We are voting AGAINST this proposal in the temperature check.
I’d like to signal our sympathy for the overall idea. We do believe that a Grant Framework for the DAO is needed and should be funded by the DAO. However, we have some serious doubts regarding this proposal. We have already raised most of those issues either in a direct discussion with Saurabh or in the public discussion regarding grants framework. We expect the proposer to provide further clarification before the vote goes on-chain, if it were to go for an on-chain vote unchanged, we will vote against it in current form.
Before I go into specific concerns, I need to disclose that I’m currently a reviewer in Optimism Grants Council and I’ve been reviewer in the Grants Council in the previous season and been involved in Grants Tooling Committee the season before. Apart from that I have experience in real-world grants programs (EU-based grants programmes and startup accelerators).
The main concerns we have are:
- the budget for this Grants program is rather small. It’s just 1M ARB tokens for a 6-month program spread out for 4 domains. However, the distributed amount is just 800k ARB which makes it 200k ARB for each domain, which translates to ~33k ARB per domain per month. How many grants do we expect to provide if the budget is so small? What kind of grants can we fund with such amounts? Compared to Optimism for example - the grants from Builders Grants (which are considered rather small) are max 50k OP each, the Growth Experiments grants are up to 250k OP.
- Individual domain managers who review all grants in their domain are not only prone to bias, but more importantly they can be overwhelmed with this job, given the expected time allocated only 15hrs / week by domain manager. I would prefer some diversity, for the sake of fairness but also for the sake of efficiency.
- the proposal lacks important details regarding how the process will look like from the operational perspective - who and how is going to KYC the grantees for example, who and how is going to keep the grantees accountable, what happens if grantees don’t deliver on their promises?
- the proposer mentions that " program manager will then coordinate with the Arbitrum team and the community to ensure that the proposal is aligned with Arbitrum’s roadmap before making the disbursal", this is an important point, but I don’t really understand it. What is the Arbitrum team mentioned? The Foundation? And how is the program manager going to coordinate with them and with the community? What is the roadmap that is mentioned here? Arbitrum team is mentioned several times here, if that is the Foundation then I would like to see the Foundation confirmation of their commitment to engage in that proposal. @stonecoldpat ?
- less important, but still serious concern - parts of this proposal seem to be inspired by other grants frameworks (like the rubric mentioned in the KPIs is literally copy-pasted from Optimism Grants Council framework that I’ve been working on - without the Grants Council knowledge and consent). I know that at least within Optimism Grants Council there are some concrete assumptions in place that drive such form of Grants Framework (like the direct support and oversight from the Foundation in several aspects). As no sources of inspiration are referenced, I don’t know if the other parts are not copy-pasted as well, so I am not really sure if the proposer ever tried running such a program before.
I believe that this proposal is a good foundation for a proper Grants Framework, but in my opinion it requires some more discussion and clarifications. I’m willing to engage in such discussion and I hope that before it goes for an on-chain vote, all doubts will be clarified and we will be able to vote for it.