Guest Pass Temperature Check

The Summary

• This proposal is a method for us to gather the necessary consensus and sentiment in order to create a bDIP
• Currently our Guest Pass has unlimited renewals and it limits our ability to mitigate value extraction and raise the bar of commitment in the DAO
• A limited Guest Pass will create speculative and tangible benefits for the DAO
• Due to these constraints and potential benefits we must come to an agreement on the new timeframe and amount of renewals for a revised Guest Pass

The Problem

Our much-beloved Guest Pass system has a fatal flaw: it allows people to sidestep our member leveling system, which greatly reduces the utility of holding BANK, incentivises “value-extracting” contributors to join (i.e. those who come for BANK, sell it, and leave), and disincentives “value-creating” members to stay (i.e. those who believe in the mission and want to make the token worth more over time).

This is something that has been brought up by Genesis Members, GSEs, and many others.

It’s time we did something about it.

The Solution

The issue with the Guest Pass is that it is INFINITELY RENEWABLE. This one property is what causes all of the issues mentioned above. To fix the problem, we need to limit the Guest Pass. If we limit it too much, however, we could lose potential contributors because they were unable to accrue enough BANK or find a place in the DAO where they feel the vibes. We present the following solution:

1. Extend Guest Pass time frame
2. Allow Guest Pass to be renewed a limited number of times (i.e. 0,1 or 2 renewals)
3. Introduce a Season Pass which gives people XXs weeks of membership (i.e. Discord access and potential Snapshot governance rights) for XXXX amount of BANK paid or time-locked (To be determined in follow up proposal(s) – @bpetes @icedcool)

The Benefits

The limited Guest Pass will allow new contributors to join, engage, and figure out whether or not the BanklessDAO community is for them. It will give a time-based incentive to create relationships with members, figure out ways to earn BANK, and ultimately determine whether they would like to become a larger part of the DAO. This will give a better experience for new members because they will feel a slight push to explore the value that the DAO can bring to them. Additionally, it will lead to a better experience for current members because there will be a higher bar of commitment for everyone in the DAO.

Furthermore, limiting the Guest pass can create speculative demand for BANK due to the nature of having a large gated community. While speculation can be seen as bad in some economic situations, due to the social nature of our DAO, it is a lever for us to pull in order to incentivise more capital and contributors to join our system.

The Next Steps

1. Reach out to other members of the DAO to solidify specification and constraints of limiting Guest Passes and introducing Season Passes, as well as gathering teammates

   1. Ops Department to figure out Discord constraints and updating DAO-wide documents
   2. Dev Guild to figure out technology specs (incl. cost)
   3. Treasury Department for alignment on their tokenomics efforts
   4. Education Department for updating onboarding sessions/documentation

2. Figure out a budget and team for the above

3. Get consensus on the plan

4. Go to Grants Committee for funding

5. Implement and roll out

The Polls

How long do you think the Guest Pass should last?

Do you agree to limiting Guest Passes using the results of the above poll and exploring the concept of a Season Passes?

Am I understanding the Season Pass solution correctly that the length of the pass is variable depending on the $BANK paid to acquire it, and is not based on actual season length? If that’s the case then I like the idea of this solution, but the name of it has to change to avoid confusion.

What if we could implement renewals based on the amount of BANK being held. For example if someone is showing increasing their BANK held but doesn’t reach the requirement issue a renewal. This could be set at different levels of BANK being held 5,000, 10,000, etc.

i think a seasonal pass is also inline with the otterspace trials OPS Guild is working on @Bpetes @brianl @chunz

Personally I don’t think we should limit the Guest Pass without having another route to membership other than holding 35K BANK. Our Guest Pass system is one of the reasons we have such an active DAO even during the bear market, so we need to ensure that the changes we make allow us to continue to engage contributors over the long term.

I’ve had several guest passers working on Bankless Card for 6 months without a single BANK, and with retrofunding they are now able to become L1’s. With a limited Guest Pass and no season pass option, my only way to do this in the future is to give them 35K BANK each, or move to a separate Discord server. Both of these options would reduce the team’s alignment to BanklessDAO (one because the champion would effective be reducing their stake of BANK, and the other because separating Discord would separate our culture from the rest of BanklessDAO).

A Season pass for 10K BANK could allow project champions to keep key contributors on while also limiting the Guest Pass.

Just my thoughts.

POST INCOMING, but no it would be a set amount of BANK for the season.

Specifics will be developed further based on the consensus of the DAO.
Really these just become knobs that we can tweak and modify.

The REAL value is that we would be developing an economic reclamation function that supports a healthy BANK ecosystem.

Some of these ideas are being thrown around, with tlBANK. (Time Lock BANK, formerly veBANK)

It’s going to put the onus on project champions and guild coordinators to show the best that they can show, to keep the people from jumping ship. Meaning more emphasis on thorough onboarding for people to feel welcome. Can that be done for the majority in 4 months?

Could be! Make sure that the onboarding centric circles, (bankless academy, first quest project, and guilds with a more new member friendly vibe) get their ducks together.

And, revisit “bank hoarding” because that’s something that’s going to derail this and the general onboarding vibe. It took me about 6 months of working, complaining, and fighting to get to L1. It’s taken some folks about 3 weeks. You’ve got to account for the people like me.

That being said. This plan, is a start. So let’s see what happens next

@blockboy @Icedcool Has the option been explored that -roll holders or -member of a working group need to be L1 or L2? Also I think it would be important to try to fill this gap between guest pass holder to L1 contributor. Have options been explored to bridge this gap?

This is the beginning of that .

We have an automated and on chain solution for this for L2 validation (needs to be l1, active, etc) coming, with a proposal to start sharing information SOON!

I’m pretty sure that technology could be further implemented at different org levels on a case by case basis, and depending on the org unit.

Strongly agreed.

The BIGGEST thing we need to support is contributors abilities to become L1. The currency of DAOs (and governments) are our contributors.

We have to support them, while building to negate exploitation.

The big thing I want to respond to here, is that, THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT!
And I personally think we should start with less restrictive, rather than going for more restrictive at the outset.

So that would mean 4 weeks, 2 renewals.

If we restrict to hard, we could reduce the onboarding of one of our most important resources, contributors.

As we experiment with this, we can get good analytics from Dao dash, or the analytics guild, and make different modifications down the road.

As infrastructure is implemented around this, it gives us more options in terms of policy, when we didn’t have any before.

Hello, I’m new here and so have not voted but want to add my opinion in hopes it is useful.

I completely understand that your aim is to prevent extortion. I can completely understand why you would want and need to prevent this issue. My response is in regards to the limiting of new members the solution entails.

I’ve had a single 2 week guest pass that expired over the weekend. I’ve got limited time, but I’ve attended the new member session despite losing 2 hours of my allowed 6 hours of sleep in a night, since I work two full time jobs.

I’ve been working my way through bankless academy though I’m stuck at verifying my forum joining at xyz even though I have joined, followed the directions and keep trying to verify.

I’ve been listening to the podcasts and trying to catch up with the frequent newsletters. And I’ve tried engaging a few times on discord.

I did this by creating and sharing a new discord server list to update the expired version in the onboarding process, which members then discussed correcting. Though none engaged with me directly.

I’ve also shared a relevant course (Doing business in Web3) I’ve gotten to assist with that my university is offering for free without any engagement but I do hope people find useful.

I do not want to extort the bankless DAO but find a way to discover a path to freedom from financial institutions and supporting my family without working myself to literal death.

However, while I understand the concepts fine, when asking where I might best focus my efforts considering my skills, I was just told everywhere.

So I’ve been trying to read through and listen to everything we were asked to in the onboarding process. With well over 30 hours invested now, I’m not through it all yet.

My guess is that few people actually go through all of the onboarding material requested and just jump straight into the various guilds.

In the end, while I plan to continue working my way through the information requested, including the newsletters, most days I get 3, and weekly roundup reviews, etc. Then asking for my guest pass to be renewed so I may start looking through the individual guilds to see where I may best fit. Since I am fortunate enough to have e the skills to assist nearly if not every single one.

Given time, I hope to contribute and learn more. The concept is a great one, but it will be a long time before we can pay our mortgages without banks, and a long time before I’m able to do my families weekly grocery shopping without a debit card.

With only 5-10 hours a week to contribute, there is no way I could go through all of the onboarding information in the time given of 2 weeks. I believe further limiting the guest pass would exclude myself and those like me entirely.

Excluding people who want to contribute is unlikely to help the DAO. People like me with multiple steady incomes are less likely to be coming in to make a fast few bucks and cashing out. We will also be a very large portion of your target audience.

Where adding a starting fee seems cou terintuitive to the goals and vibes stated for the DAO.

I realize this doesn’t offer a solution, which normally I would add, but I’m new enough to this that I unfortunately cannot add a constructive solution.

Thank you for your time, please ignore any typos as I’m typing this on my phone as I ride to work, which makes typing very hard. -_-

@gem welcome to the BanklessDAO forum! Your comments and perspective is very helpful. I have added a guest pass for you and would love to hear how the DAO can help you in your journey along with how you would like to contribute to BanklessDAO. I will ping you in the server to continue the conversation.

2 renewal would make it so that it is a full season, and they can take part in seasonal coordinape rounds. I just wonder, do we have enough to do to make 35k bank in a season? Is just a season of contribution enough to make a big enough impact to get it in coordinape? I know quite a lot of the contributors in the Writers Guild do lots, and dont make 35k a season. The Tokenomics and treasury departments have lots of great and dedicated contributors and also, dont make that. So, if someone didnt grind hard and make the requisite BANK, would they need to buy it to continue to take part? I earned my way in and i could search to see the amount of time it took. I was early and had the rollup to do. I enjoyed earning it. I was very proud the day i had 35k, The day your discord name changes colour. We need to preserve that imo. Im sure the new ideations coming take this in to consideration with the next version of BANK locking in whatever way we feel works best to start. Thats why we are here talking about it. Currently though, any token success will just bring on more and more sell pressure, but, this isnt personal, its crypto. Just, would love to see a thriving BANK like we all do.

There is an immense depth of knowledge and preparation in making this post and proposal.

I need to give it more time and thought, but perhaps there is a better framing to ‘value extractors’ that can reveal a mutually beneficial relationship between Contributor and DAO. Or maybe bDAO guilds and projects need to stop compensating in BANK.

I agree with the sentiments presented by Gem in their post. As a freshly minted L2 I often see a very different bDAO than veterans describe.

I also like what IcedCool has said in defense of this proposal. I think equating people to currency has some imperfect metaphor type pitfalls but the driving pointer at a need for better management of contributors is there. I think HR (or as coined, ‘Contributor Resources,’ CR) is a shortfall for many DAOs and protocols. In my limited experience at bDAO, I have seen a wide range of talent acquisition, training, touch point accountability, compensation, and off-boarding practices across projects and guilds. I think decentralizing these important organs of an organization is beneficial to improve overall offering by competition vetting projects and contributors by success. (Success =/= effort or value per se). I might go so West as to say that S5’s compensation flattening was the cause of much of the BANK-ennui which seems to me has captured much of the veterancy.

This is an admirable and well written proposal, that leads me to introspect about my opinion-of-reaction and think deeper about the issues at play. This sticks an actionable lever into the being-built-airplane-engine process of Contributor Relations, we don’t want to cause any shorts. Maybe this proposal could fit into a corpus of proposals within the wider-cast objective on Contributor Resources, focusing on Membership to the DAO.

Exclusivity does several wonderful things, but we must always seek to use it as a tool to create alignment, rather than value.

I agree with some of the comments above: limiting guest passes is ok and does justice to the word “guest” and its initial intention. However, before implementing such a limitation, it should be assured that such guests actually have the ability to stay on longer, meaning having a realistic possibility to earn their membership. We need a regular inflow of talent or just people who are interested and stay hooked. In different discussions I did hear that a realistic time frame to earn 35k would be around 6 months, I in particular remember @Marvel here. If I buy a season pass, that BANK may need to be spent, throwing a member back by 12k. How about holding these 12k BANK in escrow/deposit for the time the season pass runs. It could then count towards the 35k/L1 once that threshold is reached within the timespan of the season pass. If the season pass holder then decides to go for L1 membership these12k are released back to the then L1 member. If the 35k are not reached or the season pass member decides not to become an L1 member in that time span, the 12k deposit would fall back to treasury.

I may have missed that aspect, but if I have a guest pass + maximum renewals and, for whatever reason decide not to join (e.g. time constraints at this point, or as currently happens some take part in meetings upon invitation and so sign up as guest to get access to the server- perhaps there should be a solution for these kind of participants, too, something like a day pass ) but a year later would be interested to do so, would that prevent me from getting a new guest pass? Perhaps we should consider having a one year blocking period with the possibility of applying for a guest pass under the above conditions once more.

I like the ideas presented here @blockboy . Encouraging new contributors to get more involved while generating speculative demand for BANK is

I have a few questions based on my (probably limited) understanding:

Is the idea that a Season Pass would be required in order to obtain a guest pass?

What if, upon expiry of the final guest pass renewal, the individual swaps wallets/Discord IDs and starts the process over again? Is this a concern at all? And if so, how do we mitigate it?

I also strongly agree with @links ’ post above. Even now, obtaining 35K BANK isn’t feasible for many. What if this works and the value of bank goes up? Great for BANK hodlers, but wouldn’t it make it more difficult for new membership?

Thank you for leading this conversation, blockboy!

I voted no to the 2nd question. Here’s why:

I agree we should prevent people from using guest passes as a way to earn and dump BANKs. However, I think the key is to limit the total amount of BANKs that guest pass holders can earn but not how many times a guest pass can be renewed.

For a community, different people may want different engagement levels. I see a scenario in that people may not want to become full members but still want to participate in community activities from time to time. We should give these people opportunities. They will still benefit our community vibe and other matters occasionally.

So, by limiting the total BANK guest pass holders can earn, we can 1) reduce the behavior of earning and dumping and 2) keep the people who prefer to have low-level engagement in long term.

@Bananachain that is a really good idea. If I am understanding all sides correctly. I think it is a great idea to essentially hold the first 35k bank someone makes in the treasury to earn membership. But that also accounts for people who cannot contribute a ton of hours a week. If they drop off or haven’t increased their balance at all in 6 months or a year maybe send a warning, and then reabsorb that into the treasury.

However, logistically, I could see that being difficult to pull off. I think it could be worth the effort if people using the DAO to make a quick few dollars has been a big issue.

It seems that a lot of people seeking to extort the DAO and earn & dump their bank would be extremely discouraged by not being able to do so until they have gotten to 35k minimum.

It is really good to see everyone brainstorming on this by the way. <3

I really like this idea, but how would it work from a tactical perspective? How can we limit BANK that Guest Passers can earn?

I really like this idea, but how would it work from a tactical perspective? How can we limit BANK that Guest Passers can earn?

Can we achieve that by tracking the total BANKs distributed for each discord handle on the guest pass?

E.g., Guest pass list → Discord handle list → Previous BANK distributed in total (compiling historical data)–> Eligible balance to earn = Cap for guest pass - Previous BANK distributed in total.