Name (organization or individual)
Griff Green
UPDATE
I have been a delegate for over a year now and have a few things I would like to push within the DAO:
- Fight conflicts of interests issues
- Reduce ARB spending (more no votes!)
- Use vesting more in payouts to align interests
- Add token utility to ARB
- Reduce grants and increase good investments.
These will be the issues I will fight for during this next year.
Wallet Address or ENS
griff.eth
Tally Profile URL
What area are you most interested in contributing to? choose up to two tags:
- Public Goods funding
- Improving Governance participation
Please share your stance on overall goals for the DAO:
Overall
I believe the best way for Arbitrum to maintain it’s lead in the L2 space is to collaborate with the other L2s as much as possible. This may seem counterintuitive, but this is a network effects game and the real market leaders are not Optimism and Starkware types, but Visa, JPMorgan and the Federal Reserve types. This is the big pie we are fighting for, and to get it we should be working together.
Also, we should be making every effort to be effective in our coordination and learn from the mistakes of other DAOs, and stay at the macro level for DAO wide governance decisions. If I end up with a large voice in this DAO I will be actively reviewing our Governance set up early one to avoid these mistakes.
Liquidity Mining?
In my opinion, aggressively pursuing liquidity mining may not be the best approach, but it’s crucial to bootstrap network effects. I recognized the importance of this early on when xDAI (now Gnosis Chain) and Polygon were the early popular EVM chains. Polygon put a lot of effort into business development and attracted a diverse range of organizations to their network by providing them with grants. On the other hand, xDai didn’t pursue that strategy, and we can see the outcomes.
As for Arbitrum, I believe it’s essential to aggressively engage all sectors of the market. Although Arbitrum has made significant strides in DeFi, other markets such as gaming, NFTs, and DAOs are still relatively underdeveloped on the platform compared to the rest of the industry. We should aggressively pursue these markets by employing token swaps, vested incentive programs, quadratic funding and milestone-based approaches. While I’m not particularly fond of liquidity mining, I believe that we should be open to using that (especially if the rewards are streamed to the user over longer periods of time) and there are also alternative approaches can help us attract strong strategic partners to the chain.
Sample Voting Issue 1: Uniswap & Flipside
How would you vote?
Against
What amendments would you make to the proposal if any?
If it were up to me, I would suggest starting with a smaller proposal before jumping into a $25 million defi play. It’s a lot of money to commit to a first-time experiment with a new partner, and we don’t want to risk so much so a partner can earn fees on defi and run a bounty program. Honestly the whole plan of putting UNI into Aave and borrowing ETH, while creative, was too risky.
To be honest, my preference is to use Quadratic Funding and Prop House for programs anyway as they are less centralized options. These methods offer a more democratic approach to funding and avoid concentrating power in a few hands.
How would you approach the tradeoff between centralization of authority and the ability to get things done?
I strongly believe that we shouldn’t have to choose between centralized control and community engagement when it comes to fund distribution. In my opinion, having a product person and centralized control is essential for developing products. However, when it comes to distributing grants, we should be leveraging centralized decision-making powers to design and implement processes that are interactive and engaging for the community while avoiding centralized points of failure.
Tools like Quadratic Funding and Prop House are already available and can help us distribute grants as a community to anyone who wants to participate and make the process more enjoyable. Additionally, emerging tools like Pairwise can further improve our options for community engagement. In my opinion, traditional yes/no voting, as Optimism was doing, is a waste of time. If that’s the alternative, I can understand why someone would opt for centralized grant approaches. However, I believe there are better options available to us.
Sample Voting Issue 2: FEI RARI Hack Reimbursement
Outside the flipping of the vote, how would you choose to handle this situation?
Split Reimbursement
The situation was quite complicated. Joey and his team at FEI promised a full reimbursement to the users, and for me, it’s crucial that DAOs maintain their integrity above all else. However, I don’t think Joe should have made such a commitment right away, as it’s not his money to give, it’s the DAO’s. Nonetheless, because he made this promise, the DAO should try to fulfill it to the best of our ability.
In this industry, even though we’re creating trustless systems, trust becomes crucial when those systems fail. That’s why organizations like Coinbase reimburse their users after hacks because it’s vital for people to trust the brand and believe that their assets are safe. It may cost a lot of money in the short term, but it will pay off in the long run.
The community would need to understand the impact of a $80 million loss for the DAO and then determine how to support those who have lost their funds. In my opinion, if there’s enough capital in the system, a full reimbursement makes sense. If not, we could split the reimbursement among the affected users, perhaps around 5% to 10% of a hair cut. This would be reasonable, especially considering that some people made a profits from the protocol before the exploit. As the organization responsible for managing smart contract risk, it’s important to be accountable when things go wrong.
Languages I speak and write:
English and a little Spanish
Disclosure of Conflict(s) of Interest:
I’m the Founder of several companies including Giveth, Dappnode, Common Stack, and General Magic. Additionally, I serve as a Steward on Gitcoin and ENS. One potential conflict is that I have close ties with Jordi Baylina from Polygon Hermez, and their zkEVM, as well as I am an important Steward for Optimism, both could be considered competitors. However, I view these connections as opportunities to strengthen the relationships among leaders in the scaling space. My approach is to bring everyone to the table and work together rather than pitting one against the other. I believe that we are not competing against eachother but cooperating in the fight against traditional financial systems and banks. That’s why Giveth hosted the #ScalingNOW Conference in 2018, and I want to continue that effort to help us recognize that we are all in this together.
As a Steward of Arbitrum, I will of course be committed to prioritizing Arbitrum’s interests over those of any other organizations. If there is a serious conflict of interest (eg Giveth request a grant to deploy on Arbitrum) I will abstain from voting. It’s my responsibility as a Steward, and I will fulfill it to the best of my ability. I’m impressed by what Arbitrum has accomplished. I’m a big fan and a friend of many in the community. I look forward to seeing further advancements and thank you for your delegation.