BIP-22: Beanstalk Farms Q3 2022 Budget Proposal

Proposer

Beanstalk Farms

Summary

• Mint 500,000 Beans to fund Beanstalk Farms to retain, grow and support a group of core contributors through the end of Q3 2022.

Links

• Gnosis Transaction
• GitHub PR
• GitHub Commit Hash: 3b13177801b740d0f89918ea786f05f3f8d3cc0d

Goals

Beanstalk Farms designed the Q3 2022 budget to enable core contributors to work towards the following goals:

• Decentralized development: Continue to develop a diverse organization without any single points of failure or dependence.
• Focus and flexibility: Be able to deliver high quality output in a timely fashion, while having the flexibility to fund and support a wide variety of unique opportunities related to Beanstalk.
• Attracting high quality talent: Attracting and retaining high quality talent is critical to the success of Beanstalk, and the _Incentive Alignment _section has been designed with this in mind.

Post-Exploit Output

The Q2 2022 budget minted 2,000,000 Beans to fund protocol development. After accounting for Beans that were rolled over from Q1 into Q2, Beanstalk Farms had a total budget allocation of ~2,241,815.04 Beans once the Q2 2022 budget BIP passed on April 7th. Between April 7th and April 17th, Beanstalk Farms spent ~179,054.51 Beans.

Despite the governance exploit on April 17th that rendered all remaining ~2.06M Beans worthless, a group of core contributors continued to work on Beanstalk with no promise of future payment. The accomplishments of Beanstalk Farms since the exploit include (but are not limited to):

• Protocol
  • Completed audits with Halborn and Trail of Bits.
  • Shipped Beanstalk 2.0, including all functionality necessary to implement the Barn Raise and prepare Beanstalk for a safe Replant and Unpause.
  • Shipped new functionality like:
    • Oracle Whitelist;
    • Convert Whitelist;
    • FarmFacet and Internal (Farm) Balances;
    • Depot and the Curve Pipeline; and
    • Deposit Transferability.
• Frontend + Design
  • Designed and shipped Beanstalk UI V2.
• Governance Operations
  • Iterated on multiple versions of the Barn Raise structure.
  • Formed the Beanstalk Community Multisig.
  • Formed the Beanstalk Farms Committee.
  • Streamlined governance structures of Beanstalk Farms and Bean Sprout.
• Documentation
  • Launched the Farmers’ Almanac.
  • Published Whitepaper 2.0.
• Marketing + Content
  • Hosted at least twice a week calls with the community to answer questions about the path to Unpausing Beanstalk.
  • Hosted several Twitter Spaces / Bean Pod episodes with DeFi community members.
  • Engaged with marketing firms to land articles about Beanstalk in CoinDesk, the Block, etc.
  • Distributed meeting recordings and created content that kept the community up to date and informed about the latest plans.
  • Published multiple blog posts on Beanstalk mechanics.

Anticipated Q3 Output

• Launching a BEAN:ETH liquidity pool on the new Beanstalk zero-fee DEX;
• Adding the BEAN:ETH LP Token to the Deposit Whitelist;
• Exploring a suitable on-chain governance structure;
• Reaching feature parity between Beanstalk and Beanstalk UI V2; and
• Continuing the marketing engagement with TASC.

Amounts

New Beans

We propose a total of 500,000 Beans are minted to fund Beanstalk Farms through the end of Q3 2022.

Remaining Unripe Beans

Beanstalk Farms custodied 2,062,760.53269 Beans from the Q1 2022 and Q2 2022 budgets that became 2,062,760.53269 Unripe Beans at Replant. Per BFP-81, Beanstalk Farms will propose a one-time Beanstalk Farms Retroactive Payment Proposal, or BFRPP, in order to compensate contributors for contributions since the exploit in Unripe Beans.

Beanstalk Farms plans to utilize any remaining Unripe Beans after the BFRPP towards its budget, although no Unripe Beans are expected to be necessary to fund operations. Any further use of the remaining Unripe Beans must be approved via BFBP-C.

Remaining USDC

BFP-68 granted Beanstalk Farms the remaining 300,000 USDC as a discretionary operating budget in order to execute on Beanstalk’s path forward post-exploit. 199,104.86 USDC remain in custody of the Beanstalk Farms Multisig. An itemized list of expenditures per BFP-68 (totaling 100,895.14 USDC) can be found here.

Any further use of the remaining USDC must be approved via BFBP-C, unless the transaction is valued at under 4000 USDC per BFP-81.

Custody

The funds for Beanstalk Farms will continue to be custodied by the Beanstalk Farms Multisig (BFM) wallet with keys held by various community members and Publius. We propose the following signers for the Beanstalk Farms Multisig (BFM).

BFM Signers

• Silo Chad (current signer)
• austin (current signer)
• stolenhamburger (current signer)
• JWW (current signer)
• Publius (current signer)
• sweetredbeans (new)
• mod323 (new)

One Publius wallet will be removed. We also propose that ereal and MrMochi serve as backups for the BFM wallet in case a key holder is compromised or unable to perform their duties.

Snapshot Processes

Beanstalk Farms will utilize the processes for Beanstalk Farms Committee Proposals (BFCP) and Beanstalk Farms Budget Proposals (BFBP), per BFP-81. More information on the BFCP and BFBP process can be found here and here.

Initial Allocations

Moving forward, each Beanstalk Farms contributor must have a new individual Snapshot proposal, either via BFCP-A or BFBP-A, utilizing the above processes.

A one-time payment of 40,000 Beans has been earmarked to pay a security expert and will be sent upon the passage of BIP-22.

A budget of 30,000 Beans per month will be allocated to a community grant program to reward creators of new Beanstalk-related content that focuses on Beanstalk and its role in the broader DeFi ecosystem. An announcement and more information are forthcoming.

Incentive Alignment

Before the passage of the Q2 2022 budget, the Beanstalk community decided to disallow contributors from receiving any portion of their compensation in Pods.

Given that Deposits are now transferrable, Beanstalk Farms can instead align contributors with the success of Beanstalk by Depositing allocated Beans in the Silo and paying contributors with Deposits that have accrued Beans, Stalk and Seeds.

Therefore, we propose that a contributor’s allocated quarterly Bean payment is Deposited in the Silo when their hiring proposal passes (which can be part of BFCP-A or BFBP-A).

In order to simplify accounting, if a contributor is already hired at the beginning of a quarter and:

• Beanstalk Farms already has the budget to pay all active contributors for the remainder of the quarter, the contributors’ allocated quarterly Bean payments will be Deposited in the Silo at the beginning of the quarter; or
• Beanstalk Farms, does not yet have the budget to pay all active contributors for the remainder of the quarter, the contributors’ allocated quarterly Bean payments will be Deposited in the Silo upon the passage of the quarterly budget BIP.

For example, if a contributor’s compensation is 10,000 Beans/month, 30,000 Beans will be Deposited in the Silo on their behalf at the beginning of the quarter (if permitted by the accounting structure above). For each bi-monthly payment, the contributor is paid 5,000 Beans in the form of a Deposit that includes the proportional accrued Beans, Stalk and Seeds.

If a contributor leaves or is dismissed from Beanstalk Farms while they still have unpaid Deposits allocated to them, the Beans will be Withdrawn, Claimed, and then allocated to the rest of the Beanstalk Farms budget.

For the sake of simplicity and experimentation, the BFM will have discretion over when and how often to execute mow() and plant(). We expect this cadence to be codified in a future budget BIP.

Competitive Pay

Beanstalk Farms recognizes that its ability to pay contributors competitive wages is essential to Beanstalk’s long-term success. This budget proposal ensures that it can meet or exceed market rates.

Effective

Immediately upon commit by the BCM, which will happen as soon as possible upon the passage of BIP-22.