The Council of Badgers: Results are in!

4 min readMar 4, 2021

Introducing the Community Elected Councilors

Hello Badgers,

The Badger Community Council is a group of representatives tasked with overseeing the Badger Grants Program, and are stewards of the funds allocated by the treasury for the Grant Program. More specifically, they will evaluate if a community member’s grant proposal is in alignment with the criteria passed by the DAO in BIP 28.

The council is composed of seven members: four community members and three long-term core contributors. Of the four community councilors, at least two must have technical expertise to conduct necessary grant analysis. For more information on the Council, check out this article.

Council members were selected via a three-day nomination period, followed by emoji-voting in Discord to narrow nominees down to the top ten. These ten were then voted upon by $BADGER token holders in Snapshot. Congratulations to those that were voted into the seats!

Without further ado, here are the newly-elected Councilors along with excerpts from their nominations:

Gabrielhaines

Gabriel is a Crypto Personality and YouTuber, focusing on DeFi projects with long-term value. He was in BadgerDAO before launch and brought many people to the community through his videos. He is clearly qualified and has a unique ability to promote our vision and bring more partners and contributors onboard.

Tritium — VLK

Understands Badger and the larger goals, helps the community to understand, contributes to building with DevOps, code, crypto, IL/LP plays. Friendly. Well spoken. Global viewpoint. Listens. Participates in discussions.

blackbear

This person has a great working knowledge of Badger and has shown to be dedicated, helpful, and optimistic. He is Badger’s Head of Support and has been around since inception.

ethkey

[I]n the game for a long time with a vision that crypto should help everyone find more wealth. working in btc/mining for almost 10 years. Has done some work with the badger team for development. Has been farming in DeFi since there was something to farm. This dude gets it, and he has the p[ers]pective of someone with some bags who is a HODLer at heart. He’s thoughtful and friendly. We need someone like this.

Representing the long-term core contributors:

Masonv

Risk Management and financial services focused. Experience with small businesses, crypto, and traditional finance helped him see the potential to unlock bitcoin as the worlds best financial asset. Mason is excited to explore how DAO’s and their communities create long term sustainability.

Shakeshack

Shakeshack provides tremendous technical expertise having built platform and core infrastructure at a variety of startups and large tech companies with experience from design, launch, deploy, to scale. Working in tandem with seeders, he drove validations and review testing for DIGG and is continuing to drive the execution of CLAWs.

Defi Frog

This Frog leads operations at BadgerDAO and has been a key player in structuring proposals, teams, incentive programs, models, and processes. Frog was closely involved with the formation of the Badger Grants Program and spearheaded the Badger Cetedel Program and is excited to kick off the Council of Badgers with some of the most recognized and decorated badgers!

For those that were nominated but were not elected, please don’t be discouraged. We recognize the contributions that you continue to consistently bring, and we’re looking to build additional ways for you to get involved at a higher level. Stay tuned for additional information on this!

With that said, we believe that scaling BadgerDAO, which ships projects on a near-weekly basis, will be best executed alongside additional loyal and respected badgers of the community. With the expansion of our contributors and full-time builders, the Council will fulfill a very crucial role in ensuring the quality of Badgers building for the DAO via Ecosystem Grants, ultimately keeping the treasury allocations effectively distributed.

Welcome to the Council!

With the formation of the Council complete, we are also excited to officially open applications to the Badger Grants Program. As described in BIP 28, there are four types of grants: Governance, Ecosystem, Referral, and Community. Of these, Ecosystem and Referral Grants will be evaluated by the Council. Governance Grants will continue to be handled through BIPs on the Forum.

Interested parties may submit applications using the links below, where they can access forms for each type of grant (community, referral, ecosystem). BIP 28 detailed the criteria for grants, and it is by these standards that the Council will assess each application. The application process will be as follows:

Proposing party submits an application through the relevant submission form. Simultaneously, proposing party should alert the community to its submission by posting in #proposal-discussion.
Badger’s Grants Curator provides the application to the Council and oversees the evaluation period.
The Council Members individually review the application and discuss amongst the Council.
The Council will then render a decision on the application by vote, approving or denying the grant request.
If approved, the Grants Curator connects the proposing party to the relevant team members to discuss in greater detail.