Introduction

How to compensate contributors in DAOs efficiently and how incentivize contributors to keep investing in the DAO's assets are both challenging questions for DAOs.

Different DAOs provide different solutions for these questions. Foreforont also concerns about these questions as it introduced new solution for this in season two (S2).

In new principles and structured introduced in S2, Forefornt's contributors are categorized in different roles. Each role compensated differently. Non-staff contributors receive payments in $FF biweekly.

This dashboard attempts to provide more data driven insights into these two challenging questions for the case of Forefront.

Analytics

The graph below shows payouts aggregated for each role type.

As can be seen pioneer and voyegers receive only $FF as compensation, while staff and alchemists receive half USDC and half $FF.

S2 — Contributor Roles and Compensation

The main conclusion drawn from S1 is that the Forefront DAO needs committed contributors. This requirement has been reflected in new plan to incentivize paid contributors.

While some DAOs use fully equal work and equal payments, some others make payment corresponds to efforts in diverse activities, Forefront has decided upon the payment based on roles. Contributors are assigned for specific role and are paid based on their roles.

The roles and the efforts rates are as follow:

Pioneers. Forefront is the Contributor’s sole work focus [in terms of hours, minimum 30-35 hours/week].

Oracles. Forefront is the Contributor’s primary, or top 2, work focus [minimum 20-25 hours/week].

Alchemists. Forefront is a Contributor’s "part-time" commitment [15-25 hours/week].

Voyagers. Forefront is a low-priority commitment for the Contributor [10-15 hours a week].

This system is simple and won't make the process slow. Some other DAOs stock in voting and decision making in the course of projects.

I think the clear roles with transparent pre-defined payment works more efficiently as Forefront has taken.

The graph below shows what percentage of compensations has been kept in the wallets by roles. Alchemists had already some FF and kept all that they received. Pioneers withdrawn almost 50% of their FF tokens.

The graph below shows the payouts over time. It is clear from the data that March 17th was the first date that payouts has been made based on the new system.

Discussions

DAOs use diverse methods to incentivize contributors to keep their tokens. One solution would be offering different Yield options to recipients to choose. For instance, contributor can lock their assets in three, six or nine months with X APY.

Some DAOs created their own validators like MonkeDAO. Through that validator, locked (staked) payouts of contributors can be compensated.

Some other DAOs provides opportunities for different levels of holding the community tokens. For instance SEEDCLUB. This also incentivizes contributors to hold their assets.