Establishing an Integrations Team

Over the past week, we’ve had a compelling community conversation regarding the appointment of a three-person group that would be responsible for monitoring governance discussions and implementing successful DAO proposals / Snapshot votes. With the feedback received from the community, the core team is proposing that this organization be referred to as the BarnBridge Integrations Team and have the following mandate:

•      To act as a liaison between the community and the core team
  

•      To moderate community governance discussions and maintain standardized processes for both pitching ideas and responding to Requests-for-Proposals
  

•      To budget and staff project groups (i.e. squads) responsible for either implementing integrations with other DeFi projects or building out community initiatives
  

The core team is nominating Pavlo Bendus, Ser Speculor, and Ser Wir to this team. While we did not receive objections to the ability of any of these individuals, community members did raise their concern regarding the precedent being set regarding pseudonymous members. We take these concerns seriously, given our own emphasis on working out in the open ourselves, but recognize that such norms are just that – norms. As the BarnBridge protocol transitions to completely DAO-run in the future, such a norm would only be enforceable through community vote, and so we view the best course of action at the moment to see whether this facet of the proposal is palatable to the community or not.

The members of the Integrations Team will be compensated every epoch by a smart contract funded by the BarnBridge DAO treasury in $BOND tokens equating to $1500 each. It is expected that Integrations Team members commit an adequate amount of their time to these efforts, and a number of guardrails will be in place to ensure that both the community and the core team can hold them accountable.

•      Regular and transparent reporting of activities and uses of funds
  

•      Whistleblower address maintained by the core team
  

•      Dedicated Discord channel
  

•      Potential for member recall votes
  

•      Monitoring of $BOND trading activities
  

Regarding concerns raised by community members on the nature of this team’s reliance on the core team or its size, we would like to emphasize that we see this as simply the first step in building out a truly decentralized governance system. The templates, processes, and norms that come from the Integrations Team pilot will come to inform a more elaborate structure of specialized working groups and squads that will get built up around the DAO over the coming year. Our primary goal with the Integrations Team is to expand the bandwidth available for the protocol’s horizontal expansion into DeFi and to steward a vibrant community of contributors within the BarnBridge ecosystem.

With all of that said, this SnapShot will go until the end of Saturday, April 3rd, similar to how our DAO votes go on for four days. Unless there is a meaningful (i.e. > 30%) objection to the terms laid out here, we will move forward with instantiating the Integration Team SquadDAO and proposing a DAO funding vote. That vote will allocate $60,000 worth of BOND to a vesting contract, representing a quarter’s worth of team salary. Future DAO votes will then be used to a) fund the team budget for staffing implementations, and b) renewing salaries on a quarterly basis.

Core team members will abstain from signaling their support for the vote until the end of this period, so as to provide everyone a clear view with community sentiment regarding the proposal.