BesuDAO Brainstorming

Goals

• incentivize Hyperledger Besu contributions in support of ethereum mainnet
• retroactive funding of prior contributions
  • some ratio of genesis token supply is allocated to retroactive funding
  • both code and non-code
• long term support of ethereum mainnet
  • decentralization
  • client diversity
• ensure future contributor rewards in perpetuity
  • safeguard treasury, ideally validator stakes are un-exitable
• fair distribution of rewards
  • attribution of infrastructure contributions
  • attribution of individual contributions
  • resolving patronage
• trust-minimized
  • no custodian or executor to implement the outcome of BesuDAO votes

Naive Implementation

The smallest possible thing that could work: after operation profit goes into the ConsenSys treasury, however all coinbases are public knowledge for accountability. Then, once a quarter Besu Maintainers each get equal quadratic voting power to move that money into existing or new gitcoin grants. EF retains withdrawl keys, and exiting a validator is at their sole discretion.

MVP Steps

A DAO contract which can be the custodian of funds and can directly implement the will of votes will take some time to create and audit. Legal and financial considerations also make this more complicated. However we can take some MVP steps to unblock the grant and start the validator program, while giving us more time to design a DAO and/or minimze trust:

• create a multi-sig account, perhaps gnosis safe, and agree to an mvp set of signatories
• communicate the address to EF to use as the withdrawal address for the stakes
• agree to use the address as the coinbase for the validators Consensys has already built out infrastructure for

This would mean the transaction fees and validator rewards would all target the multi-sig.

TBD / discussion points

• $BESU as a synthetic representation of validator stake, rewards and tx fees with a peg to ETH
• smoothing of rewards