Culture of CWA- the good, the bad, and the ugly
A deep dive into the Custodian weekly allowance
DISCLAIMER: The following does not represent the views of the IPF.
Seeding an ecosystem
The Custodian weekly allowance, also known as the CWA, is likely the most common Proposal in the Alien Worlds DAOs. Aspirational to new users, CWA also provides an incentive for Members to convert to Custodians.
Part of the expected benefit of being a Custodian is the privilege of the custodian weekly allowance, a Resource distribution meant to incentivize Custodians and accommodate the time and energy it takes to perform the duties of being a Custodian on the Alien Worlds Syndicates. CWA also drives ecosystem value, and creative interpretations of how to deploy Syndicate resources.
But who decides what the CWA is each week? How is that amount determined? How does it get changed?
Defining Value
What constitutes value from Syndicate to Syndicate can be difficult to quantify, as discussed in the recent article, Value Addition VS. Value Extraction — Why Whales Leave. Because how communities define value can vary so widely from community to community, how we communicate what we believe to be valuable becomes paramount in whether or not we can accept differing opinions as being just as valid as our own.
Culture of CWA
One of the benefits of each Syndicate is that the Custodians can decide amongst themselves what they feel an adequate CWA is. However, this can also become problematic when there’s the issue of two Custodians not communicating with a 3 Custodian majority, or vice versa. Should the 3 of 5 majority of Custodians still grant the CWA to the other 2 Custodians, even if they do nothing more than claim the budget, or distribute the CWA? Or as is the case across many Syndicates, nothing at all.
But recently, the topic of CWA has become debated among Custodians, and even within Syndicates that Custodians share.
Thus far, the overarching culture in Alien Worlds seems to support CWA as an entitlement to any Custodian on any Syndicate. Since the launch of the Alien Worlds DAOs, this has played out in a few ways.
Let’s take a look at the history of each Syndicate.
For the most part, we can see a common CWA that generally ranges from 10,000 TLM to 15,000 TLM. Below is an approximation of the timeline for CWA weekly changes in each Syndicate since the launch of the DAOs.
Neri —
CWA started at 5,000 TLM in November 2022 at the launch of the DAOs but rose to 13,545 TLM and sustained that amount until the eventual increase in July 2023 to 15,000 TLM. Their CWA stayed here until October 2023, when it doubled to 30,000 TLM, where it has remained.
Kavian —
Kavian Custodians seemed to only distribute a CWA in December for 9,403 TLM until April 2023 when 10,000 TLM per Custodian was passed. This stayed consistent through July, when it increased to 15,000 TLM, and then again in October to 20,000 TLM, where it has remained.
Magor —
Launching at 5,000 TLM, the CWA increased to 10,000 TLM in December 2022 before dropping down to 7,500 TLM for January and February of 2023. It then increased to 10,000 TLM and sustained there until June 2023, where it briefly rose to 12,500 TLM before leveling out and staying at 15,000 TLM to date.
Naron —
Of all the Syndicates, Naron has established the most diverse CWA practices based on work performed. Some Custodians received only 10,000 TLM for week 1–9 of their duties. That’s 1,111 TLM a week. On the high end, a custodian received 46,000 TLM for week 1–9 (5,111 TLM a week.) This varied practice continued until April 2023, when Custodians each received 2,882 TLM a week, which diminished slightly as the budget decreased over the coming months. In August of 2023, Custodians received 6,658 TLM a week, which again diminished in tandem with the weekly budget until November, when the CWA was Proposed as Council, awarding Custodians 1,000 TLM a week.
Veles —
Starting at 4,800 TLM when the DAOs launched, this quickly moved to 10,000 TLM until August when it was briefly 5,934 TLM. It jumped to 15,000 TLM for almost two months, and then to the CWA Proposed as Council, at 1,000 TLM.
Eyeke —
Consistent since the launch at 10,000 TLM until March, when for around two months, the CWA dropped to around 7,313 TLM. It rose to around 9,293 TLM until June when it jumped back up to 10,000 TLM, sustaining there until October, 2023 when it increased to 20,000 TLM, where it has since remained.
Requests for Change
A recent article by Mining Matters pointed out some inherent flaws in the CWA. Often we see that a Syndicate will award themselves the CWA that matches other Syndicates, even if that CWA is a larger percentage of their Custodian weekly budget, sometimes even amounting to nearly a third of the Resources available to them to create Proposals from.
“Custodian Weekly Allowance
Jumping right into the topic: looking at the DAOs, some planets already spend more on the Custodian Weekly Allowance than what the treasury of that planet earns in the same time. This is obviously not sustainable and needs to be tackled. As a first (but not final) measure we would like to ask all DAOs to cap their Custodian Weekly Allowance at 20% of the weekly allocation from the treasury, or the income to the treasury, whichever is lower.Nonetheless, in the long run, it would be best to reward actions instead of a general allowance. We also know, however, that there are some general tasks that each custodian should do to stay on top of the developments around Alien Worlds, which is sometimes hard to quantify. Maybe this is a topic where the community can come up with and forward constructive ideas for solutions?”
The DAOs, the Metaverse and Everything — Mining Matters
Examples of CWA Culture
Notably, when the Custodian weekly budget increased from 2% to 4%, Kavian and Veles celebrated with an increase intended to be temporary, but other Syndicates didn’t interpret the associated memo in that way. Neri chose to double their Custodian’s weekly allowance from 15,000 TLM to 30,000 TLM, where it has remained despite community backlash.
On Naron, we see a very small CWA that’s more based in rewarding individual Custodians a CWA relative to work contributed, despite their budget being higher than those Syndicates that rewarded their CWA with a larger percentage of the budget. Naron also rewards the smallest CWA.
Magor Custodians created CWA’s for what they called Custodian 6 and Custodian 7, requiring that those in that position on the candidate list not be a Custodian of another Syndicate, and join specific chat apps. However, this is difficult to maintain since the vote power changes daily, as well as the positions held by anyone in the candidate list. More so, ultimately it is only Custodians who can create and pass Proposals. So in this case, a “community allowance” would be a more appropriate title to the permissions in the smart contract. This practice only lasted as long as the running majority on Magor changed for a period of time. Since the majority changed, no further Custodian 6 and Custodian 7 Proposals have been Proposed, which makes it seem this was intended only for specific people.
On planets like Kavian, despite the majority of Custodian positions being held by the same three people for six months, the two minority Custodians still received the same CWA, though there was little active collaboration or contribution to the Syndicate. However, once the majority changed, a new Custodian created five individual CWA Proposals (instead of using the TLMsplitting tool), but signed only three of the five Proposals (the new power of majority). When the previous majority won the next election, they followed en suite, but instead required the minority Custodians to join their preferred platform of communication to receive their CWA.
Changes in culture
A heated debate ensued around what the rights to the CWA are, and if the CWA should be an automatic privilege of being a Custodian, or based on work contributed in a sliding scale. Other Custodians and community members feel that the CWA should be capped to a percentage of the weekly budget, not a standardized 10,000 TLM –20,000 TLM, let alone 30,000 TLM.
In the Alien Worlds docs, the ability for a Custodian to claim their pay can happen directly from the smart contract, in which case CWA would not dependent on any other Custodians to Propose or approve. Turning on this feature would eliminate the need for consensus around what an appropriate CWA is from week to week, but consensus would required to establish best practices.
In the meantime, the CWA has the power to become a cultural expression of the Custodians who steward the Syndicates, though they often disapprove of how other Syndicates decide their own culture of value. While this demonstrates the beauty and power of the AW DAOs, CWA has also become a point of contention, and a way to wield power over other Custodians, even within the same Syndicate.
Conclusion
The culture of CWA, while inherent to the roles of Custodians, remains divided on how to justify its value.
One such solution could be to allow each Custodian to Propose their own CWA, based on what they feel their contribution reflects on a weekly basis to the Syndicate.
However, the foresight of such work can be hard to predict without open communication and consensus with other Custodians on which projects add value to the ecosystem. And despite the disagreements around changes to the CWA, Custodians generally expressed openness to changing the CWA if the intent to change was openly communicated for discussion.
Interpretations of CWA will remain dynamic, and it will be exciting to see how the dynamics around it evolve as new communities come and go. Custodians can now discuss these issues in MSIG.chat, a new chat app designed for the Alien Worlds Syndicates and MSIGgroups!
What do you think the CWA should be?
Join Alien Edition on Wednesday, November 15th at 12:00 pm PST / 20:00 UTC for Segment #18, featuring “CWA — The good, the bad, and the ugly” during “Discuss With Us,” Alien Edition’s new conversation piece that bridges DAOs and the communities that build them together.
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