Name: JasonW
Wallet Address or ENS: 0xfe8a5765bDdA3A31801E89d4d183d30555B5F4e4 (jwindawi.eth)
Tally Profile URL: Tally | jwindawi.eth
What area are you most interested in contributing to?
My focus in governance is on building a sustainable future for Arbitrum DAO. I’ve worked as a governance lead for a DeFi DAO as well as being a governance-focused protocol specialist for Alchemy. Prior to that, my background is in institutional tradfi investing and governance, as well as a stint in academia as an organizational sociologist studying blockchain projects. I’ve become an Arbitrum delegate because I believe in the tech and in the community and am looking forward to building together. Specific areas I’m in interested in include:
- Supporting Infrastructure
- Tooling, Improving protocol decentralization
- Improving governance participation
Please share your stance on overall goals for the DAO
As the author of AIP-2, I’ve seen firsthand how the Arbitrum DAO has grown since its earliest days to become one of the most innovative community governance structures in the ecosystem. This growth has been strongly aligned with the community values in Section 6 of the DAO’s Constitution, and I’m excited to contribute to the DAO’s continued evolution along those lines.
Within that context, there are several areas I see as critical to the DAO’s future:
- Growing the ecosystem sustainably. Arbitrum operates in a highly competitive space and needs to continue to excel at capturing mind and market share. At the same time, the DAO Treasury is not infinite, and funds need to be spent with a long term view. This means that transparency, accountability and demonstrated benefits need to increase jointly with the amount of ARB spent on any single initiative.
- Funding innovation. Offchain Labs continues to contribute leading technology for the space and for Arbitrum. The DAO can also contribute by directing funds to projects with the potential to accelerate the development of Arbitrum’s stack.
- Expanding DAO participation. The DAO Constitution defines social and technical inclusivity as core community values, and they should both be kept in focus as core goals. The DAO should play an important role in meeting these goals by continuing to invest in programs that give motivated community members ways to contribute beyond governance and code development.
Sample voting issue 1
I would vote against this proposal, while acknowledging the improvements made to it by Flipside over the course of its development as well as the fundamentally attractive concept of “no negative net UNI”.
Proposed amendments
The core of my objection to this proposal as presented is that it bundles two complex proposals into an even more complex one. This bundling compounds the related issue of centralizing both benefits and control around Flipside. Because of this, the proposal would benefit from splitting the grant program from the funding/investment components into their own proposals, each of which could then be crafted to be more compelling.
The first component would remain the ecosystem activation and retention via bounties, though with a more explicit commitment beyond that stated in the proposal to fund bounty programs to be managed by other providers. This part of the grant would also benefit from some form of multi-stakeholder oversight along the lines of the original Allocation Committee, though with an explicit mandate to ensure that bounties are distributed and measured effectively.
The second component would be the investment mandate to fund the bounty program. There are a number of areas for improvement in the program as proposed, not least of which is the projected yield of 30%. The absence of a performance track record makes this impossible to evaluate, which is unfortunate given the vulnerability of the bounty program’s funding to fluctuations in this yield. Charging what amounts to 50% fees for this yield would also be far outside of tradfi standards for such a strategy, and would surely eat into the yield on a net basis. The DAO would be better served by opening this component to competitive bids that would add price discipline and pressure for more transparency around the projected sources of yield and their sustainability. The proposed Allocation Committee could then oversee the selected vendor, eliminating the need for the Oversight Committee.
Centralization vs. efficacy tradeoff
Decentralization isn’t an a priori good in all cases - there are times when centralization can allow a project to go farther, faster. That said, this proposal illustrates a few possibilities for adjusting the balance between centralization and decentralization to be more effective.
One of these is through competition, which is to say, by decentralizing at the start of the process in order to get to the best possible provider(s) for each part of the proposal, so that whoever is selected has the DAO’s trust to operate regardless of how centralized they are. Another is the path followed by Flipside in terms of opening participation to multiple projects in its revised proposal, as well as in its proposal of oversight committees with broad stakeholder representation.
Sample voting issue 2
My vote in this case would be for full reimbursement - the funds were owed to retail users as well as (ultimately) the members of other DAOs, and there was no possibility of the hacked DAO moving forward to justify keeping any funds in the treasury.
Conflicts of interest
I have no current conflicts of interest, and will revise my profile to disclose any future conflicts should they arise.