[BIP:86] Staworth Service Provider Engagement

TL;DR - appoint Staworth as an independent service provider to the Beefy DAO for the next 12 months, to support various work streams across accounting, legal, operations and business development.

Staworth is pleased to present this 2025 services proposal to the Beefy DAO for consideration.

Since April 2024, Staworth has been one of the core contributors receiving monthly recurring compensation. Prior to this, Jack has been a member of the Beefy core team since April 2023. Now, we are excited to propose a transition to act as a standalone service provider, accountable directly and independently to the DAO.

With this new arrangement, we propose to increase our own transparency and accountability to the DAO. This proposal seeks to ringfence certain functions like financial reporting and non-reserved legal services in a separate entity, ensuring separation of responsibilities and risk. And Staworth will introduce our own goals and public platform to make clear where we stand as an independent contributor.

Who are we?

Staworth Limited is a new DAO services company founded in March 2024. We provide support with legal, accounting, governance, marketing, business development and operations. By advocating for the rights and interests of the various stakeholders in our DAOs, we help them reach their collective goals.

Jack is a commercial lawyer by training (English Law), who has been supporting DeFi projects since 2022. Coming from a background working on complex contracts, compliance and litigation, DeFi presented a fresh opportunity to grapple with new areas and leave a mark. Unable to pass up the promise of this burgeoning industry any longer, Jack left this old life behind in 2024, to serve DeFi foremost and full time.

Staworth currently serves three DAOs: Beefy, karpatkey and Gnosis. Beyond complimentary experience working with DAOs, accounting and legal issues relevant to Beefy, Staworth seeks to leverage its network to identify new opportunities for growth and improvement.

Contributions

In 2024, we were proud to deliver the following notable contributions:

• Spearheaded and operated the Beefy Profit Distribution program aimed at improving incentives across stakeholders and developing participation and token utility.

• Maintained all of Beefy’s financial accounts and reporting, preparing 4 quarterly/annual reports. Served on the Beefy Treasury Council throughout. Also joined karpatkey, leaders in DAO financial reporting, aiming to learn more and contribute to wider industry standards.

• Helped to win 600,000 ARB in grant funding from the Arbitrum Long Term Incentives Pilot Program for Beefy and deliver this, together with a large grant from the Optimism Governance Fund, across hundreds of small boosts throughout the year.

• Leading key governance proposals, including Beefy’s ChainPatrol engagement, the Security Monitoring Budget and Hexagate agreement, and our Development Insurance Fund. Acting as a delegate for GnosisDAO.

• Providing private and confidential support for legal matters, including negotiations with key partners, compliance measures and organisational governance.

• Published various pieces of thought leadership and marketing materials for Beefy, karpatkey and in a personal capacity.

• Became a strategist for Beefy and launched 7 new products (with several others awaiting approval).

• Attended 5 conferences across 5 countries on Beefy’s behalf, working booths, attending events, representing Beefy in panels and interviews, and building new relationships. For example, Staworth developed a new relationship with Compound/Alphagrowth, resulting in over $100,000 of joint incentives for Beefy.

Goals

During the course of this engagement, we aim to continue our work across the above areas, but with a renewed focus on decentralization.

In particular, we would like focus on:

• Seeking out changes that can further the overall decentralization of the project by increasing the role of the DAO or decreasing the reliance on individual contributors.

• Introduce additional levers for profit distribution to improve the DAO’s value alignment, and steer the existing profit distribution program through a process of continual improvement.

• Encourage and increase the overall level of governance participation, including with existing holders, new entrants and key partners of the DAO.

• Encouraging more contribution and involvement with the DAO across current users, new audiences and partners.

• Developing our contribution to conferences by attending more events and taking more opportunities to speak or otherwise represent the DAO.

• Building a revised and improved accounting system as part of a new partnership with Octav (replacing Cryptio), to improve and accelerate our accounting efforts.

Budget

To fund this engagement, we are seeking approval for the following budget items:

• Contributor Funding - $8,000 per month plus VAT (currently 20%). This is the same base level of funding that Staworth currently receives. However, as Staworth has registered to collect VAT in the UK, we are obligated to charge an additional amount for VAT. In view of this overall increase, we are not asking for any inflation or performance increase.

• Contributor Incentives - Staworth will be eligible to participate in any contributor incentives on equal terms as with other key contributors.

• Accounting & Financial Reporting Costs - Up to $12,000 per year. As is the case now, Beefy would continue to fund the cost of the accounting software that Staworth operates on the DAO’s behalf. These monthly costs can increase depending on the number of chains and contracts to be included, so this new annual budget leaves a fair amount headroom. Only costs actually incurred will be taken from the budget, and we will report on spend against this budget. Current spend on accounting software with Cryptio is c. $9,200 per year. In replacing this with a new partnership with Octav, we expect to achieve an initial discount against the current pricing.

• Events Budget - Up to $15,000 per year to fund reasonable attendance, travel, accommodation and sustenance at industry events and marketing opportunities. This is based on a projected attendance of up to 6 international trips to represent the DAO in the following 12 months. It can also be used for a greater number of domestic trips. We will report publicly on all spend against this budget.

Where for any reason the above budget items may be exceeded, we will seek further approval from the DAO for any one-off extensions or fund the difference ourselves.

The inclusion of accounting and financial reporting costs within this engagement would replace the previous budget for financial reporting under [BIP:70]. This will allow Staworth to revisit these costs on an ongoing basis each time a new engagement is sought.

For context on events, in 2024 we incurred $10,787.17 of reimbursable travel expenses (including Staworth’s and Jack’s personal pre-incorporation expenses) over 5 trips. Domestic trips were typically around $1,000. Continental trips were around $2-3,000. Intercontinental trips were around $3-5,000.

Terms

This arrangement will be subject to Staworth’s independent contractor terms throughout.

In addition, the following supplementary terms shall apply specifically for Beefy DAO:

• Conflicts of Interest - where any apparent conflict of interest is identified in any of the work to be performed by Staworth under this engagement, whether by Staworth, Beefy or third parties, either Staworth or Beefy shall be entitled to halt that work immediately without explanation. Staworth shall create and maintain a conflicts policy and register, as a means of safeguarding against conflicts.

• Independent Interests - subject to any provisions and policies relating to conflicts of interest, nothing in this agreement shall impact the rights of Staworth and its contributors to hold or action their own independent views and interests in matters of the Beefy DAO’s governance. Staworth and its contributors shall always retain the right to abstain without explanation on any governance matters.

• Split Services and Expenses - there may be circumstances where Staworth provides services in parallel for multiple clients (e.g. attending conferences with opportunities to represent two or more projects). In such circumstances, Staworth will always report the existence of such a split to all client contributor teams, together with an indication of the likely division of its efforts between them. Where any expenses are incurred in relation to split services, Staworth will offer to split the funding of its expenses in line with its expected efforts for each client.

If approved, this engaged will commence on the 1 February 2025 and proceed to the end of January 2026. A further engagement proposal will be provided towards the end of this initial engagement.

Proposal

Beefy DAO should appoint Staworth as a service provider for the 12-month engagement described in this proposal, subject to the budget and terms described herein.