Yambassadors Silo

[Snake]

YAM DAO Grant Application

1. What is your name? Pseudonyms are cool too.

Who is the point person is for the application.

Answer: Snake🐍

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2. What is your discord/telegram handle?

if you are not in the discord or telegram, please join by following these links:

Yam 🍠

Telegram: Contact @yamfarm

Answer:

Discord: SnakePoison#2187

Snake

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3. Project Name

What should we call your project?

Answer: Yambassadors

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4. Project Description (140 words or less)

*Give a summary of the project you are proposing *

Answer:

As the Yam treasury grows both in value and assets, some of the assets may hold governance/voting/ staking rights. Yambassadors will be a silo that focuses on standardizing how Yammers participate in the governance of those protocols. This initiative is inspired by Index Coop and their meta-governance.The Yambassadors would ,in this comparison, be the Meta Governance Committee. For the scope of the funding being requested, I will kick off the silo with an achievable and clear value add project that I hope to collaborate with others to develop.

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5. About You

Tell us about you and your team. What experience do you and your team have that is relevant to the project. Please provide github profiles, websites, prior work, etc

Answer:

The team will be 1 of 1 for the current scope. I’m a full stack engineer but the idea is for this silo to create the tools that would allow for less technical members to participate as Yam ambassadors. For now the relevant skills are that of a smart contract engineer to be able to technically implement solutions on-chain. For that my most relevant experience would be my work on:

UMA Synth Dapp:

Wicked: DeFi Currency Hedging Made Simple

GitHub - WickedFinancial/Wicked: Dapp for creating, redeeming and settling...

UMA Financial Product Libraries :

synths-sdk/contracts at 422a5191e627ad08cf4d0419b6c9ce69a13bf2f4 ·...

Uniswap AMM adapter:

GitHub - ElmoArmy/UniswapAmmAdapter

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6. Project Goals and Scope

If the project succeeds, what goals will it achieve? How do we measure that success? Please provide specific KPIs. If you are unsure of how to do this, do the best you can and we can work it out together.

Answer:

This is meant to be a long term silo with the mission of empowering yammers to guide the projects that are aligned with Yam to succeed as well. However, in the short/medium term, the first project will entail getting UMA rewards for the treasury and securing the Optimistic Oracle.

Success will be measured with verifiable milestones:

• Smart contracts deployed and verified

• Yam governance approved

• Voting with the DAO’s assets on UMA

• Returning DAO’s assets to the treasury.

Through this process the DAO would gain the ability to vote with the UMA in control by governance and earn more UMA in rewards.

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7. Milestones

What are the steps that you plan to follow to complete this project. Is it one step or multiple? If there are multiple then please list all of them.

Answer:

The scope of this grant is to cover the following.

• Create a proposal contract that allows governance to interact with UMA’s DesignatedVotingFactory and create a new DesignatedVoting contract with governance as owner and me as the initial ambassador. Transfer 500 UMA from treasury to the voting contract.

• Have the core/infrastructure team review the contract.

• Deploy proposal contract on Ethereum.

• Propose the contract to on-chain governance, queue and execute.

• Participate in at least 1 UMA optimistic oracle vote or dispute.

• Write a report on said vote and the implications if any to the DAO.

• Propose governance call to return UMA tokens back to the treasury.

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8. YAM / Ecosystem Benefit

What value does your project add to YAM and the wider ecosystem? How do we measure that benefit?

Answer:

In the short term, having a silo kick off with a laser focused focus and objective that leads to a straight forward revenue stream for the DAO is what the core team has been asking for. Measuring success will be simple as the core team has plenty of members that know how to go through on-chain transactions and github repos to verify progress on the steps outlined above.

In the medium term, this first project executed would lead to implementing YIP-99 which was well received. This grant would enable me to work on cool projects related to this idea and unlock thousands of dollars in rewards to further compound innovation.

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9. Funding Request and Breakdown

Please include the total funding amount that you need and also include a breakdown of how the funds will be used across each part of the project.

Answer:
The scope encompasses deliverables for the span of about 6 months. I am requesting 80K USD (70% Stable / 30% Yam at prev 30d TWAP of payment date) to be distributed evenly upon reaching the following milestones.

1st milestone ~2 months

• developing, testing and collaborating on the on-chain Yambassador proposal.

• deploying Yambassador proposal contract on chain and proposing to governance.

2nd milestone ~2 months

• successfully executing the proposal or reproposing if there is an issue.

• participating in governance, researching as needed.

• creating a template for UMA voting disputes.

3rd milestone ~2 months

• developing, testing and collaborating on the on-chain Asset/Reward Retrieval proposal.

• deploying Asset/Reward Retrieval and proposing to governance.

• next steps write up for the silo and the silo treasury. Part of the write up will include a few hours to pass down lessons learned to a future Yambasassador.

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10. Other Information

Imagine you’re a YAM holder. What else do you think we should know about your application?

Answer:

I would ask, how much revenue could this realistically bring in for the DAO?

Since December there have been around 35 votes in which if the DAO had voted correctly it would have earned rewards worth 70,000 YAM / 15,000 USD/ 2,500 UMA . Extrapolating that for the rest of the year, the DAO is leaving on the table around 7,500 UMA or 40,200 USD.

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[ross]

Hey @Snake. Good to see you and thanks for the proposal! I appreciate that you used the template and were so thorough.

Before I start, I want to clarify that I am responding not as any official capacity as a YAM contributor, but as a YAM community member and voter.

Similar to YIP-99, I support this initiative so for me this is just a question of the details.

Questions

@Snake

Success will be measured with verifiable milestones:

• Smart contracts deployed and verified
• Yam governance approved
• Voting with the DAO’s assets on UMA
• Returning DAO’s assets to the treasury.

Through this process the DAO would gain the ability to vote with the UMA in control by governance and earn more UMA in rewards.

This is where I would like to see some more details. How do you expect the smart contracts to work? What is the general use pattern for these contracts and how does the DAO interact with them? What extra work will members of the DAO need to do to use these contracts?

@Snake

The scope of this grant is to cover the following.

• Create a proposal contract that allows governance to interact with UMA’s DesignatedVotingFactory and create a new DesignatedVoting contract with governance as owner and me as the initial ambassador. Transfer 500 UMA from treasury to the voting contract.
• Have the core/infrastructure team review the contract.
• Deploy proposal contract on Ethereum.
• Propose the contract to on-chain governance, queue and execute.
• Participate in at least 1 UMA optimistic oracle vote or dispute.
• Write a report on said vote and the implications if any to the DAO.
• Propose governance call to return UMA tokens back to the treasury.

• Why 500 UMA vs some other number?
• Only 1 vote? is this vote just to prove it works?
• Following on the comment above about how the DAO uses the contracts, it seems important to me that YAM voters understand what it will take to continue using this contract in order to pay back the initial investment to build the system.

Split Proposal?

So I’m wondering if it makes sense to split the proposal, similarly to how you already have, where there is an initial research/ documentation grant to clarify how the contracts are expected to work and give voters more information about how the program will unfold over the medium term. Maybe you already have this mapped out, and in that case it would just involve putting together a report/presentation on what you already know.

This would also help the DAO understand the cost implications. Your proposal is for $80,000 and assumes a payback rate of ~40K/year, which would mean the investment would break even after year 2. But this assumes that there aren’t significant upkeep/running costs for the program. If it costs us $20k a year to run the program then the payback period has extended to 4 years. I’m just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but because there is no reference currently, I have no other option.

Compensation

Final point for me. Would you be willing to accept part of the payment in YAM and or UMA tokens?

Paying partially in UMA would be beneficial for the treasury since it is an investment that should pay itself back in like tokens and would be an acceptable way for the DAO to further utilize some of the assets in the treasury that it doesn’t plan to sell.

And then regarding YAM, while we don’t have much right now to use as payment, I strongly believe that all grants should have some portion paid in YAM, even if it means the dollar amount is increased.

All of these processes are being worked out, and that means that early grants/silos get to be the guinea pigs for this new system. Nothing I am asking for is set in stone. But I do want to explore the best way to make this program successful.

And once again, thanks for the effort to go through the process to create a new silo/grant!

[Snake]

@ross

This is where I would like to see some more details. How do you expect the smart contracts to work? What is the general use pattern for these contracts and how does the DAO interact with them? What extra work will members of the DAO need to do to use these contracts?

Sure I could add some more detail here.

How do you expect the smart contracts to work?
The smart contract being referred to here is the proposal. The proposal contract would call “newDesignatedVoting” on Uma’s deployed DesignatedVotingFactory setting the governance timelock as the owner, assign me as a voter via setDesignatedVoting and tranfer a test amount of UMA.

What is the general use pattern for these contracts and how does the DAO interact with them?

It follows a delegation pattern so as the designated voter, I (or any future ambassador selected by the silo) would essentially just have to vote as a regular UMA voter. Whenever the DAO wants or otherwise needs the UMA assets back, then a proposal would go up calling WithdrawErc20 on the delegating contract.

What extra work will members of the DAO need to do to use these contracts?
The proposal for designating and retrieving rewards would be part of the scope of this application. No skills or work apart from being able to propose and slightly modify hardhat scripts would be needed.

@ross

• Why 500 UMA vs some other number?
• Only 1 vote? is this vote just to prove it works?
• Following on the comment above about how the DAO uses the contracts, it seems important to me that YAM voters understand what it will take to continue using this contract in order to pay back the initial investment to build the system.

• 500 UMA was selected as an arbitrary small number of tokens, sending all the UMA from the treasury wouldn’t be advised until we see the entire process work out. 500 could be further lowered to 10.

• That is correct. If there is more than one vote in the round then it may be more.

• The contract that does the delegating already exists, has been audited and is used by several groups. Average Yam holders should be prioritizing making the UMA in the treasury productive and not get hung up on the inner workings of the contracts involved. This proposal stands to pay for itself with no additional capital, in a projected 2 years.

@ross

So I’m wondering if it makes sense to split the proposal, similarly to how you already have, where there is an initial research/ documentation grant to clarify how the contracts are expected to work and give voters more information about how the program will unfold over the medium term. Maybe you already have this mapped out, and in that case it would just involve putting together a report/presentation on what you already know.

I’m not quite following the logic here as to why break this up. Could you clarify what it is that a research/ documentation grant would do for the community?

@ross

This would also help the DAO understand the cost implications. Your proposal is for $80,000 and assumes a payback rate of ~40K/year, which would mean the investment would break even after year 2. But this assumes that there aren’t significant upkeep/running costs for the program. If it costs us $20k a year to run the program then the payback period has extended to 4 years. I’m just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but because there is no reference currently, I have no other option.

I’d rather have a discussion about the cost implications with the community than do a whole report on all the various factors that may or may not happen. I could play “what ifs” all day but no one has a magic ball. If the price of UMA doubles in a few months or the frequency of votes goes up (as it has been trending), this proposal pays itself back in a much faster schedule. I went with one of the most conservative estimates possible to arrive at the 40k per year revenue stream, it could be much higher. Lastly, there is no maintenance that has to be done on the contracts but I’d imagine that the Yambassadors doing the research and voting would want a portion of the rewards moving forward. That is outside of the scope of this application.

@ross

Compensation

Final point for me. Would you be willing to accept part of the payment in YAM and or UMA tokens?

Paying partially in UMA would be beneficial for the treasury since it is an investment that should pay itself back in like tokens and would be an acceptable way for the DAO to further utilize some of the assets in the treasury that it doesn’t plan to sell.

And then regarding YAM, while we don’t have much right now to use as payment, I strongly believe that all grants should have some portion paid in YAM, even if it means the dollar amount is increased.

All of these processes are being worked out, and that means that early grants/silos get to be the guinea pigs for this new system. Nothing I am asking for is set in stone. But I do want to explore the best way to make this program successful.

I’m not following how this matters for this proposal as there is no cliffing or vesting being proposed. I’d imagine the best way to pay this grant out would be in an asset held by the treasury, but it could easily be exchanged for whatever other token at time of payment.

Thanks @ross for your feedback and questions. Let me know what else I can clarify for you.

[feddas]

Snake thanks for putting this together.

Let me make sure I get the numbers correctly:

Cost of this proposal = 28ETH / 80,000 USD
Estimated time of completion = 6 months
Before the contracts are ready and audited will you be able to start earning rewards?

Estimated potential rewards over 1 year = 7500 UMA @ current price of $5.35 = $40,125 less any rewards that might need to be paid out for maintenance.

A few questions:
What is the level of knowledge and time commitment that would be required of maintenance?
Would it require interacting with your smart contracts directly?
Would it require on-chain governance to interact/vote?
Is there an interface that would be provided to earn rewards?
Is there additional costs to claim rewards?

Currently at face value, the ROI on investment seems a bit low and there’s no guarantee that UMA rewards will continue for the foreseeable future. It could potentially go up in rewards, but it is more likely to go down.

Feddas

[Snake]

@feddas

Before the contracts are ready and audited will you be able to start earning rewards?

No audits are required for this as the initial project for this scope will utilize UMA’s contract and contract factories. Rewards will be earned with the amount of UMA that is transferred right away but for a sanity check we should do a round of voting and successfully getting the rewards back to the treasury before moving all the UMA reserves.

@feddas

What is the level of knowledge and time commitment that would be required of maintenance?

There is no maintenance required for the work being proposed. However, someone needs to vote and the research that they do to vote correctly could be seen as an ongoing cost which as you said could be subsidized by the rewards.

@feddas

Would it require interacting with your smart contracts directly?

If you mean this proposal, yes, the work in scope requires a smart contract engineer and I am more than capable to handle this.

As far as a future Yambassador/voter, the hope is that UMA’s dashboard handles this case directly and so it is easier than crafting a manual tx.

@feddas

Would it require on-chain governance to interact/vote?

No, only to change voter or retrieve the assets. Rewards would compound in the voting contract with no need to come back to governance.

@feddas

Is there an interface that would be provided to earn rewards?

The hope is the voter would be able to do so with UMA’s dashboard otherwise the interface would have to be a script.

@feddas

Is there additional costs to claim rewards?

No, there is not.

@feddas

Currently at face value, the ROI on investment seems a bit low and there’s no guarantee that UMA rewards will continue for the foreseeable future. It could potentially go up in rewards, but it is more likely to go down.

Voting with the UMA in the treasury is just the beginning. This Yambassador silo is meant to be ongoing and develop standards as to how to keep assets productive.

@feddas

there’s no guarantee that UMA rewards will continue for the foreseeable future.

Rewards for voting are essential for the oracle to work properly. I’d be happy to get some input from UMA on this but I feel strongly that voting rewards aren’t going away any time soon.

I want this to be a good deal for the DAO too. I arrived at the numbers with this in mind, but smart contract work is in high demand so I didn’t want to sell myself short. Maybe you could share with me the sort of ROI that would get your approval?

Thanks for your feedback @feddas

[ross]

Reading through this post from UMA, I’m wondering if it would make sense to maybe broaden our scope just a little to be able to apply for an UMA grant for this work to defray some of the costs. This may not be viable, and if not please let me know but here is what I am thinking:

From that article:

We can frame this less as just for YAM, but as a tool that anyone who uses compound governance can utilize to delegate voting on their treasury held UMA. In this sense we are funding open source code that improves both YAM and UMA, strengthens the relationship between our 2 DAOs and allows others to follow in our footsteps.

[Snake]

@ross I’m glad you are thinking about ways to move this forward, but I’m not seeing a path in which this proposal gets UMA funding. This proposal is about making the assets in our reserves productive and while voting secures the Optimistic Oracle, they are already funding this mechanism with rewards. I have a few ideas as to how this silo might work to work more closely with the DAO’s that we have a partnership, but I feel contacting UMA for a grant is a bit premature.

Do you currently support the proposal as is? If not, what would you want changed to support it?

[Snake]

The Yam Quarterly Treasury Report came out for Q1 2022 (Thanks @ross) and it seems that for $171,641.74 there was only revenue of about $1523.63.

Clearly we are striving to do better than this, but we need changes asap to get us back on track. Had this project been setup before Q1, we’d be talking at least a 14x increase in revenue for the same period. I’m not aware of any other silo being proposed that is expected to bring in a better ROI. That said, I’m willing to modify terms to make this happen. So please as you leave feedback, consider weighing in on this matter.

[feddas]

@Snake

As far as a future Yambassador/voter, the hope is that UMA’s dashboard handles this case directly and so it is easier than crafting a manual tx.

Is UMA actively working on this? When is the expected time to completion? Would it be possible to use this dashboard to simply the amount of work that you would need do?

@Snake

However, someone needs to vote and the research that they do to vote correctly could be seen as an ongoing cost which as you said could be subsidized by the rewards.

Could you give an estimate of the number of hours it would take for someone like me (very basic level of smart contract knowledge / programming) to go thru the process of using your smart contracts to correctly vote and receive the UMA rewards?

@Snake

I arrived at the numbers with this in mind, but smart contract work is in high demand so I didn’t want to sell myself short. Maybe you could share with me the sort of ROI that would get your approval?

Yes I agree and I don’t discount your effort/time. I just want to make sure resources are focused on long term value for Yam. IMHO the ROI really depends on the cost of on-going maintenance and the questions above. Also do you forsee any other use/benefit for this proposal aside from UMA oracle reward voting? Maybe we can use the same contracts for any of our other treasury assets? Or would this be a single purpose contracts?

Thanks Snake.

[Snake]

@feddas

Is UMA actively working on this? When is the expected time to completion? Would it be possible to use this dashboard to simply the amount of work that you would need do?

This should already work with their dashboard, I just haven’t tested it. I’ll get some clarification on this, from the UMA team. A web interface for the voter to interact with the contracts is outside the scope of what I’m proposing though. A script however would be included so that one could run something like hardhat vote --answer 1.0.

edit:
After some digging, I can confirm that this logic to vote through the designating voting contract is available through the UMA dashboard. source: voter-dapp/useVotingAddress.ts at master · UMAprotocol/voter-dapp · GitHub

@feddas

Could you give an estimate of the number of hours it would take for someone like me (very basic level of smart contract knowledge / programming) to go thru the process of using your smart contracts to correctly vote and receive the UMA rewards?

I’d estimate that calling the contracts with your vote would take at most 30 minutes. What would be more challenging and range from 15 minutes to 1-3 hours is figuring out what should your vote be. Some questions that are being posed are easy (eg. Will $ETH be above $3,000 on x date ), but some are more nuanced or technical (eg. IS_RELAY_VALID requests).

@feddas

Also do you forsee any other use/benefit for this proposal aside from UMA oracle reward voting?

The scope of this project is to deliver this specific use case, but I’m sure that there will be lessons learned here that may be beneficial to other applications/ use cases. Like I mentioned in the proposal, the Meta Governance Committee from IndexCoop runs an interesting program that allows their token holders to vote with their treasury and I’d like YAM (through this silo) to implement something like this in the future.

@feddas

Maybe we can use the same contracts for any of our other treasury assets? Or would this be a single purpose contracts?

I’m not sure if other assets could utilize the same type of contracts but it would be worth exploring as a means to further increase revenue or even just for project alignment. This is exactly why I’m proposing this as a silo and not just a one off proposal. This silo will be the bedrock/foundation for future efforts in making treasury assets productive. The UMA use case is just the beginning.

[ross]

I do support the proposal, but I’ll be honest and admit that my first reaction was a bit of sticker shock.

Maybe this is unwarranted, and I just need to be shown that it’s a good deal. As you mentioned in your post above, you don’t want the DAO to get a bad deal and don’t want to sell yourself short. I’m totally with that. I want neither of those things either and believe that the DAO should pay fair rates for all the work that is done for it.

And things always take more work than expected. I understand that and it’s part of why I’m trying to get a handle on what the work entails. But 6 months seems like a long time.

Here is where I make a bunch of assumptions and ask questions

@Snake

The scope of this grant is to cover the following.

• Create a proposal contract that allows governance to interact with UMA’s DesignatedVotingFactory and create a new DesignatedVoting contract with governance as owner and me as the initial ambassador. Transfer 500 UMA from treasury to the voting contract.

This seems like the bulk of the work. Do you have an estimate of how many man hours this work will take? What rate are you assuming when putting together your proposal?

And based on your answer to the deliverables question, this work is split between all 3 milestones. But I’m not clear as to why. My assumption is that we would want the full functionality to be written at the beginning and not spread across all 3 milestones. Don’t we want to be sure the reward and retrieval process works from the beginning and is tested. Isn’t it part of the main contract that gets deployed?

I imagine that the contract will be conceptually similar to the previous UMA farming contracts that nate wrote: yamV3/contracts/tests/ugas_farming at master · yam-finance/yamV3 · GitHub. Those provide functionality to move funds into them, execute specific actions, and then unwind those actions and retrieve the original funds and rewards.

• Have the core/infrastructure team review the contract.

Are the funds for this part of the $80K proposal request?

• Deploy proposal contract on Ethereum.

Similar question. Are deployment costs assumed to be part of the proposal request budget?

• Propose the contract to on-chain governance, queue and execute.

This probably gets rolled up into existing costs. I am assuming that any calls to the contract you make are coordinated with whoever writes the monthly proposal this goes into, but that seems pretty minor.

• Participate in at least 1 UMA optimistic oracle vote or dispute.

This is for testing, so it requires a vote in an oracle vote and/or dispute, get rewards, then send them back.

• Write a report on said vote and the implications if any to the DAO.

Is this a report about the vote or a recap of the process of creating the contracts?

• Propose governance call to return UMA tokens back to the treasury.

Is this testing the fund return portion of the contract?

Additional questions and assumptions

@Snake

The scope encompasses deliverables for the span of about 6 months. I am requesting 28 ETH / 80,000 USD to be distributed evenly upon reaching the following milestones.

1st milestone ~2 months

• developing, testing and collaborating on the on-chain Yambassador proposal.
• deploying Yambassador proposal contract on chain and proposing to governance.

as mentioned above, this seems like where most of the work is happening (writing the contract and then testing it, etc). There is a chance there are issues and it needs a redesign, requiring more work after. Am I mistaken here?

2nd milestone ~2 months

• successfully executing the proposal or reproposing if there is an issue.
• participating in governance, researching as needed.
• creating a template for UMA voting disputes.

What does the “template for UMA voting disputes” entail? Other than that, I’m not sure what part of this should take 2 months. Based on your answers to other questions it seems like the proposal and test vote are relatively simple and not very time dependent.

3rd milestone ~2 months

• developing, testing and collaborating on the on-chain Asset/Reward Retrieval proposal.
• deploying Asset/Reward Retrieval and proposing to governance.
• next steps write up for the silo and the silo treasury.

Wouldn’t all the reward retrieval code need to be completed before deploying the original contract? If so, then this would be concurrent with the governance and test votes.

Doing the write-up and report of the process will potentially take some time, but 2 months again seems like a lot.

Am I mistaken in assumptions here? Based on the scope, it seems like writing and testing the contract is the lions share of the work. It then should be tested and if there is a problem there may be work to fix it. Finally, once deemed complete, there would be work to document and report on the process.

Funding Questions

Are you envisioning that all of the 80K will be spent on this UMA contract or is there fluff to make sure the silo is sufficiently funded and there may be funds left over? Do you expect the whole process will take 6 months or is that is there to make sure that if there are delays it still meets deadlines?

I’m cool with adding slack into the funding and the timelines, but it would be good to know what it is and write in contingencies for things going wrong (i.e. the initial implementation has problems and needs a redesign).

So, back to the original point about sticker shock. Getting a small grant from UMA would help defray costs, and if we end up making a contract that works more universally then that is win/win. The path for getting funding from UMA is asking. I will do it if you don’t want to.

Similarly, me asking if you were interested in receiving some of a grant in UMA tokens also defrays the costs of this proposal. It uses an asset that we will then be able to earn back instead of one that we can’t. It also pays for the work in the asset we will be earning which limits the volatility risk in our future UMA earnings and makes payback calculations much easier.

[designer]

It’s great to see your proposal and your interest in creating this silo. Ross and Feddas has asked a bunch of good questions. I have just one to add…

You’ve outlined the success metrics and the milestones, but I don’t see requirements definition. Is that something you feel is not needed or that you will add into the next version of your proposal?

If you don’t plan to add requirements to the proposal, is it one of the steps you intend to perform – and if so, would or could that step be an independent, preliminary phase so a more complete understanding of what the final solution will entail before committing to the full solution?

[ethe]

For clarity, thats originally what the Delegate uma tokens post was about, uma related, with specification to the milestones and compensation for the work completion? Id like to understand what the general idea is before moving forward.

[Snake]

@ross

This seems like the bulk of the work. Do you have an estimate of how many man hours this work will take? What rate are you assuming when putting together your proposal?

I believe the bulk of the work is spread evenly between the milestones which I will delve into a bit more in this response. Working backwards from 80k, a 6 month estimate, 4 weeks in a month and 40 hour work weeks the rate is about 83.34/ hour. A little less considering the incidentals such as contract deployments, transaction costs, governance delays, redeployments and potential reverts.

@ross

Don’t we want to be sure the reward and retrieval process works from the beginning and is tested. Isn’t it part of the main contract that gets deployed?

Well the plan is to test this whole process through a local chain fork and make sure that everything works as expected. However caution should be exercised when transferring large amount of funds and deploying contracts in a real network. There would have to be at a minimum two governance proposals to make that happen.

@ross

Are the funds for this part of the $80K proposal request?

As is evident even from just proposing this project, review and alignment between myself and the core contributors takes time/effort and that is what I’m saying is being compensated. The amount is all inclusive and factors this in, yes.

@ross

Similar question. Are deployment costs assumed to be part of the proposal request budget?

Yes it is all inclusive. Including the opportunity cost of having the YAM needed to propose the transactions needed to governance.

@ross

This probably gets rolled up into existing costs. I am assuming that any calls to the contract you make are coordinated with whoever writes the monthly proposal this goes into, but that seems pretty minor.

No I think you are missing the part in which I will be proposing the transactions to governance myself. Existing costs comes into play for those on the core team that want/should review my proposals.

@ross

Is this a report about the vote or a recap of the process of creating the contracts?

About the vote. This a report that basically outlines why did I vote a certain way and how did I interpret the dispute. If the vote is on a governance parameter and not a dispute, it would similarly be about assessing what is in the best interest of the DAO. I believe I will be setting a standard here that should be followed by any future Yambassador.

@ross

Is this testing the fund return portion of the contract?

Correct, returning the principle and 100% of the rewards.

@ross

There is a chance there are issues and it needs a redesign, requiring more work after. Am I mistaken here?

No, that is correct.

@ross

What does the “template for UMA voting disputes” entail? Other than that, I’m not sure what part of this should take 2 months. Based on your answers to other questions it seems like the proposal and test vote are relatively simple and not very time dependent.

Let me further expand what this milestone looks like as I believe you are underestimating the work I believe must be done in this time.

• successfully executing the proposal or reproposing if there is an issue.

To have completed the first milestone, I would have had to propose the transaction to create the designated voting contract, assign myself as the vote and the time lock as the owner, and transferred over a test amount of assets. In the event the proposal gets the votes and past the timelock but is unable to execute or an issue arises that does not allow the project to move forward… I’d have to debug the issue, have the changes reviewed and repropose a new tx to governance. This happened on proposal 22 just 3 months ago.

• participating in governance, researching as needed.

This is referring to being an active participant in UMA’s governance process. This may mean engaging with other voters on UMA’s discord, engaging with proposals on their forums and in the case of disputes engaging with voters to try and assess what the community is leaning towards, and researching UMIPS to determine proper answer for disputes. This above and beyond just sitting down when a dispute arises to do the transactions but it includes that as well which could happen at any time during this time frame. While the milestone is to participate in just 1 dispute in order to mark this whole project a success, historically there have been more than just 1 vote a month.

• creating a template for UMA voting disputes.

There is a concept in UMA of being correct, but that just means voting with the majority. It will not always be the case that a Yambassador will be correct or that he/she will vote against their conscience or against the DAO’s interest for the sake of winning a reward. As DAO members, we should demand of our Yambassadors a report as to why they voted a certain way/ didn’t vote at all.

This should be especially required to do so when the vote was incorrect, no vote was submitted, or the voter clearly voted against the DAO’s interest. This milestone is about creating a guiding document or template that delves into this. The template itself might just take two days of effort with another to review, but may expand into several days after getting feedback from the community and other contributors. Creating the template and submitting at least one of them is the bare minimum for this milestone.

Two months for all this work seems reasonable to me and maybe after this clarification, it makes sense to you too. More than willing to limit the voting phase of this project to bring that costs, but it seems to me like most lessons learned about who we delegate to, what their qualifications should be and for how long terms should be set will come from this phase.

@ross

Wouldn’t all the reward retrieval code need to be completed before deploying the original contract? If so, then this would be concurrent with the governance and test votes.

Doing the write-up and report of the process will potentially take some time, but 2 months again seems like a lot.

Am I mistaken in assumptions here? Based on the scope, it seems like writing and testing the contract is the lions share of the work. It then should be tested and if there is a problem there may be work to fix it. Finally, once deemed complete, there would be work to document and report on the process.

The third milestone is essentially the same as the first milestone. It would additionally include the work to document the project and debrief the community (in the form of an article) on the whole thing. I’d need your help in understanding what assumptions you are making to understand where the disconnect is.

@ross

Are you envisioning that all of the 80K will be spent on this UMA contract or is there fluff to make sure the silo is sufficiently funded and there may be funds left over? Do you expect the whole process will take 6 months or is that is there to make sure that if there are delays it still meets deadlines?

I’m cool with adding slack into the funding and the timelines, but it would be good to know what it is and write in contingencies for things going wrong (i.e. the initial implementation has problems and needs a redesign).

I have given an honest estimate of how long I expect all of this to take. There is no fluff, but there is a chance that I run into zero issues, perfect gas prices and sparks of ingenuity that allow for me to complete this sooner. I would consider that a win for everyone. On the other hand, I could have transactions revert, have to wait on core team members to get back to me on reviews, have to repropose governance transactions, wait on UMA disputes, miss votes and so on… I’m planning that in 6 months this project is a success. Maybe you’d consider that fluff but no, the plan is not to keep left over funds in the silo. I wouldn’t advise to make contingencies that say, for example, if there is an error in my code, I get additional time or money to hit a milestone. I’d like for this grant (and any others) to be fix cost, a value add and achievable within the stated time frame.

@ross

Similarly, me asking if you were interested in receiving some of a grant in UMA tokens also defrays the costs of this proposal. It uses an asset that we will then be able to earn back instead of one that we can’t. It also pays for the work in the asset we will be earning which limits the volatility risk in our future UMA earnings and makes payback calculations much easier.

I’d imagine the best way to pay this grant out would be in an asset held by the treasury, but it could easily be exchanged for whatever other token at time of payment.

Like I said, it doesn’t matter to me how the funds are paid so long as the asset is liquid on DEX’s.

@ross Thank you for providing your support, detailed feedback and hard questions. I truly believe you are coming from a good place and asking some really good yet challenging questions.

[Snake]

Hey @designer! Thanks for chiming in.

@designer

You’ve outlined the success metrics and the milestones, but I don’t see requirements definition. Is that something you feel is not needed or that you will add into the next version of your proposal?

I filled out the template that Ross worked on for these types of grants and there was no requirements language. I had assumed that the intent was to capture requirements between the project goals and milestones section so to that end I specified the following:

@Snake

Success will be measured with verifiable milestones:

• Smart contracts deployed and verified
• Yam governance approved
• Voting with the DAO’s assets on UMA
• Returning DAO’s assets to the treasury.

I delve a bit deeper as to what that all means within this grant application but maybe you could share with me a format that would more aptly satisfy the answer to what you’d be looking for. I tend to focus a little too much on technical details, so maybe I need to work on a better high level summary.

@designer

If you don’t plan to add requirements to the proposal, is it one of the steps you intend to perform – and if so, would or could that step be an independent, preliminary phase so a more complete understanding of what the final solution will entail before committing to the full solution?

I think it could be beneficial to have a more traditional requirements document with acceptance criteria alongside the rest of the application. If that’s something you think would need to support the proposal, I’d be happy to draft that up.

[Snake]

Thanks for taking the time to look over this proposal, @ethe.

@ethe

For clarity, thats originally what the Delegate uma tokens post was about, uma related, with specification to the milestones and compensation for the work completion?

Yes that is correct. I would say that this proposal implements that YIP and more as this silo would serve to be the foundation as to how Yammer delegate the rights of assets held in the treasury.

@ethe

Id like to understand what the general idea is before moving forward.

@Snake

• Create a proposal contract that allows governance to interact with UMA’s DesignatedVotingFactory and create a new DesignatedVoting contract with governance as owner and me as the initial ambassador. Transfer 500 UMA from treasury to the voting contract.
• Have the core/infrastructure team review the contract.
• Deploy proposal contract on Ethereum.
• Propose the contract to on-chain governance, queue and execute.
• Participate in at least 1 UMA optimistic oracle vote or dispute.
• Write a report on said vote and the implications if any to the DAO.
• Propose governance call to return UMA tokens back to the treasury.

I felt this was a good overview of the scope that this grant covers. Any particular section you’d like to delve deeper into?

[ross]

@Snake

@ross

Similar question. Are deployment costs assumed to be part of the proposal request budget?

Yes it is all inclusive. Including the opportunity cost of having the YAM needed to propose the transactions needed to governance.

@ross

This probably gets rolled up into existing costs. I am assuming that any calls to the contract you make are coordinated with whoever writes the monthly proposal this goes into, but that seems pretty minor.

No I think you are missing the part in which I will be proposing the transactions to governance myself. Existing costs comes into play for those on the core team that want/should review my proposals.

The requirement to hold lots of YAM is something we are trying to avoid. At a macro scale it is unreasonable to expect that grant recipients should need to hold the YAM to propose on-chain votes. The proposed solution to this is the gov-ops council, which would coordinate on-chain proposals and relieve grantees from needing to front YAM to make proposals.

How this works in practice is still an open question (that I would love to have more people thinking about), but the general rule is that Grantees should not be required to hold (or beg delegation of) the 125,000 YAM required to propose an on-chain vote. Likewise, in an environment where there are multiple grants, having the gov-ops council coordinate and propose on chain votes keeps the system more secure as it requires that they are checked, and token holders don’t have to question whether an on-chain proposal is legitimate or not.

Of course, if the gov-ops council fails to do their job and censors a grant recipient’s on-chain proposal then it can be proposed without them (either buy buying YAM, or requesting delegation of YAM). But I believe this should be an exception and not the norm.

@Snake

I filled out the template that Ross worked on for these types of grants and there was no requirements language. I had assumed that the intent was to capture requirements between the project goals and milestones section so to that end I specified the following:

The template I made (and you filled out) is a first draft, and when I first created it I was assuming that it would be used to apply for a short term grant that would then be used to further specify the scope of work that a silo would do, including requirements docs and other supporting materials that token holders may want/need to make a fully informed decision on whether to fund work.

That isn’t clear from the template so I don’t expect anyone to know that. But it is also partly why I asked about whether you would be interested in breaking the proposal up into 2 parts. The first part would be answering all these questions, doing pre-work like a requirements document, and getting into the full scope. And we would pay for that work since it isn’t trivial and a grant isn’t assured.

Sorry for the confusion. I agree that a requirements doc would be helpful.

[Snake]

@ross

The requirement to hold lots of YAM is something we are trying to avoid.

I disagree with this. A stake in the game is important. The best silo leaders and teams should have enough yam to propose and have a voice in yam’s governance.

@ross

general rule is that Grantees should not be required to hold (or beg delegation of) the 125,000 YAM required to propose an on-chain vote

I don’t believe this is an actual rule. It seems contradictory to have a minimum yam requirement for proposers but allow everyone to bypass that requirement through the council. I don’t support that at all.

@ross

Of course, if the gov-ops council fails to do their job and censors a grant recipient’s on-chain proposal then it can be proposed without them (either buy buying YAM, or requesting delegation of YAM). But I believe this should be an exception and not the norm.

I think the gov-ops council should have a minimal amount of participation and exist to mostly maintain infrastructure. Having the ability to censor and make transactions not proposed by this group seems to violate the core values of YAM.

All that said, the gov-ops council isn’t fleshed out yet so I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds about it.

@ross

The template I made (and you filled out) is a first draft, and when I first created it I was assuming that it would be used to apply for a short term grant that would then be used to further specify the scope of work that a silo would do, including requirements docs and other supporting materials that token holders may want/need to make a fully informed decision on whether to fund work.

That isn’t clear from the template so I don’t expect anyone to know that. But it is also partly why I asked about whether you would be interested in breaking the proposal up into 2 parts. The first part would be answering all these questions, doing pre-work like a requirements document, and getting into the full scope. And we would pay for that work since it isn’t trivial and a grant isn’t assured.

Sorry for the confusion. I agree that a requirements doc would be helpful.

So should I rescind this or table it and ask for a grant to create these docs that you speak of? Not understanding what the process should be here.

[Snake]

Thanks again for the offline discussion in regards to the requirements section, let me know if this fails to capture what we discussed.

Category	Requirement Description
Secure	utilizes audited or reviewed contracts
	accompanying and reproducible tests are included
	Step ladder amounts of assets (begin with 500 to test security assumptions)
Auditable	Trial is carried out on mainnet
	Accompanying template for voting decisions that capture sources, arguments, and influence
	At a minimum a report must be submitted for any incorrect votes
Reproducible	Documentation for future voters on voting procedure
	Successful retrieval of assets to the treasury
	Requirements documentation for future voters

[Snake]

After some more discussion with interested parties, it seems that I have resolved all open concerns and a snapshot accepting this silo is the next step. Please let me know if anyone else see’s a reason why this proposal should not move forward. Thanks all.