I want to share my perspective given that several delegates have raised concerns about the lack of clarity in the responsibilities of the various AAEs, particularly AF and OpCo.
I think that the main reason is that, to date, the OpCo is not yet 100% operational as originally designed. Fortunately, although not yet officially announced, the Head of OpCo is already part of the structure and is currently being onboarded.
So far, the absence of this figure, central to the entity and its role in inter-entity coordination, prevented the OpCo from advancing on a public strategy definition and the establishment of medium to long term objectives. With this key hire in place, both will take shape.
That said, the OpCo’s current core mandate is to operationalize new initiatives coming from the DAO, the coordination across AAEs and to proactively develop new business lines that generate revenue for the DAO.
On the first and second point, significant progress has been made. As shared in the recent transparency report, the OpCo Team took over initiatives such as Firestarters, DAO Events, RAD, Watchdog, Code of Conduct, various DAO’s Calls, and a number of other initiatives that are not visible on the forum, as they relate to coordination between AAEs and stakeholders. The OpCo Team also served as a receiving point for several new initiative proposals and delegate feedback, which were internally validated across the various AAEs teams. That coordination work does not always end up with a forum post but is heavily time consuming.
As for the Arbitrum Foundation, they detailed their responsibilities in their recent response:
Nowadays, with the DAO operations running much more smoothly thanks to the OpCo Team’s efforts, the clearest expression of what sets the OpCo apart from the Arbitrum Foundation will come from the discovery and development of new business lines that generate revenue for the DAO treasury. That work is only now beginning, though with the Head of OpCo and a CFO recently onboard, I expect it to translate into concrete and measurable impact for the DAO.