one-time issuance of 1,000 YFI for our core developers to distribute amongst themselves. While controversial, this proposal has received positive attention from big names such as Framework Ventures, Polychain Capital, Charlie Noyes of Paradigm, and more. However, the community seems quite against this specific proposal, so I won’t elaborate further.

This conversation is important, so please make sure your voice is heard!

Proposal: Gitcoin x Yearn Partnership

This proposal was shared by srs-parafi on Jan. 8. Here’s the summary:

Create an official Yearn Gitcoin collection for donors to support the development of Yearn. Today, there is no easy way to support many of the great Yearn initiatives and core contributors via grants. There is too much focus on YFI and not enough on capitalizing the protocol with adequate resources to fund development.

What this proposal aims to do is simple:

Create an official Yearn Gitcoin collection 7.
Create Yearn Grants Council responsible for curating the collection (i.e., recipients) and allocating of grants.
Explore yGift integration with Gitcoin. It could work as follows: each recipient has a unique yGift. Similarly, donors receive a yGift NFT based on their contribution amount (create tiers/scarce NFTs as an added incentive).

So far, most people seem to be in favor of this proposal. If you’d like to lend a helping hand, join the thread here.

Bonus: Yearn yTokens Index

This proposal was shared by milkyklim on the PowerPool governance forum on Jan. 14. Here’s the summary:

Launch an index in the PowerPool ecosystem consisting of Yearn vault tokens: curve.fi/Compound LP, curve.fi/3pool LP, curve.fi/mUSD LP, curve.fi/GUSD LP, curve.fi/y LP, curve.fi/busd LP.
Instead of using equal weights — 16.66% — use adaptive weights proportional to vaults TVL. The index serves 2 purposes:
1. smoothen APY generated by vaults;
2. create liquidity sink for yTokens and effectively be the largest exchange pool.

This seems like a cool idea from Klim. An index, weighted by TVL, will allow users to get exposure to yields across various vaults without all of the work — seems like a nice win for Yearn, PowerPool, and more casual yield chasers.

The index has a decent amount of support, but is still in need of a name. If you have ideas drop them here.