ballena.io Engagement Incentives

We have been working with the former BALLE team to develop governance mechanisms that complement the launch of BALLEv2.

We created this proposal to encourage community members and liquidity providers to participate in governance, and to compensate these people for doing so.

The first initiative as part of this incentive program is the implementation of a SourceCred instance to track contributions to the ballena.io community.

This proposal looks to leverage SourceCred to distribute a fixed amount of BALLE per week based on the Cred and Grain scores accumulated by users across Github and the governance channels in Discord.

Find more details about ballena.io´s Cred records in the following link.

• Link: https://cred.ballena.io/

Community members will need to opt-in to this program to be eligible for rewards, with specifics on the process and parameters to be finalized based on feedback from this proposal.

Motivation

The introduction of ‘soft’ incentives around governance in Maker have improved the quantity, quality and diversity of contributions.

We aim to empower these contributions in the ballena.io ecosystem via a suite of governance incentive programs. We believe that there is a much broader space for participation in the BALLE community from people and groups who may not have the capital to become LPs, or who otherwise choose not to do so.

After the last dev. team meeting, the issues related to token distribution regarding this last team arose. As ballena.io aims a community led DAO, the contribution rewarding system should be a major concern for the design of this project.

We found ourselves immersed in a shortage of future supply for new contributors as most of the tokens allocated for this purpose were already assigned to the different developing area leaders from the beginning. From a total supply of 3000, the tokens were distributed as a fixed supply for each of these, 400 tokens, leaving a little margin for all new contributors, 600 tokens. We found that the token distribution reserved for the initial dev. team leaders must be re-structured.

We are committed for a long-term sustainable project, meaning we are committed for a fair and long-term viable way of resource allocation that ensures the non-stop project´s progression. Although having initially assigned the corresponding amount for each of the dev. team members, the measure taken consists of a reduction in the dev. team leaders´ allocation, meaning an increase in the available tokens for the rest of the contributors. This way, community users will find a lucrative opportunity to enrich the project, be part of it and feel motivated while being rewarded for their efforts.

This is the way we found to be the most suitable for what we, at ballena.io, are aiming for. Our goal is to bring together the greatest thinkers, work together in innovative solutions and continue evolving as a unique project for the long-term.

The new structure includes the incorporation of new areas such as “Social” or “Design”, areas where great effort was found to be involved. An updated list of areas as follows:

• Project Lead.
• Blockchain.
• FrontEnd.
• Documentation.
• Security.
• Strategies.
• Design.
• Communication.
• Accounting.

A leader will be assigned for each of the areas, who will be in charge of its management. This position will be subject to the minimum working quality and quantity required for this charge, therefore making this role into a rotating one. Leaders can be removed, changed or maintained depending on the DAO´s judgement.

The tokens will be distributed as a reward to contributors individually based upon the Cred´s score gained by contributing on the required tasks. The idea for the rewards distribution is mainly based upon the cred system’s analytics. However, human intervention will be required to readjust these values for the proper compensation for users’ work. The dev. team leaders will supervise this analytics and readjust the cred’s parameters consequently.

This way, community members will be eligible for task performing and being rewarded with BALLE tokens to do so. Leaders will publish contributor vacants and simple tasks when required. Enroll to your area of interest as a contributor or perform these simple tasks for earning the rewards you deserve!

Find more information about development areas, leaders and tasks in the following link to the organization document below. Here, you will also find information regarding vacant positions of the new available areas, which will be voted in the following hours.

• Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xN_0I3ceNBnqHzByvokrSUpqWjYQXA_j15S3oMZ-pvA/edit?usp=sharing

Specification

The ballena.io SourceCred Instance was set up in March 2021 and has been collecting contribution data for the past ~2 weeks.

We propose that BALLE tokens are distributed to contributors based on the Cred scores recorded by SourceCred and the subsequent grain (or BALLE) scores earned among active participants. For more on how this works, please see this documentation.

The following specification details our proposed structure for these incentives. Inspiration for the allocations and configuration of this instance were modeled after the MakerDAO SourceCred Trial.

Discord Incentives

We’ve noticed community members on Discord play an active role in educating new users as well as providing valuable feedback and discussion around protocol governance. Through this integration, we want to create mechanisms for those actions to be easily validated and rewarded.

The first instance of Discord incentives will track activity in most of the Discord channels, rewarding participants for meaningful contributions in the same way as Github activity — focused on reactions as opposed to post volume to push towards a ‘quality over quantity approach’.

This program looks to serve as an ongoing medium for community members to be better rewarded for their discussion in Discord, with ambitions to boost the importance of BALLE emojis and token-based roles.

Github Incentives

Project development takes place on several GitHub repositories managed by front end and banck end Leads. Code contributions will be taken in consideration for Cred calculations, so all developers who want to participate on the project can benefit from it.

Funding

The proposed funding for SourceCred incentives consist of 40 BALLE per week.

This total quantity of tokens is the sum of 10 tokens, corresponding to the contributions made during the same week and 30 tokens, which correspond to the contributions made during the past 10 weeks, approximately.

Based on a weekly decay of 0.16, the 50% of the total rewards is distributed in accordance to the contributions made during the whole month, the 25% is distributed according to the last month´s contributions, the 12.5% is distributed in accordance to the one before, and so on.

This way, contributors will be able to leave the dev. efforts for a few days with almost no impact on their revenue.

Drawbacks

Some points to consider around the introduction of SourceCred incentives for contributions to the ballena.io Discord and Github sites:

• There is potential for this program to be exploited using bots or through collusion between actors. We will be monitoring the rewards distributed by the instance and will take action if malicious activity occurs.
• The corresponding cred could be misleading as the algo could not correctly rate users´ contribution. Please note that the dev. team will closely follow-up the cred´s steps and take action if necessary.

Notes

Please note that this program aims to ramp up in the event that it is successful, and we believe that starting with smaller allocations and building up as time goes on is the best way to approach these incentives.