Working for the DAO

Its important to set out some guiding philosophy for the culture of the organization.

Firstly its important to understand what we are.

What is SharedStake?

SharedStake is a grass roots Ethereum staking protocol.

We started because we wanted to stake our own ETH between friends in a decentralized trust-less manner and understood economies of scale would boost our rewards and reduce costs.

This has scaled out into a grassroots community of fellow stakers, defi users and degens.

At no point in the process did we raise funds from VCs or retail, therefore the project has both 0 and infinite runway.

But that also means it has no money.

This is not the place to volunteer if youre living paycheque to paycheque and need money.

If you have some free time and want to learn about DeFi while helping us grow and pumping your SGT bags, then this is the right place for you!

What are we trying to do?

We have 100s of ETH stakers and 1000s of token holders and governance participants.

After a certain point it becomes difficult to scale. And as such since we aren't trying to return maximal profit to our VCs or monopolize the market, we do not want to scale too much.

We're trying to optimally scale and onboard contributors that contribute actual value to the DAO.

Overview of our philosophy

We want to have a low touch, async culture comprised of competent community members that can execute and grow the co-op.

We want to measure results so we can improve them.

And keep continually evolving as a DAO.

With a focus on capital and time effeciency.

Ideal candidate

In so far we want to attract competent individuals to volunteer their time and share SGT tokens with them to make them co-owners of the co-op and align long term incentives.

Ideally individuals that are the caliber of DeFi protocol founders. Capable of developing ideas to actual products and able to lead others.

With a general focus on technically minded individuals with a strong grasp of DeFi.

That can deliver results that provide true value for the DAO.

Without too much hand-holding, guidance, prodding. Which would end up with a net time benefit that is negative.

They need to be intrinsically motivated. Pre-existing token holders are great for that. Can identify and solve our pain points. https://edw519.posthaven.com/what-are-employers-looking-for

What can i do to help?

• We're always looking for devs

  • Solidity? take a look at the v2 phases and see if you can help implement some

  • Front-end? See if you can implement some of the phases on the frontend or fix bugs

• Biz dev

  • We're looking for help from our community

  • Where do you want to see us? who do you want to see us partner with?

  • Lets make it happen!

• Partnerships / listings

  • Is it really as easy as sending an email? I dunno because our current community contributor Swmelon has been handling it.

• Marketing

  • We want to incentivize our community to support and post about us on

    • reddit

    • twitter

    • others? you pick

• Community management

  • Want to help keep fud out of discord and tg?

• Defi specific others?

  • You tell us what youd like to see

Common pitfalls

Some common pitfalls and negatives we see

• They ask for permission too much - just do it - let us know if it works. You own this too

• They expect the small pre-existing volunteers to have all the answers - we dont, its a vast ever expanding space, we dont know all the new shiny protocols or the right things to do

• They fail to plan and execute on their own - related to the previous points, just try it, see if it works?

• They block tasks - weve had volunteers that would pick up all the tasks but not deliver in a timely manner, blocking others and preventing other volunteers from rising up

• "I did my part I should get paid even if it didnt work" - No. We want to strongly avoid this. This adds to management overhead with people doing pointless things that deliver no real value. Figure out what adds value with the community, try it.

• No metrics - related to the previous point. If we dont measure, we cant improve, and we cant know if were actually having a positive effect. We want to avoid wasting time. Having more employees doing bullshit jobs to get a promotion or raise isnt the goal here. We want to stay lean

• No intrinsic motivation - Constantly prodding people to get work done is exhausting. Easier to just do it

• Unwillingness to try what works in this ecosystem - more common in marketing / bd. Some things work well in crypto, some people want to try things from their previous industry or what they know. As long as there's metrics and a plan to stop if it doesnt work it's fine, but perhaps a crypto native way wouldve been better

What we want to avoid

• rent seekers People just trying to get paid for a bare minimum contribution This: - adds to management overhead, - increases payout gas costs, - reduces incentives to attract new contributors Ideally we want community members to contribute as they understand the space and our product and are intrinsically motivated.

• "I did my part I should get paid even if it didnt work" Same issues as above. Community members may want to contribute what theyre interested in. Even if there's not net positive value. They can feel free to do so as long as it isnt affected the management overhead too much

• Toxicity / negativity / FUD disguised as feedback A lot of people feel the need to voice their concerns and question. This is usually great. Except when the answers can be found in the docs. OR is obvious. Or has been answered many times before. Unfortunately some think this is "useful"(?) and bring up aggressive criticism and complaints and expect compensation(?) Ideally we want to avoid negativity and toxicity and grow a more kind community. Find a fault? Great! Lets discuss solutions! Post what ideas you have and what youve seen out there in the wild! Loudly complaining about it or criticizing design decisions that can be fixed in future versions isnt the way. [Every "competitor" ive spoken to has been more supportive and kinder than a lot of the existing users and community members we have]

Previous experiences

Here's some things we tried previously as a DAO. That are influencing how we structure incentives and payouts for contributors in the future.

• Payouts to experiences volunteers as a retainer We identified top community contributors and gave them 500 SGT to continue contributing for 4 more months. Most instantly sold their bag and stopped contributing 1 savvy individual stopped, came back, contributed far enough to get into the 1 month boundary post the 4 month retainer, asked 2 of the founders to re-up the retainer, pocketed another 1k SGT and then stopped contributing. Overall it didnt work. We also didn't factor in the dollar value, albeit it is difficult to do so with a utility token with high volatility such as SGT. At the time these payouts were worth $40k

• Payouts every month This added too much overhead and attracted too many rent seekers

• Payouts at the end of a time period This worked out really well with the last payout. Albeit some users did stop contributing, most stayed around. Overall the only missing thing was some incentive for more long term contribution