We appreciate @Immutablelawyer and other ARDC members bringing forward this extension.
We also strongly resonate with Entropy’s recent retrospective, which identified the core structural issue: by fixing six-month budget caps and effectively keeping providers on retainer, ARDC risks incentivizing research to meet budget allocations rather than to genuinely address DAO needs, and it lacks detailed consensus on expectation and thus, failing to make a real impact from research. The true value of research is not the quantity or even technical quality of the outputs, but rather their tangible influence on delegate opinions, budgeting decisions, and broader DAO strategy.
We recognize two main ways the DAO could structurally address this issue. First is an impact-based funding model, where upfront base payments are reduced (e.g., 30–40% of current levels), and the remainder released only after retroactive evaluation by delegates or proposal authors who would score reports quarterly based on their actual impact. The second approach involves introducing a detailed pre-research scoping phase to explicitly define how each deliverable would benefit DAO decision-making, which is to expand the role of the Supervisory Council and involve more participants in the process. However, we suspect that this second option may introduce considerable overhead and slow down processes, making it less desirable in practice.
We therefore encourage exploring better design for coordinating this inititiave, one potential path being modifying the proposal to incorporate a lightweight yet explicit retroactive impact-assessment mechanism. Without such a change, or a similarly effective structural revision, we hesitate to support extending the current model for another six months.