On December, 2022, the Alchemist Council has decided to vest all MIST funding coming from inflation over 3 years (a community vote was held to determine the duration). This is a first for the blockchain space and is a way to further align the interests of the community. Vesting ensures that community members who receive funding through inflation will be incentivized to work on projects that benefit the community over the long-term, rather than just focusing on short-term gains. This helps to align the interests of community members with the long-term success of the community, which the Council hopes will lead to more sustainable and impactful projects being developed within Alchemist.
Alchemist utilizes Sablier to send vested MIST to its contributors in the form of streams. A vested MIST stream has a start date, an end date, a receiver address, and a quantity of MIST.
Once a vested stream kicks off, the receiver of the stipend begins accruing claimable MIST proportionate to the amount of time that has passed since the start date.
Vested MIST streams don't stack on top of each other. To get the claimable MIST the receiver must perform an Ethereum transaction per stream. So if a receiver wants to claim from all their streams they will need to perform as many Ethereum transactions as there are streams.
If you are an Alchemist contributor and are receiving vested MIST, go to your Sablier dashboard at https://app.sablier.finance/ to view your incoming streams. And check out the Sablier docs at https://docs.sablier.finance/protocol/faq/basics.
Example
A community member, AlcheMisty, has built a Twitter bot for one of Alchemist's projects, Chaos Labs and also a Dune Dashboard of MIST vesting stats for Alchemist. The Alchemist Council has decided to send this contributor:
Stream 1: 120 vested MIST over a period of 12 months for the Twitter bot
Stream 2: 900 vested MIST over a period of 36 months for the Dune Dashboard.
After half a year AlcheMisty decides to claim the accrued MIST from each stream. Let's first calculate how much that is for each stream:
Stream 1: (6/12) * 120 = 60 claimable MIST
Stream 2: (6/36) * 900 = 150 claimable MIST
To claim their MIST AlcheMisty has to kick off 2 separate Ethereum transactions to the Sablier contracts, one for each stream. Once the transactions are complete AlcheMisty will have 210 MIST in their wallet.
The remainder of AlcheMisty's stream will continue accruing linearly relative to the start dates rather than the time AlcheMisty made their first MIST claims from the streams.
Most Alchemist products receive a monthly budget of MIST to be vested to their contributors. The budget amount is established by the Council on a per product basis and is based on a number of factors including: current amount of inflation available for funding, the team's value add to Alchemist, team size and needs, and the future potential of what the team is working on, other projects interested in an allocation of vested MIST funding, and the vested MIST that other teams are receiving within Alchemist. Teams are required to fully vest their budget to their contributors with a 3 year vesting schedule or return any excess unvested MIST back to the Council at the end of the month before unlocking any additional funding.
All Alchemist contributors are evaluated on an equal footing when receiving vested MIST, because the type of labor they perform in service to Alchemist is assessed relative to what other contributors are doing.
The methodology for arriving at the exact allocations of vested MIST is as follow:
The Council evaluated all the different kind of contributions performed by Alchemist contributors.
Next contributions were matched up with equivalent professions in a well developed job market. We specifically looked at New York city using public Glassdoor job market data.
Afterwards these professions were matched to the salaries they received in NY. This enabled us to normalize salaries relative to each other. So if a Community Moderator is receiving $50,000 a year in NY while a Sr. Software Engineer is receiving $200,000 a year, we now know that within Alchemist the latter would need to receive 4x as much vested MIST as the former. This was performed for all types of roles within Alchemist.
We then used the role with the lowest compensation based on Glassdoor data as a unit of work to measure other roles against. So a Community Moderator would represent a 1, while a Sr. Software Engineer would be a 4. And if a business developer was receiving $110,000 they be a 2.1 (because 100,000/50,000 = 2.1).
Once we got the units of work for ALL the contributors within Alchemist receiving a stipend we then added them up and got around 128 units of work. This then enabled us to take the monthly amount of inflation that the Council Multisig receives and figuring out exactly how much vested MIST each of the contributors ought to be rewarded by. To simplify this estimate we assumed that all contributors are contributing an equal amount of time on a monthly basis.
The full document involved in performing this analysis can be viewed here.
