By Alex Woodard(Arca) & Dean Eigenmann(Dialectic)
Summary
Since Maki transitioned to an advisor role, Sushi moved to more of a flat organizational structure. However, DAOs and Digital Asset projects are still very nascent and require structure to continue to grow. Over the past year, Sushi has seen tremendous success in community-driven DAO and protocol efforts, but as the protocol scales, it needs proper resourcing, processes, and principles for the various teams that are building under the Sushi DAO. This proposal outlines the details of what the new DAO structure of Sushi core will look like to provide more organizational structure that allows the team to ship best-in-class community-owned products while providing more oversight to the Sushi community. Additionally, this structural proposal will be used for future DAO’s, similar to Sushi Samurai’s, building on top of Sushi and Sushi’s treasury. TL;DR: The following updates to the framework of Sushi DAO are proposed in this post:
- Establish a new formalized entity through a community mandate.
- Establish a new operational multisig within this new entity.
- Establish a new organizational structure for current and future DAO’s that allows Sushi to be properly resourced and continue to scale.
- Establish further checks and balances between the various teams developing under Sushi and the Sushi community.
- Establish further frameworks to install community-driven leadership and vision.
Motivation/Rationale
In just one year’s time, Sushi has grown from a single-product DEX to establishing itself as a key player in Defi with a community-driven DeFi suite of six complementary products. This growth has been phenomenal but has led to natural growing pains that need to be addressed. In order to scale, each product line must be properly resourced to fully execute the community vision. This proposal aims to adequately structure Sushi Ops DAO, and future DAOs developing Sushi, with a formalized entity, processes, structure, and community leadership in order to capture and capitalize on future growth.
The Current Team structure
Sushi Ops currently operates under a flat-org structure. Whereas this has the benefit of allowing core contributors to flow between product lines and work on what they are most interested in, it isn’t scalable and leaves some product lines under-resourced.
Proposed Entity, DAO/ Open-Source Contributor re-process with community mandate
Goals:
The goal of this new DAO structure is to better align the core Sushi team with the community by providing governance oversight to the core contributors, and accountability, by creating a structure that allows Sushi to continue to scale its product offering for the years to come.
Structure and Entity Transition Plan:
- Creation of a new Ops entity under the Sushi DAO to formalize processes and structure.
- Creation of Product Teams, with an organizational level hierarchy for onboarding new contributors.
- Creation of a new multi-sig with community mandate and more governance oversight.
- Moving funds over to the new entity to fund operations through the year.
- EOY - Leadership will put out a proposed budget 2022 roadmap, Q1 Roadmap & budget requesting funding from governance. Explained further in the leadership section below.
New Entity:
The Sushi dev studio will establish a legal entity that provides oversight and protection over the contributors. The entity will follow the legal frameworks of a DAO with governance oversight.
New Entity Structure:
The structure of the new entity will do two things. 1) The creation of product teams, and 2) The breakdown of contributors through the creation of an OSC (Open-Source Contributor) levels model.
OSC Level Separated by Different level of Trust
The DAO is streamlined into Entry → Contributor → Trusted Contributors → Do’ers, each with different trust levels. This model has a distinct ownership-based and decentralized way of participating in Sushi DAO while remaining structured in decision-making alongside the community. It is also a tested framework and one that has been used by Sushi’s partner.
The proposed OSC (Open-Source Contributor) Process:
Sushi Factory Level:
Sushi is DAO, and anyone can come into the Sushi Factory, which is a group of contributing members who receive a 1-month grant to work on their own RFPs (request for proposal). This will be achieved via the Sushi Gigs Platform which is being built by the internal team. These RFP’s will be approved by the community, with any further grants and product lines developed going through governance. This allows encouragement for ideas and talents to flow into the DAO, and further build the community on a larger scale.
Sushi Contributors
Sushi Contributors compose into product teams that cross-function with each other. They work closely with the Sushi Factory to ship products, work with projects, and bring products to market
Product Teams (written with feedback from Core Team):
Products Teams:
- Trident
- Kashi
- Shoyu
- MISO
- Multichain
Every product team would consist of one or multiple contributors focused on product, designers, front-end, solidity, web3, marketing, & business development. Some of these contributors will be available to work on more than one product, but all products will have at least one of each. The distribution of the existing core team across these products will be determined by an internal poll that gauges their level of expertise and interest in each of the products.
Product: Define the vision and strategy for the product and product team. Full understanding of the scope of the product from initial wireframes to building out the product to designing go-to-market strategies, as well as overseeing business development and marketing efforts. They would work closely with leadership to develop quarterly/yearly roadmap, team budget, team KPI’s, present updates at company-wide meetings, and communicate with leadership and operational multisig on hiring and firing to make sure the product team is adequately staffed.
Designers: UX and UI designers are responsible for building the frontend interfaces, iterating user personas, and designing user tests. Other areas include supporting marketing with marketing assets.
Front-end: FE devs should be responsible for implementing mockups as well as a deep understanding of web3 and developing apps that interact with smart contracts.
Solidity: Solidity devs are in control of the core functionalities of the product and ensure infrastructural compatibility with the rest of the product.
Marketing: Marketing should include product marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, and work with other product teams to have consistent brand and marketing efforts across all business lines. The marketing team will cross-coordinate with others products.
BizDev: BD focuses on bringing the product to retail and institutions, as well as onboarding inbound leads.
Operational multisig/Trusted Contributors
To give oversight back to the community, operational multisig members should be known members of the core team to the community and selected through a vetted process.
While the current Sushi DAO system has been effective for day-to-day purposes, the team has heard questions as to whether it privileges a tech-only mindset. To resolve this tension, and expand the Sushi DAO, signers should be known members among the core team, who work in either 1. Technical 2. Operational or 3. Product capacities, as opposed to the current structure, which is a fully technical operational multisig team. The ops team should be diversified with interests from other departments who represent different skills and experiences. Operational members will be split into product teams outlined above based on their interests, skill set, and team needs.
The community understands what’s in Sushi’s best interest, as well as who is best to be accountable to execute that mission with the rest of the core team. Therefore, operational multisig should be selected by governance via polls on the forum, instead of the current process – internally without governance. Core members who are interested in and capable of being on the Ops multisig can submit their names, and the community can decide who should sit on the committee via forum votes.
Community Selected Council/Do’ers
Community Selected Council/Do’ers will be deeply involved in the community and differentiated into operations, product, and development. They will work together and are responsible for the following tasks:
- Governance and community management - understand the community’s mission and execute that within the rest of the team.
- Project oversight – Working alongside the community to develop a product roadmap, KPI’s and work with DAO contributors to fill any gaps when necessary.
- Development of yearly/quarterly operations plan through governance and community engagement
- Develop a quarterly and yearly grant approved via governance proposal and approved by the community, to then allocate resources effectively to each product line.
- Develop Quarterly and Yearly updates for the community similar to tradfi 10Q/K’s.
- Participate in Monthly AMA’s to update and hear from the Sushi community.
- Work with the community and project managers on any onboarding and offboarding of core contributors to make sure each product team is adequately staffed.
- Offboarding to be decided by Community Selected Council, Do’ers alongside the operational multisig members.
- Point of contact for the community and contributors at Sushi and all other decentralized protocols.
To structure in accountability, the leadership team will be reviewed by governance. A vote to renew leadership will occur annually. If something happens that would require a faster timeline than the yearly review, governance can propose a vote. Additionally, if the core team decides that additional chefs for variance roles are needed, all new roles and people filling the roles will be voted upon by governance. A proposal to fill these leadership roles will be released immediately following a successful vote of this proposal. Additionally, we would like to work with the community on a Compensation Realignment Proposal for the core team following a successful vote of this proposal.