SIP-23: Token Incentives for Operational Leadership

Author: Henri Pihkala

Background

The Streamr project has a new product, new strategy, new energy, reworked team, and all of that generates a great new opportunity! One loose end to tackle, which I consider crucial, is to make sure that incentives are perfectly aligned between DATA holders and key team members.

We, the co-founders, have always had a heavy interest in DATA due to our genesis allocation in 2017, and this continues to be the case. However, the project’s top operational management, consisting of CEO and CTO roles currently held by Mark Little and Petri Savolainen, have joined later. This creates a mismatch in interests between us DATA holders and these key project contributors. In my opinion the roles should be heavily incentivized to energize them to create value for all DATA holders, and not doing so would be a mistake.

However, the roles must only be rewarded in the case that value really is created! In this proposal I will explain how that can be achieved.

This proposal is inspired by Elon Musk’s famous incentive package at Tesla, which grants generous rewards in the form of newly created Tesla stock, but triggered only if astronomical value creation is achieved. The benefit of such an approach is that the incentives will cause dilution only in case of massive success. If successful, all stakeholders will be very satisfied despite the dilution, and if not successful, no dilution occurs.

Correspondingly, this proposal sets certain ambitious token price levels - way above current market price - which unlock token rewards which are only minted if the trigger price level is reached. The lower milestones are more easily achievable (the token has in fact been there before!) and therefore come with generous but not astronomical rewards, while the higher levels set new all-time highs and come with really strong rewards.

Proposal

Establish the following token incentive plan to reward the project’s CEO and CTO roles for value creation. The specified amount of tokens is allocated from the unminted reserve and minted to the recipient if - and only if - the trigger price is reached. There is a delay of 7 days between reaching the trigger price and delivering the tokens.

DATA price¹	DATA tokens	Value multiple²	Total dilution³
$0.05	2,000,000	7x	0.32%
$0.10	2,000,000	14x	0.32%
$0.15	2,000,000	21x	0.32%
$0.20	2,000,000	29x	0.32%
$0.25	2,000,000	36x	0.32%
$0.50	5,000,000	71x	0.79%
$1.00	20,000,000	143x	3.15%
Total per person	35,000,000
Total (2 persons)	70,000,000		5.52%

¹ The DATA price is defined as the last execution price of DATA/USDT on the Binance exchange. ² Approximate value increase vs. the DATA market price at the time of writing ($0.007) ³ Calculated using the total supply at time of writing (1.268B DATA) and includes both persons’ rewards

Closing Words

Win-win situations are rare, but for me, it’s a no-brainer to take 0.32% dilution in case the DATA price increases 7x to $0.05. The same applies for all the other levels: easy to take a total of 5.52% dilution if the price has reached $1. It’s important to see that from the current market standpoint, the effect of this proposal can only be net positive (value was created) or neutral (nothing happened), but there is no condition where it would have a negative effect!

Given the challenging market conditions that have brought down valuations of the vast majority of all projects, we DATA holders have little to lose but could have a lot to gain. Therefore, let’s do everything we can to set the project up for success. Through these incentives, the recipients have a reason to work relentlessly in the shared advantage of us all.