In support of Yearn’s governance process
The past few weeks and months have been wild for any Yearn believer. There were ups and downs that were pretty exhausting. I even had to admit, I ended up selling and rebuying my YFI several times in the process — which obviously ended up diluting me badly because I should know better, but that’s life.
For those on the sidelines, this is brief summary of what happened:
1. BABY (Buy Back and Build) proposal was passed to redistribute protocol revenues (https://gov.yearn.finance/t/yip-56-buyback-and-build/8929)
2. A previously unknown member of the community (yfi_lit) came out of nowhere to revive the possibility of minting additional YFI (https://gov.yearn.finance/t/proposal-developer-incentives/8920)
3. A proposal to mint 6,666 YFI was proposed by the core team and passed (https://snapshot.page/#/yearn/proposal/QmX8oYTSkaXSARYZn7RuQzUufW9bVVQtwJ3zxurWrquS9a)
4. A new group emerged from the first proposal that reignited the possibility of burning the minter (https://gov.yearn.finance/t/yfi-mint-controls-burn-the-mint-alternatives/9501)
5. V1 Dai vault was exploited (https://www.coindesk.com/yearn-finance-dai-vault-exploit)
6. Yearn’s team restored lost funds with a very elegant solution leveraging the newly minted YFI (https://cointelegraph.com/news/yearn-finance-puts-expanded-treasury-to-use-by-repaying-victims-of-11m-hack)
7. The Compensation Working Group proposed a new retention package for key contributors (https://gov.yearn.finance/t/yearn-retention-packages/9698)
While I’m quite surprised that YFI’s price not only remained relatively stable but even appreciated during this process, this post is not to discuss price and my terrible trading tactics but to fully and heartily support Yearn’s governance process.
First of all — all decisions from the team ended up being the right calls, without hesitation. While as a YFI holder I dream of a token that appreciates in both the short and long term, I recognize that’s never possible and most of the time you need to make tradeoffs. It’s unbelievably hard to make difficult decisions by consensus in a regular organization, but nearly impossible in a decentralized futuristic organization without a leadership structure that has thousands of entitled anonymous stakeholders.
I was involved in some of the private Telegram groups with live proposals and have to admit, I’m impressed by the commitment shown by Tracheopteryx and the rest of Yearn’s team. They placed themselves under the excruciating process of public judgement, jeopardizing a significant part of their assets (they owned a significant amount of YFI even before the mint), solely because they believe in what Yearn stands for and deeply want it to succeed.
There is no real precedent for what happened. A decision-making process had to be designed as fast as possible, by people that had nothing in common except allegiance to the project, in a very public way… and it went surprisingly well. Not only did the mint happen, but it allowed Yearn to survive a major crisis literally days later.
Without dwelling on the specifics, I guess the whole point of this post is to state that for the first time I’ve seen decentralized governance actually work, and it’s freaking powerful. People with nothing in common make the right decisions, under pressure, for the long-term sustainability of an abstract project. I’ve never been more hopeful about the future of DeFi and look forward to what Yearn’s team can build now that they have the right resources and incentives. Despite the ups and downs I still believe Yearn is something new, unique, unstoppable… a fast-moving entity unlike any other organization that has ever existed.
Yearn is finance in our new frenetic, global and decentralized world.
I leave you with Trach’s final words in the article quoted below: “This is where my true passion lies. I am here because I believe Yearn to be the world’s most advanced decentralized autonomous entity. It is a new life form.” I feel nothing but respect for that thoughtful feathered dinosaur.
Note: I strongly recommend that you read this article to expand on Trach’s thoughts: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2021/02/15/love-coordination-at-the-frontier-of-governance-how-yearn-minted-300-million
