Despite voting “Yes” on Snapshot, I will be voting “Against” on Tally. My Snapshot vote was made in favor of seeing where changes would lead, however upon additional reflection and review of the changes to the proposal I don’t believe the proposal should move forward as stands.
I previously expressed hesitancy towards the size of the grant, mainly as a % of the DAO budget, but also the size in relation to the potential benefits funding specifically gaming could provide. The extension of the program from 2 to 3 years is appreciated, however I think ultimately this is too large of a grant to focus specifically on gaming. I don’t really believe the gaming ecosystem is worth pursuing with this type of funding and given how far behind Arbitrum already is in the gaming space I fear we will just be throwing funding at hopelessly catching up. Additionally, people I represent as a delegate have shown either apathy or opposition to this type of spend. I am all for ‘spend it if you got it’, but I think this is too narrow of a focus over too short of a timeframe to be spending this large of a budget on.
I will note that I see value in the Infrastructure Bounties portion of this proposal, and as such on the off chance this does not pan out I’d be for further discussion / funding of something like that.
I also must echo concern expressed about the administrative costs. This is a hefty cost, both in terms of straight ARB as well as a percentage of the total ask. In fairness to the proposal, there has been some expanded explanations of the costs, but I still think they aren’t fully substantiated and a little underwhelming given the time this proposal has been worked on. For example, an independent analysis of staffing costs was done, but then it was doubled without much explanation beyond “our estimates were higher”. I will caveat all this with this - if the analysis is accurate and this is just the cost of business in the gaming space… then fair enough. However, I think then the discussion circles back to my main point - I’m not sure the cost to run this is worth the potential benefits.
Also, as a more general point — I’m not a fan of the precedent being set to just start paying people to draft proposals. I understand a lot of effort goes into these things (100s of hours as noted above), but this wasn’t part of the Snapshot vote and to throw it in as part of the Tally vote makes it feel pork barrel-ish (for a lack of a better word). In that obviously no one is going to reject a 225m ARB tally vote solely over a $100k spend… so it puts a voter in a difficult position where even if said voter is against that specific spend they are forced to stomach it to get a proposal through they would otherwise support.