Proposal - Referenda #10: Bounty to compensate expert advisors of Phala team

🗳️ Governance
#1

This proposal is consist of one proposal and two sub-bounty proposals

Context

The Phala core team took a very small (5%) amount of tokens compared to other blockchain projects to be able to distribute more to the community and the miners. By doing this, it was always our vision to use the Treasury to support those most active in making the network a success and compensating for a professional advisor team that helps to develop Phala in many respects. Doing this on-chain maximizes transparency and avoids opaque advisor deals. This proposal is the first attempt to implement such a plan using the Bounty system. Although the Council does have the power to spend Treasury funds, we decided to put this up for a community referendum to avoid any conflict of interest and to get the maximum discussion and buy-in from the Phala stakeholders. That means, we will not use the Council’s power to execute this bounty directly but have the public decide on it.

BOUNTY ONE (Previous task)

Bounty Proposal: Bounty to compensate expert advisors of the Phala team
Proponent: 3zfavDwAsV83TGCDYko4gs3uYPQq4fuS8mcy5BtFqjzyPes8
Date: 11.11.2021
Requested allocation: 225000 PHA
Proposed Curator reward: 100 PHA

Short description:

This bounty is used to compensate the expert advisors for their work previous to the launch of Khala as well as for ongoing work until October 2021 and the future work from November to December. The expert advisors provided us with their professional opinion, industry experience and guidance for a successful inception of the network. Furthermore, the experts pledge to further help the Phala team in the future. They hold important knowledge in growth management, strategic and economic analysis, technical support and dev education, all important skills for a successful network.

Context of the bounty:

We have three excellent expert council advisors, they are: Joe, Jonas, Zoe. They are all experts in their respective fields, and have made great contributions for the development of Phala, which will be compensated with the proposed bounty.

Expert advisors will help Phala in the long-term development of growth, technology and analysis&research, and establish reputations in the crypto world. They are Phala’s “think tank”.

For their outstanding contributions, we will give them incentives through this bounty. This task bounty will be a long-term incentive bounty, which will be split into different stages of sub-bounty. For example, in 2021 we will apply for one bounty from March to October, and another from November to December. Each bounty will be rewarded with different tokens according to the contributions made by expert advisors.

The incentives for expert members will only come from the bounty program of the treasury, and rewards will be given based on their contributions.

Problem statement:

Different skill sets are required to help the Phala ecosystem. Those are:

  1. Growth: Penetrate the European market to raise user awareness and create an active and larger developer community.
  2. Research and Analysis: Research and analyze new tokenomics mechanisms that suit the innovative nature of the Phala network. Additionally, the complex nature of the parachain slot auctions require thorough analysis and planning.
  3. Technology and Product: Suggest new products and opportunities for the Phala core technology.

Solutions:

Milestone 1: Growth

Mission: Activate the European market and acquire more reputation in Europe for Phala
Person in charge: Zoe
Budget: 75k PHA
Time: Mar.- Oct. 2021

Achievements:

  • created speaking opportunities for Marvin before Khala Launch
  • Clubhouse with community over 1k members
  • BerChain event
  • moderated community events on crowdcast with Marvin and Hang
  • Formed a developer education team. Reach out and Interview developer advocators.
  • Promoted the hackathon in the European dev community.

Detailed information with attachments and links:

  1. Brought more exposure for Phala in the European market and enhanced the awareness of Phala in the European market.

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800×800 532 KB

  1. Interacted with and established a closer relationship with users in the European community

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1198×662 444 KB

  1. Growth Business Development
  • Successfully promoted Phala to become the official member of BerChain - a Berlin based Blockchain community with over 150 members from the European and global blockchain ecosystem.
  • Expanded cooperation opportunities for Phala within the European universities.

Milestone 2: Tech and development

Mission: Give tech support to team and help to build tech community
Person in charge: Joe
Budget: 75k PHA
Time: Mar.- Oct. 2021

Achievements:

  • Suggested topics for hackathon with Encode.
  • Gave suggestions of building a dev community.
  • Assisted the technical team to successfully launch the mining system.
  • Helped Phala solve the technical difficulties in the mining program, and shared technical skills. Helped to solve the on-chain issue.

Milestone 3: Research and Analysis

Mission: Completion of related research on the Phala project
Person in charge: Jonas
Budget: 75k PHA
Time: Mar.- Oct. 2021

Achievements:

  • Conducted rigorous market research for Phala in the early stage of the tokenomics creation, studied the tokenomics of well-known projects in the field of crypto currency, and gave adjustments and suggestions to the former Phala tokenomics.
  • Fully participated in the discussion of the current tokenomics and the continuous revisions, pointed out risk issues, and provided solutions.
  • Conducted market research on the Kusama and Polkadot slot auctions, analyzed publicly available blockchain data and slot auction data and gave mathematical model calculations and inferences to Phala’s slot auction rewards. This laid the foundation for Phala’s successful low-cost slot auction.
  • Provided constructive input on incentives in Kusama slot auctions, put forward the NFT reward plan, negotiated a partnership with RMRK and actively communicated with partners and developers to promote the progress.
  • Developed the outline for the upcoming thought leader tournament that incentivizes community members to create content about Phala and thereby help to grow the outreach of the network.

BOUNTY TWO (Future task)

Bounty Proposal: Bounty to compensate expert advisors of the Phala team
Proponent: 3zfavDwAsV83TGCDYko4gs3uYPQq4fuS8mcy5BtFqjzyPes8
Date: 11.11.2021
Requested allocation: 75000 PHA
Proposed Curator reward: 100 PHA

Short description:

This bounty is used to compensate the expert advisors for their work previous to the launch of Khala as well as for ongoing work from Nov to Dec 2021. The expert advisors provided us with their professional opinion, industry experience and guidance for a successful inception of the network. Furthermore, the experts pledge to further help the Phala team in the future. They hold important knowledge in growth management, strategic and economic analysis, technical support and dev education, all important skills for a successful network.

Problem statement:

Different skill sets are required to help the Phala ecosystem. Those are:

  • Growth: Penetrate the European market to raise user awareness and create an active and larger developer community.
  • Research and Analysis: Research and analyze new tokenomics mechanisms that suit the innovative nature of the Phala network. Additionally, the complex nature of the parachain slot auctions require thorough analysis and planning.
  • Technology and Product: Continue to support Phala with new ideas of how to deploy the core technology in user-facing or developer products.

Solutions:

TASK 1: Growth

Mission: Activate the European market and acquire more reputation in Europe for Phala
Person in charge: Zoe
Budget: 25k PHA
TIME: NOV.- DEC.2021

TODO LIST:

  • Follow up promotion of Berchain collaboration & BerChain community expansion & BerChain BlogPost
  • Continue to build a dev community education team, keep reaching out and interviewing candidates.
  • Push Phala PR in German magazines
  • Minerva University students Visit at WeWork Berlin to learn about Phala Network
  • Follow up European Blockchain Convention
  • Conduct 2021 Phala Berlin meetup:
  • https://www.meetup.com/Polkadot-Berlin/events/281710295/

TASK 2: Dev support

Mission: Give tech support to team and help to build technical community
Person in charge: Joe
Budget: 25k PHA
TIME: NOV.- DEC.2021

TODO LIST:

  • Give suggestions for building a dev community.
  • Assist technical team to optimize the mining system.
  • Assist technical team to solve any problems encountered on-chain.

TASK 3: Research and Analysis

Mission: Completion of related research on the Phala project
Person in charge: Jonas
Budget: 25k PHA
TIME: NOV.- DEC.2021

TODO LIST:

  • Will work on an improvement and updated version on the tokenomics of Phala to solve challenges that are imposed by the innovative technology.
  • Analyzing and optimizing the strategy for the upcoming Polkadot slot auctions and guiding the future actions to acquire a slot on Polkadot.
  • Continue the work on the Phala thought leader tournament.
#2

Disappointed to see that the past and future requests are lumped together here. I am in support of the bounty for past work but the future work just doesn’t have enough detail and it is at a higher rate of compensation (i.e. 12.5K PHA per month) than the past work. For this kind of future bounties, more detail and expected results/milestones should be provided, just like we see on Kusama.

Questions:
Task 2 - What does “Assist technical team to optimize the mining system.” mean in terms of expected results?
Task 3 - Were any results from the phase 1 Thought Leader tournament published?

#3

Hi Michael

Thank you very much for being involved in the discussion. You are right that the structure of having both bounties together in one proposal is not optimal. As we outlined, we want to enable the community to vote on the proposal instead of using the council executive power on this. In the absence of any sub-bounty-like structure, we decided to put both bounties into one, to not take up too much time of the governance process and leave space for other proposals (e.g., by other community members). In our opinion this was the most efficient way.

With regard to your criticism about the relationship between past and future work, I also tend to agree with you that the splitting was not done optimally. The reason being that we originally agreed on the whole budget but wanted to get the community votes on it well before Christmas, so that it actually reaches everybody. Then the splitting of the budget was not done optimally, but please be assured that the total budged agreed upon is unaffected.

Also bear in mind that this proposal is very special because it was only possible to propose it in hindsight because there was not a blockchain when we started work. For future bounties we will definitely switch to a system were milestones are more clearly communicated ex ante and expected results and timelines are properly stated.

With regard to the thought leader tournament you can find the outline here. There are more resources and details internally which will be published once we start the tournament. However, during the registration phase we saw that the demand was not high enough, probably also caused initiating this before we even launched the parachain. This means, the tournament was announced too early and we put this on hold for a bit to generate the most impact later. As stated in the proposal, we will come back to this soon.

Thank you again for being an active community member of Phala and I hope that my explanations satisfied your questions and concerns.

Cheers
Jonas

2 Likes
#4

Hi Michael,

Thank you for sharing your opinion about the bounty proposal.

As stated in Jonas reply, the advisory compensation was agreed on to be payed out as a whole. However, we really wanted to make sure to have the community being involved in the discussion before holiday season.

We will consider your feedback for future bounties and planning to create such bounties mainly for already executed work, or if for future work definitely with more detailed expected results.