We would like to dispute the non-scoring of two comments and the low scoring of another.
Low scoring of Security Council rationale. As it has only been given a 4/10 both on depth and on clarity and communication, when it provides a thoughtful and clear breakdown on the criteria used to pick our candidates. We strongly believe it should be scored higher.
TMC discussion – This comment was not scored even though it contributes to fowarding the discussion on TMC and threesigma’s proposal and suggests improvements on its process. After seeing your report, we disagree, we do offer suggestions with potential impact on the outcome of the proposals, raising questions is valid when looking to contribute discussions around a subject. Addressing your feedback here, some questions had been raised before in September and February, however given that they didn’t make it into the final process the questions could be raised again.
Vote buying services – This comment is valuable and worth scoring in our opinion. Once again, providing a clear assesment and contributing our stance to the discussion.
We’d like to thank @SEEDGov for their efforts in reviewing the April 2025 Delegate Feedback results. However, after carefully reviewing our contribution, we respectfully request that our specific comments be reviewed and reconsidered.
Although this feedback was counted in the program, we believe we should have received a higher score because we suggested additional rubrics that other DAOs use in their incentive programs and advised DRIP to adopt a similar approach to make it more robust and transparent.
We also highlighted the accountability gap and offered the following example solution, which we believe illustrates how incentives should be distributed to the selected projects.
Finally, we flagged a critical marketing concern, many incentive programs fail or ignore this side entirely. We believe integrating a clear outreach and visibility strategy into DRIP’s roadmap will make onboarding smoother and drive stronger engagement, which is essential for the program’s success.
This feedback wasn’t counted in the DIP, even though we believe it should have been because we clearly outlined how the proposal could drive impact and offered actionable guidance. Though brief, our suggestion provided a solid contribution to strengthening the proposal.
I would like to dispute the perfect 10/10/10/10/10 scoring of this comment from @JoJoDAO Discussion: Vote Buying Services - #11 by JoJo
In my opinion, it doesn’t add that much to the conversation and to what other delegates had already shared previously, other than the “Specific tech changes for lobbify” which in all honesty is a mute point since @lobbyfi or any other vote buying platform that arises can decide to run their product however they please, like @Vertex_Protocol pointed out in the subsequent comment.
I would also like to dispute the 5 Bonus Points awarded for this comment, since I believe it should be scored as DF instead, and also, this rationale explaining this decision is linking to a private link that can’t be seen publicly:
To begin with, we would like to clarify that the mere act of producing a podcast about Arbitrum does notautomatically qualify for Bonus Points; rather, the impact it generates is the determining factor.
To expand on the criteria, we could say that there are three key items to consider when analyzing these types of contributions:
Does it feature a key stakeholder?
Did it achieve strong engagement metrics on social media?
Would you say it had a tangible impact on the DAO by influencing other delegates’ decisions?
In this particular case, we believe both podcasts featured relevant stakeholders for the DAO, but we are unable to observe metrics that support strong engagement.
This leaves us with the final question:
Would you say it had a tangible impact on the DAO by influencing other delegates’ decisions?
Since this is a somewhat tricky question, any impact should be clearly documented.
Regarding the first podcast, we have no elements to support such a claim.
Regarding the second podcast, the only potential evidence we have is the following statement:
First, we would like to clarify that Paulo’s comment was published on May 10th, which places it outside the evaluation window for the month under review.
Additionally, this statement raises a few questions:
@PauloFonseca, are you in a position to confirm that this podcast had a significant influence on the depth and clarity of your later comment?
Finally, @KlausBrave, could you confirm that you will not request retroactive compensation from the DAO or any DAO-funded program for the production of these podcasts?
We want to emphasize that, considering the monthly nature of the DIP and the fact that we haven’t yet had the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate Paulo’s comment, any determination regarding the impact of this particular podcast will be made during the May review.
Thank you for pointing that out! It has been corrected.
EzR3al
While @Ministrodolar has already provided some insights into the assessment of your comments, we’d like to clarify that we, as PMs, want to avoid penalizing delegates based on technicalities or rigid structures.
We understand that the subjective nature of this parameter can be confusing, particularly in edge cases like this, where many delegates are clustered around the 60–65 point range. Part of this work unfortunately involves making the tough call of leaving some contributors without compensation in a given month.
As outlined in the report, we now observe two differentiated categories of delegates/contributors participating in the program:
Those with a significant amount of voting power, who may also contribute to the DAO’s daily operations beyond voting. These individuals are key to maintaining governability by helping proposals reach quorum.
Those with lower voting power, whose voting activity contributes less to reaching quorum, and for whom this program focuses more on rewarding their contributions to discussions rather than voting itself.
In that regard, there are cases where the sum of a delegate’s voting power and their contributions throughout the month does not generate sufficient impact to justify compensation under this program.
That said, this does not mean that “small” delegates have no chance of earning incentives. In fact, the data shows the opposite: 17 out of 30 compensated delegates this month had less than 1M ARB in Voting Power.
For those who haven’t been able to meet the 65-point threshold recently, we’ve provided various suggestions for improvement. From our perspective, the small delegates who are succeeding should serve as benchmarks for both the quality and time commitment required. That’s why we encourage anyone below the threshold to double down on their efforts and look to those successful cases for guidance.
Finally, since it’s related to this dispute, we’d like to address Paulo’s question:
Indeed, the criteria for classifying a comment as valid or invalid follow a subjective and strategic approach. In general, we try to only consider the best contributions from each delegate to avoid situations like those raised by cp0x and Tane in our thread [DIP v1.5] Delegate Incentive Program Questions and Feedback. This criterion is applied uniformly to all delegates.
Tane
While the comment may meet the requirements to be considered valid, there are a number of reasons we took into account for not including it in the assessment:
The first suggestion, focused on an optimistic governance system similar to Lido’s Easy Track, is relevant and adds value to the discussion, but we had already assigned a score for a comment that included this same suggestion in the thread [Non-Constitutional] Service Provider Utilisation Framework.
Another factor to consider is that, due to the nature of the discussion and the low level of controversy surrounding the proposal, it is difficult to have any real impact on it. We understand that the suggestions go beyond the discussion itself, but it’s important to note that very few delegates received scoring in this thread.
Lastly, if there were a factor that we believe would justify considering the comment as valid, it would be the second suggestion related to the cap implemented in the DIP. As we’ve mentioned before, including the first suggestion in the assessment would (from our perspective) mean rewarding the same suggestion twice.
That said, we should also consider that if we had to score this comment based on what was stated above, we believe it would receive a lower score than the comments already included. This would result in a disadvantage rather than a benefit for Tane, in line with what you yourselves expressed in this comment.
While from our perspective this comment represents a due diligence task involving a series of questions to better understand the proposal, we generally find it difficult to quantify the value it brings to the discussion. We’ll go point by point to explain our position:
First of all, we don’t fully understand the claim about potential conflicts of interest. It might make sense if the committee members were part of specific protocols, but in this case, we’re talking about three “Arbitrum Aligned Entities” with no specific affiliation to any ecosystem protocol. In this sense, it might have been helpful to elaborate further on this argument.
As for the subsequent questions, we believe that public reporting is already implied in the inclusion of the Evaluation Partner role.
From this excerpt, two things are clear:
The Evaluation Partner must deliver periodic reports
The Evaluation Partner must develop a public dashboard tracking all relevant metrics
In this particular case, other delegates had already asked about the metrics used to determine the program’s performance. (In fact, the comment right before Tane’s includes a question along those lines.)
As we’ve mentioned above, the proposal already included the creation of a public dashboard by the Evaluation Partner. In this case, we suggest reviewing the proposal details in depth before making comments.
We acknowledge that this is an interesting question. However, given that the committee will have a degree of discretion, it’s reasonable to expect that protocols that fail to fulfill their co-marketing obligations will no longer receive incentives. That said, considering the rest of the comment, we don’t believe this is enough to assign a score (especially not one that wouldn’t negatively affect the rest of the assessment).
We appreciate the detailed justification provided in this particular case. We’ll go through it point by point once again:
After a second review, we believe the dispute regarding Relevance is valid, and as such, we have updated that score to 7.
Regarding Timing, it’s not only about the number of days or the phase of the discussion (RFC, Snapshot, or Tally), but also when the contribution is made relative to the level of engagement the proposal/topic has already received. In this case, Tane’s comment is the 30th out of 34, which—while not inherently negative—is an indicator that the contribution comes “relatively” late in a discussion where several other delegates have already provided substantial feedback. That’s why some of the alternatives mentioned by Tane in this comment—such as strategic delegation of DAO Treasury ARB to active delegates, ARB staking, and direct interventions on platforms like LobbyFi (dialogue, control, or bans)—had already been discussed to varying degrees.
This doesn’t mean we didn’t take into account the pros and cons analysis they included, but the relative value of that input is lower compared to the suggestion related to NEAR.
Once again, we appreciate the feedback you’ve shared with us. We’ll now proceed to analyze the final suggestions.
This is a somewhat tricky factor, as impact per se is difficult to quantify, although there are a number of elements we’ve been taking into consideration:
Impact on other delegates and their decision-making (e.g., being quoted by others).
Impact on the proposer and whether the suggestions led to changes in the proposal. (This also depends on the proposer, although we’ve noticed that well-reasoned suggestions with strong arguments tend to be taken into account.)
Timeliness of the feedback (related to the overall timing).
Expertise/background of the person providing the feedback. (If the person is an expert in the subject being discussed, their input will clearly carry more weight.)
Voting Power of the delegate (it’s well known that a delegate with higher VP is more likely to influence a proposal through their suggestions, as the proposer needs their support).
We may be overlooking something, so we welcome suggestions to expand or improve this criterion.
In this case, we are open to suggestions from the community. Our perspective on how to adjust Timing and Clarity in the Community so that they do not become gameable factors in the assessment can be found in the Bible 1.6, and we have also explained it previously here:
Good suggestion! Perhaps we could add some examples to the Bible. For now, we suggest using the comments with the highest score in this parameter as a benchmark.
We hope this response has addressed your dispute. Best regards!
Ignas
In this paragraph, we do not understand the statement “there is no allocation directly aimed at incentivizing users.” The very purpose of an incentive program is precisely to make the use of certain primitives more attractive to users. This is the point where we usually ask for a deeper analysis so that your argument carries more weight.
This suggestion had already been made previously.
We acknowledge that the suggestion is not bad; in fact, there have been several cases of protocols matching incentives (such as Curve). However, the large number of precedents regarding this suggestion indicates that it is not particularly novel.
In fact, this response from Entropy in the thread suggests that this possibility has already been considered (although not specifically as a way to reduce costs). It is worth clarifying that, so far, we have not found a reasonable and well-argued justification—neither in this comment nor elsewhere—explaining why the costs are high:
For the moment, this type of contributions (X threads) are out of the scope of the program.
Staking was mentioned by six other delegates prior to this comment.
Regarding the implementation of mechanisms like veTokenomics, while the suggestion is “novel” in the context of the discussion (i.e., no one else had mentioned it as an alternative), it lacks a solid rationale explaining why it represents a good option for the DAO. Therefore, the currently assigned scoring already reflects that it is merely a suggestion in the style of a “strategic direction,” since without a strong foundation or deep analysis of its benefits, the potential impact is limited.
cp0x
We understand this point. In fact, the reason we assigned scoring to this comment is because we believe you raised a valid point. However, to achieve a higher score in the depth of analysis parameter, we think you should have included all the research you mention directly in the comment. The fact that we are learning about this investigation through your dispute suggests that the comment could have been more thorough and revealing than it was—and therefore could have scored better across most parameters, including impact.
We remind you that, as an internal policy, any contribution related to the DIP is not considered in the assessment to avoid conflicts of interest. This is clearly stated in the Bible.
Honestly, it’s difficult to understand your point here, as the proposed framework does not refer at any point to the Arbitrum Audit Program but simply establishes an example scenario where the DAO requires an audit of a recently developed cross-chain messaging infrastructure component:
We think that the comparison made lacks relevance since the fund allocation mechanism is different. The proposed framework doesn’t seem designed to allocate large amounts of funds but to provide small amounts in specific proposals that do not justify undergoing the full governance process.
Well, in this case we will go point by point of the comment:
This question is fine, although it has been asked previously by other delegates.
Here, while we understand your suggestion, you have not provided sufficient evidence that vesting is an alternative that guarantees long-term capital retention. As we expressed to DonPepe in his report, the question remains: what prevents users from leaving once the vesting period has ended?
Again, there is not enough evidence to support this assertion. Comparing it to LTIPP does not guarantee that the total amount allocated was appropriate nor that funds were distributed efficiently.
Additionally, assumptions are made about the token’s price action (which has increased by 30% since this comment).
It is a valid question although somewhat difficult to answer without knowing the Distribution Partner.
It is already specified beforehand that the Evaluation Partner will provide a public dashboard to track the progress and results of the seasons:
In this case the proposer replied that it would not be beneficial to establish a limit.
This is your opinion and we respect it, but from our perspective, it is not a rewardable action.
In summary, out of the 7 items, two suggestions lack solid justification, one question was already asked by another delegate, one question whose answer was already in the proposal content, one expression of opinion regarding season cancellations, and one valid question about distribution (although still unanswered). Considering all the above, we do not believe this comment had enough impact on the discussion or the outcome of the proposal.
Regarding the GRC, we have not been able to find you in the Attendance Report that we usually share in the Monthly Framework. If you have any evidence that contradicts the report, please share it with us through this channel or privately if you prefer.
Zeptimus
Regarding this comment, we would like to emphasize that the reason we do not believe comments in this thread should be incentivized is because the participants are acting as Builders rather than delegates. Incentivizing people to comment in this thread would, in a way, undermine its original purpose.
Requesting success metrics (KPIs) and stronger accountability mechanisms are generally standard questions and/or contributions. In this case, besides pointing out their absence, there is no deeper analysis provided. In general, it is expected that a delegate is able to offer a more thorough analysis in order to receive compensation.
What would have truly enriched the discussion is if you had provided examples of the types of accountability mechanisms you would apply or metrics that could work within the framework proposed by Gabriel.
The same applies to the third suggestion — of course, we all want to improve the value proposition of the $ARB token, but it is not as simple as just stating it.
It’s worth mentioning that you have received 48 points for those tasks, which corresponds to what a delegate with your Voting Power should receive considering the framework.
It is also worth mentioning that the DAO has approved a degree of subjectivity in the assessment because the previous framework did not consider the quality of comments, which increased the potential for gaming the program (and therefore the noise in the forum).
We understand that not getting incentives may be frustrating, but as we stated in the report, especially delegates with low Voting Power need to make extra efforts to justify compensation of (at least) $3,000, since their impact on the DAO’s quorum objectives is considerably low.
In your personal case, to be honest, we do not see that the contributions made during April had sufficient impact to justify compensation from Arbitrum DAO.
Paulo Fonseca
We understand that what you refer to as a ‘secret meeting’ was not an official ArbitrumDAO event. Beyond the fact that some matters discussed there may have ended up reflected in the Vision, we do not see that this piece of information you bring into the discussion in your comment has a significant impact on the DAO.
This was already clarified in the report; our position remains unchanged.
As you rightly mention in that thread, the Telegram chat does not belong to the DAO, and in that same thread, a member of the Arbitrum Foundation can be seen stating that the matter did not warrant going through the usual governance process. Therefore, no comments in this thread have received any scoring.
Here subsequent events tell us the opposite:
Tamara (who participated in this initiative as a contributor) mentions that it wouldn’t be a good idea:
Later, Entropy confirms this by consolidating the communication roles into a single one.
We understand your point; indeed, since the comment was not very deep or detailed, the reason for its inclusion lies precisely in the fact that other delegates used the same argument later on.
That said, comparatively speaking, we believe the score assigned to your comment is consistent when observing the scoring of other comments deemed valid in this thread.
We have no evidence to corroborate such a claim; in fact, the election results indicate that Pedro was not elected. We also do not consider retroactive compensation based on a rationale to be appropriate. In any case, the decision to include Pedro as the fourth member of the OAT was made by the three existing OAT members, who have that authority by mandate.
This dispute was addressed in a timely manner. If anything has changed since then (for example, if the holding has been delegated to the null address), please let us know.
LobbyFi is not eligible for not voting in the Security Council elections, and zer8 is not eligible due to insufficient voting power.
It is worth clarifying that for your contributions related to ETH Bucharest, you have received a total of 45 points in 3 months, which represents the highest amount of points this program has assigned for an individual initiative.
It is also important to note that without the Bonus Points awarded this month, the compensation would have been $0 instead of $4,243. Together with the points awarded during February and March (which allowed you to reach Tiers 1 and 2), this represents, in our view, a sufficient monetary compensation.
Finally, we remind you that this contribution is a direct consequence of an inefficiency within the DAO, since a budget and sponsorship were approved for an event without an appropriately compensated Lead to carry it out. In this regard, expecting this program to fully fill that gap as a 100% representative of reality is an unfair expectation.
web3citizenxyz
This rationale has received 13.6 points versus the 10 points that were typically assigned to all the rationales in a month under the previous framework. We agree that it is a good rationale; however, considering its low potential impact and the points mentioned above, we believe the scoring awarded in this case is consistent.
As we have stated in the report, the main suggestion revolves around a point that has been mentioned on multiple occasions, which from our perspective, does not add value to the preceding comment nor to the discussion at hand. We maintain our position on this matter.
This is another comment for which we have justified exclusion. We observe an analysis regarding whether it is possible to mitigate the effects of LobbyFi (an issue that, as you rightly point out, has already been analyzed by several delegates) and finally some questions; however, these questions have not led to further engagement from other delegates.
Curia
We will provide a rationale for the score assigned in this case:
Concerns regarding long-term sustainability or the budget size had not only been widely mentioned but also lacked a solid argument.
Regarding the large number of requested details, the proposer has made it clear that a rigid program could harm the ultimate goal.
As for accountability, it is worth noting that the proposer has arranged for the creation of an Evaluation Partner, and furthermore, the suggestion, despite being well justified, had no impact on the proposal.
The shared rubric is the main reason why this comment received a score.
Having said all this, comparatively speaking, we believe the score assigned to your comment is consistent when observing the scoring of other comments included as valid in this thread.
We do not see any elements to support the claim that “there was a suggestion that strengthened the proposal,” as no changes were made to the proposal based on this comment.
Paulo Fonseca
Thank you for letting us know; the link was incorrect. It has now been fixed. It was supposed to be the link to the JoJo report, which has always been public.
That said, since this is not the first time you have disputed another delegate’s scoring, we want to make it clear that we will not allow disputes to become a perverse mechanism where delegates target each other through the DIP (not saying this is your case, we just want to prevent this). For this reason, we will no longer process disputes regarding the scoring of third parties.
Having addressed all disputes and more than four days having passed since the report submission, we hereby consider the dispute period closed.
Thank you for your detailed responses, however I disagree with some of them and still find them important and timely comments.
From your point of view, it turns out that it is absolutely unimportant what kind of analysis I personally conducted in order to formulate my assessment of some proposal, and it is only important that someone else gave a link to the study? It’s just that for me 3 out of 10 is an assessment of an opinion, not based on anything, in which case I can still understand such an assessment. Well, and influence is generally unclear how it is determined: I say that this is not the best idea with arguments and if such an initiative is not implemented, then I consider my impact to be equal to 10, and not 1
I was the 6th delegate to comment on this proposal, i.e. I was one of the first in the first hours of the proposal being posted. I did not see other delegates asking about the same result, and I also gave an example from the proposal so that the authors could clarify how this would help with a specific wstETH
From experience, users become more loyal to the project and study the project in more detail if they understand that they will not receive tokens immediately. Our community has participated in projects many times where there was vesting and this only encouraged participants to collect more project tokens, since you already have a skin in the game.
Roughly speaking, more loyal users who do not look at immediate benefits participate in incentives
Even a 30% increase in the token does not give a value close to the grant volume that was last year. The difference, according to my estimate, was 13.3 times, now it has become 10 times - this is still significantly less
it turns out that we will depend on the partner, and not say what conditions we need? This is a strange approach, because DAO pays money, and therefore offers its own conditions - we are not bound by any technical limitations in the blockchain - we are free to choose for ourselves how it should work
That’s why I asked - will it be a separate site from the partner, or the official Arbitrum site. This is important, because from previous experience, only a small number of users knew about the Arbitrum incentive programs. If the current one is not hosted on the official site, the same problem is possible
I gather you want to avoid someone being rewarded twice.
Correct I have no plans to submit this for any other compensation.
Timing of attribution of contribution (not impact)
I claim that this award should be allocated for April.
The DIP v1.6 “bible” is silent on any requirement to wait for an external “impact” (e.g. a Paulo post) before awarding Bonus Points for work actually done in a given month.
Exceptional contributions are awarded in the month they’re submitted.
The manual specifies that
“At the end of each month, delegates who have submitted proposals of significant impact to the DAO … will have the opportunity to earn bonus points … which will be added to their final score for the month.”
In which month are my comments evaluated?
Comments are evaluated in the same month in which they occurred, regardless of whether it is a proposal that then goes to a vote or if it is a thread in a different part of the forum (not a proposal).
My DAO Watch podcast episodes were published in April, so they meet the “submitted … at the end of”-April criterion.
By extension, any delegate-authored content (blogs, podcasts, deep-dives) should likewise be creditable in the month of publication.
DIP manual ties Bonus Points to the month of actual contribution, not to when someone else’s reply or up-stream post happen.
Regardless I do meet the criteria, there is evidence for impact occurring here within the month with several delegates expressing value with comments or likes.
Let’s hear from Paulo. @paulofonseca - can you weigh in on the impact the DAO Watch podcast had on you, the DAO, and its timing? Lets wait for this.
Attribution of contribution and causality of impact
Inconsistent logic
How can one attribute bonus points to people putting in effort to SOS, but not causing results as SOS is put into hiatus, also it’s impact was not knowable or measurable within the same month contribution occurred
For the record I don’t agree that putting in work that doesn’t yield a positive result is worthless, I think its valuable all the same even to arrive at a choice the DAO doesn’t take is valuable work in of itself and we should incentivize the work to workout paths we deliberate and decide not to take.
ETHBucharest booth - by what metric are you assessing the value of people volunteering? on the effort of hours, or what metric is being used to measure the impact of that contribution?
Do we award effort or impact? there appears to be inconsistent treatment and not a coherent principle of incentive attribution occurring.
In my view we should incentivize both, to incentivize experimentation and trying something new and continue to motivate the contributors behaviour.
Astro Teller, former head of Google X designed the incentive mechanism to reward failure, reward the number of experiments run else they would never get outlier outcomes and people revert to safe actions that never produce breakthrough results.
I took courage, risk and work to interview a contrarian voice in the DAO, that already has a social cost. This podcast gave Paulo the time and space to unpack design faults and risks occurring in the DAO. That takes guts. If we don’t incentivize this, by the negative we penalize outlier voices from speaking out even further.
I’ve already had many private DMs of people sharing the podcasts were valuable but won’t risk saying so publicly as the signaling cost of expressing views counter to major voices already in power in the DAO is high.
How do we want to incentivize or penalise speaking truth out going forward?
Lastly as a new entrant to the DIP, this is quite demotivating treatment, when I take initiative and it’s something smaller, new and emergent, I think a smaller bonus say 5 points is actually a motivating response to indicate, hey this is promising keep it up, perhaps target more timely or specific proposals or improve production quality, reach etc, vs the all or nothing approach to recognition: the Blockworks podcast on a bigger account is awarded 10 points and the DAO Watch work is cast as worth zero.
A point of process, I suggest a change that the DIP Bible language states the dispute period be 4 business days.
In this instance this month 2 of the 4 days were on the weekend, and the bulk of the dispute response came as one big comment at the end of this period and at the same time declaring it closed, I don’t think adequate time and process has been provided here.
Thanks for this valuable initiative. CryptoIs, like me, has been a member of the DAO that started DAOs (Dash), and I’m sure he has witnessed its growth and setbacks, bringing a wealth of knowledge and lessons. Arbitrium is a DAO that is still in its relative infancy, presenting an opportunity to do things right and avoid being short-sighted. There is more to gain from pushing it to its highest long-term potential than from quick plays.
Where was even the election posted? It’s not on the list of tally nor snapshot proposals
If we’re going to get completely taken out of any incentive, despite continuous work through the period, joining weekly calls, etc etc. We could have at least been warned, no?
I find two months to be too big a penalty for something that falls outside of the regular UIs
Like tbh, this is very discouraging and makes me feel participating in Arbitrum is too prone to arbitrary decisions
Responding to the questions around the infamous podcast episode
Sir, yes, sir! Talking it out in this podcast clarified my thinking in my comment. For example, I re-listened to the podcast episode to write my comment on the vision thread.
Yes, it had a lot of impact. That’s why I posted just the podcast link in the thread sooner, before I made my full comment above. I think that if I hadn’t done the podcast episode, I probably wouldn’t have made my post.
Addressing the feedback on my disputes
Well, of course it has impact. It matters a lot if the creation of the new vision proposed by the AF was done in the open and collaboratively, or behind close doors, like this post of mine publicly proves it was.
Honestly, this argument doesn’t make sense and is inconsistent with previous scoring. The criteria to decide if a forum post should be awarded under DF or not isn’t “the matter did not warrant going through the usual governance process” since there have been plenty of topics in the past that would never have gone through the usual governance process and were awarded under DF.
Even if this is true, for sure this comment of mine deserves a higher score on the Timing rubric, because it was indeed the first one mentioning that argument. The fact that it was scored equally with 3 points out of 10, for Relevance, Depth of Analysis, and Timing, shows that the scoring is not fair, under your own argument.
Well, it would be crazy not to award me BP this month for ETH Bucharest. April, with the Arbitrum DAO presence at ETH Bucharest, was the month that I put in the most blood, sweat, and tears for Arbitrum DAO ever since I became a delegate in September 2024. Everybody else that was there could tell you that was the case.
That’s precisely why stepping up and doing that work voluntarily, by myself and others, is worth Bonus Points. My dispute was to make the attribution of those bonus points more fair between the delegates rewarded, in relation to what happened on the ground, and you failed to address that in this response.
I’m not targeting anyone with my disputes. I’m looking for clarity as to how you guys score comments, given the enormous discrepancies and inconsistencies between scores from one delegate to another. And also the discrepancies and biases in selecting which comments are considered valid and invalid, as I pointed out previously in this thread.
Also, I believe the dispute system was initially designed so that anyone can dispute anyone’s results, even for the sake of overall fidelity and accuracy. That’s why the template for a dispute post includes the username of the targeted delegate, right?
So, if with this message you intend to change the rules of the DIP, once again arbitrarily, for what constitutes a valid dispute from delegates, by banning the ability of delegates to dispute other delegates scores, I suggest updating the DIP Bible and create a new 1.7 version of the program with that change.
As @KlausBrave mentioned above, the dispute period should be measured in business days, especially since you habitually post the results on Fridays or towards the end of the work week.
Honestly, we don’t understand this response. Our point is that your comment does not refer to the research that you later mention in the dispute. We believe there is more depth in the dispute itself than in the disputed comment.
We also haven’t said that the analysis you carried out is not important — quite the opposite, we’re saying that it would have been positive if you had included more details of that analysis in the comment, as it’s not initially possible to determine its detail through that post.
When you ask “why are you sure that in this case there will not be the same result as last time?” along with the example “Why in the same example about wstETH all the borrowing will not go to another chain when the season ends?” that’s equivalent to asking about long-term sustainability, which is one of the issues of previous incentive programs.
In this sense, that question had already been asked by @pedrob:
We agree, but that’s not our approach — it’s Entropy’s. Our point was that, with the proposed structure, it would be difficult to get a response, given that we still don’t know the Distribution Partner.
KlausBrave
Exactly, we want to avoid double-spending since Bonus Points are only granted if there has been/will be no financial benefit for the delegate beyond the DIP.
Thanks for the clarification!
Here, beyond what the Bible says, it’s a matter of applying common sense: a contribution gains significant value from the moment it generates a tangible impact for the DAO. That’s why, on more than one occasion, we waited for initiatives such as Detox proposed by L2Beat to be approved by the DAO (the same applied to the Huddles case proposed by Paulo).
Now, the fragment you quoted says “delegates who have submitted proposals of significant impact to the DAO.” In our opinion, during April, the significant impact that is now manifest had not yet materialized.
Comments are usually not part of the Bonus Points framework. Extraordinary contributions have a different nature than feedback—there are several examples of Bonus Points granted months after an initiative’s kick-off (mentioned above, but not the only ones).
In this case, even though it wasn’t possible to know the final or total impact, we believe that:
The very act of posting a SOS could be seen as a materialized impact in the forum regarding a key discussion.
Following each SOS post, there were comments from delegates, which we can consider “impacted” by the submission since there was engagement.
Each submission also generated a SOS Discussion Call where delegates participated by asking questions and providing feedback in each case.
Effort and impact. Without those volunteers, the Arbitrum Booth would not have been possible. Naturally, they had an impact through their collaboration.
Here we believe there was a misinterpretation of our response:
We never said that we were not going to incentivize this initiative.
SEEDGov as PM never takes sides—it’s not our business whether it’s a critical voice or a voice “aligned” with entities such as AF or OCL. We never implied that one or the other is being incentivized or penalized.
We never said the value is 0, we just disagreed on the timing and needed Paulo’s response to confirm that this podcast had a significant impact on his response. It’s worth noting that this impact was stated by you in your dispute, so there was no way for us to be aware of it when evaluating your April contributions.
The fact that you find our opinion on the timing for granting points to this initiative demotivating is a pity, considering we specifically mentioned it in the report as a positive initiative in principle, but that we didn’t yet have enough elements to give it a score. This was entirely true at that time, given the reach on social media and the fact that there was only one comment from Paulo mentioning it in the forum. It’s worth clarifying that we don’t usually rely on likes in a comment, especially when most of them come from people involved in the initiative or somehow connected to the delegate in question, or from people we cannot appropriately verify. In the image you can see that of the 8 likes, 1 is yours, another is from CryptoSI, another from Andrei who is linked to Paulo via Proposals.app, and 2 others from people who do not actively participate as delegates in ArbitrumDAO / we don’t have enough references for them.
That said, only today, May 20th, 2025, SEEDGov can verify the impact that this podcast had on Paulo in a response to the vision posted by AF, which (potentially) can be considered within the Delegates’ Feedback framework. The nature of this situation requires us to first analyze Paulo’s comment (which does not pertain to the month of April) before we can fully assess the broader context. As Program Managers, it would be unfeasible for us to incorporate future events into an analysis of a past month. This is only reasonable when both of the following conditions are met:
The update takes place within the first few days of the month.
The update does not require extensive analysis.
Neither condition applies in this case, which is why we kindly ask for your understanding—otherwise, we would be setting a precedent we are not willing to uphold. It’s also important to note that we are currently processing 69 reports per month, and that number continues to grow each month.
In summary, our intention is not to demotivate you, but to be consistent with the decisions we’ve made in the past. We understand you may agree or not, but the reality is that this is a known risk since this proposal was approved, given the subjective nature of Extraordinary Contributions and Delegates’ Feedback.
We hope that now that there is greater clarity regarding the potential inclusion of this initiative for the month of May, you find motivation to continue contributing to Arbitrum DAO. It’s worth mentioning that we’ll be keeping an eye on the growth of the reach of these podcasts.
Thank you for this feedback. In practice, we do usually allow a few extra days when the dispute period overlaps with a weekend. That said, we also want to avoid delaying payments for too long.
Still, we’d like to clarify that the sentence closing the dispute period applies to new disputes only. Any disputes already posted can, of course, continue to be discussed.
danielo
Security Council elections was one of the most important Topics of the ArbitrumDAO during the months of March, April and some days of May.
Member Election Phase started April 12, and it was announced by the Arbitrum Foundation in this Forum Post.
Also, the Arbitrum Foundation Team was really vocal on the importance of the Security Council Elections during the past two months. For example, here you can find the Recording of the March 11, 2025 - Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call where SC Elections were discussed. Also, there was an overview of the candidates on March 25, 2025 - Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call (recording here). Process continued and there was also an update on the April 8, 2025 - Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call.
Also, Arbitrum Foudation team held an AMA with the Security Council Candidates. You can find that record here.
As an important note, SEEDGov as a Program Manager of the DIP also conducted a campaign for the Security Elections. With the objective of having the most amount of VP voting on the first week, we introduced a linear penalty system (similar to the one of the SC Elections) and also announced that those delegates who didn’t vote on the Security Council Elections were not going to be eligible for both April and May incentives (post can be seen here)
We’ve also posted on the Arbitrum Delegates chat two different reminders of the Mandatory Voting:
You can check that, as of today May 20, this message is still pinned in the ‘Delegate Incentive Program’ Chat.
Also, there’s a specific section of the Arbitrum Delegates Chat called ‘Security Council’ where Raam posted regular updates of the matter.
As a final note, the Security Council elections are the most important governance process within ArbitrumDAO, as the signers are responsible for safeguarding one of the Layer 2s with the highest Total Value Locked in the ecosystem. We believe the awareness and outreach efforts carried out by the Arbitrum Foundation and the DAO have been highly valuable, resulting in the election with the highest amount of Voting Power used in the history of the ecosystem. For more information on this, we recommend the Arbitrum DAO Security Council Dashboard by Entropy Advisors
Paulo Fonseca
Thank you for this clarification! It’s very helpful.
From the moment the vision was posted without any public debate on the forum, it is implied that there was no open and collaborative development beyond what may have happened behind the scenes.
We don’t believe it is inconsistent. In past months, it has been clear that both the scoring and the number of comments considered valid are lower for what we may call “secondary” topics compared to discussions that are clearly central to the DAO, such as SOS, the AF Vision, or the DRIP.
Timing and Clarity & Communication scores are adjusted relative to Relevance, Depth of Analysis, and Impact on Decision-Making. This is not new and was clarified months ago, as stated in the Bible and here:
And we agree. That’s why we were quite flexible and assigned you the highest aggregated score (45 points) ever granted for a single initiative in the history of the program.
We don’t believe we failed to address this. As we’ve previously mentioned, the program is trying to fill a gap, which makes it inherently imperfect and means there won’t always be a perfect correlation between the scores assigned to participants and the actual work performed.
As we’ve already responded, there are no such discrepancies or biases. All delegates were evaluated equally and under the same criteria.
There are two points to clarify here:
The template includes a username field as a formal requirement — that doesn’t mean the intention was to enable disputes of other delegates’ scores.
Disputing another delegate’s score only made sense when the program was limited to rewarding up to 50 delegates. In that context, if a delegate with TP > 65 were at risk of not being rewarded due to others receiving higher scores, a case could be made for disputing another’s scoring. Given that this scenario is far from the current reality, we don’t believe it’s necessary to allow disputes against other delegates’ scores — especially when JoJo’s score doesn’t prevent you from receiving compensation. If that changes in the future, we’ll be happy to reassess this decision.
I’m not disouting the Security Council Election was well marketed. I was aware of it. My issue is with it being the sole determinant of my contributions for two whole months. I check tally and snapshot weekly (on top of attending virtually every call, weekly startegy discussions with L2Beat, etc.). I did mess up by not asking “where is the voting for election happening” as I checked 2-3 times but didn’t see anything. So that’s on me. But then when I get 0 reward for months, despite constant work to steer the DAOs Org Design towards a more verticals-oriented org design (something that’s now advancing with increased aligment around creating a catalyst for DeFi), and also Tempeh hilighting my contribution for SOS around other verticals, etc.
I’m doing constant work here, not in a way that’s designed to tick boxes but based on the best contribution of my skills to the areas where I can have most impact (Org Design). And yet I’m getting 0…
Like it just feels the program is designed to be ticking boxes and spending time aerguing with you guys about a podcast, instead of focusing on doing high level stratgey work.
Just this week I have 2 calls with Krzystof for thinking through how to approach advancing with SOS, what sort of process makes sense, etc. And you’re telling me all of that is worth $0. Feels just too drastic and not set to create the right incentives.
