Beanstalk: The Road Ahead

The Beanstalk Roadmap is constantly evolving in light of new information. This post has been written with the following goals in mind:

• Organize the community to work together to put Beanstalk in a position to succeed over the long term. An inspired, organized and driven community is essential to the long term success of Beanstalk.
• Encourage discourse within the community on what is the best plan of action to make Beans the primary stablecoin protocol of DeFi. A lively community discourse centered around the right topics will drive high quality attention to Beanstalk.
• Outline our ideas for how the community’s time and resources should be allocated as of 10/6/21.

This roadmap may change based on community feedback.

An overarching long term goal is to ensure Beanstalk is not dependent on Publius indefinitely. While the protocol itself doesn’t require significant additional development from Publius, in order to succeed Beanstalk must attract a strong and resourceful community that grows — and helps Beanstalk grow — organically without Publius’ direct and perpetual involvement.

Reliance on Publius presents both an existential risk to Beanstalk, and one of its biggest challenges. This is reflected throughout the list, but also in a few specific instances worth highlighting:

1. Dev Budget — We will propose one-time BIPs that will mint new Beans and allocate them to a development fund. In the short term, we expect Publius to be responsible for approving payments from the dev budget to developers. Over time, we expect to decentralize this process.

The dev budget will allow us to incentivize:

• Both front and back end developers who are interested in Beanstalk to get their hands on the protocol.
• Publius to start sourcing developers for a long term development team.
• User experience to improve in line with the growth of Beanstalk.

We expect community feedback on the specific amount and structure of the dev budget. If you have thoughts on the structure of the dev budget, want to get paid in Beans to work on Beanstalk or know someone that might, come chat in our #dev Discord channel here.

2. Community Organizer — Finding a community member interested in serving as Community Organizer is an essential step to moving Beanstalk away from reliance on Publius. In the future, the goal is to fund this through a BIP as a full time position.

Finding the right community organizer presents a tall task. They must have:

• Skills organizing and managing a large group.
• Deep technical understanding of cryptocurrency, economics, and the crypto-economic landscape.
• Some technical expertise wrt computers and blockchains.

We hope to source potential options from the community in the coming weeks.

The BIPs to fund both a dev budget and Community Organizer would require approval from the community according to the normal governance process.

We have declined to give hard estimates on timing, and instead group the various items in blocks. This is reflective of both the ever-changing nature of this document, as well as the difficulty in giving exact due dates for technical development.

With all of that being said, here is the Beanstalk Roadmap for the coming months as of 10/6/21.

Short Term (Rest of October)

• (DONE) First live AMA with the Beanstalk community via the Beanstalk Discord channel. (Planned for Thursday 16:00 UTC, Season 1482)
• Publish economic analysis of 1st debt cycle.
• (DONE) Deploy Beanstalk Subgraph V1, which will allow us to display a whole suite of advanced analytics on the website. This should also improve website performance as it will replace the need to parse events on the UI.
• (DONE) Improve tooltips for the website to improve clarity for each transaction. We would love feedback from the community on what information is helpful for different tooltips.
• Create Telegram bots for transactions and account information that runs on top of the subgraph.
• (DONE) Continue to publish in various locations about Beanstalk, starting with an initial post about Beanstalk on Reddit. We were just approved to post on r/CryptoCurrency.
• Select a high quality auditor to conduct a security audit on the Beanstalk code.
• (DONE) Propose various BIPs to the community to fund a:
  - Short term dev budget
  - Short term community organizing & marketing budget

Our estimation is that in total the initial funding BIPs will total at most a few hundred thousand Beans. We intend to create a vesting schedule on all payments made from BIPs.

Medium Term (Rest of 2021)

• Begin the initial security audit.
• Publish the current website code for bean.money.
• Apply dev budget to start improving UX, UI, and graphics on the website.
• Apply dev budget to start to work on the long term BIPs and infrastructure upgrades on the back end.
• Select a community leader and approve/fund the position through a BIP.
• Begin to have Beanstalk incorporated into other protocols.

Long Term (Early 2022)

• Finish the initial security audit.
• Make Stalk and Seeds tradable ERC-20 tokens.
• Make Bean and LP Deposits tradable ERC-1155 tokens.
• Create a Pod market in some capacity. We would love to source ideas for the best way to do this from the community, as Pods are a novel asset with a unique structure. This may also have relevance to the market structure for Bean and LP Deposits.
• Approve and fund at least 1 official Beanstalk development team through a BIP, independent of Publius. We will start to source devs from the dev work that will be done over the next few months.

Some important future developments of Beanstalk did not make the list. Below are brief explanations as to why they are not currently on the roadmap.

1. L2: Making Beanstalk — and passive USD Deposit accounts — widely available to smaller Farmers remains incredibly important to us. However, the most natural way for Beanstalk to scale to L2 is to have a totally independent Beanstalk deployed on each additional chain. In the short term, our primary focus is on having the original Beanstalk successfully maintain its peg. Doing so will greatly enhance the ability of other Beanstalk to be successfully deployed on other chains and for other assets. Launching another Beanstalk before the original has established itself as reliable will create competition between the two, which is not appropriate at Beanstalk’s current stage.

2. Alterations to the Economic Model: In general, we are thrilled with the functioning of Beanstalk during its first debt cycle. In the near future we will be publishing a more detailed analysis of the first debt cycle and explain why we have thus far decided against proposing any of the various economics-related BIPs we have been considering.