Title: Dispute
Delegate Name: paulofonseca
Reason for dispute (please detail): The current 0/0/0/0/0 scoring of this comment, and the current consideration of this comment as valid and its 0/0/0/0/0 scoring.
Context for this dispute
First, I would like to highlight that with the current scoring, I’m not qualified to receive any DIP compensation for May, since despite contributing meaningfully to the DAO during this month, @SeedGov decided to actively penalize me for two comments I made, scoring them with 0/0/0/0/0, so that my Delegate Feedback metric would be averaged down, and so that I wouldn’t have enough points to qualify for any compensation, therefore choosing to reward me with $0 USD this month, for the first time ever since I started as a delegate in Arbitrum DAO.
If SeedGov were to fairly score my comment regarding the D.A.O. program and consider the other comment about the SOS process invalid, as I’m arguing with this dispute, I would be in the top 5 of the delegate ranking for May, and I would receive over $4,000 USD in compensation this month, which makes a significant difference for me personally, since I live off of this DIP compensation ever since I’m working full-time for Arbitrum DAO, both as a delegate and by building arbitrum.proposals.app.
In the Notion feedback to Delegates (when opening the May section and then the paulofonseca section), SeedGov states that the reasons they scored both of these comments with 0/0/0/0/0 were:
- “we do not support delegates publicly attacking the reputation of valuable contributors in this community”;
- “we believe these comments contribute to a toxic environment that discourages others from continuing to engage and contribute meaningfully. For this reason, we have taken the uncommon step of penalizing this behavior.”
- “We consulted with multiple DAO stakeholders regarding this situation, and all agreed that this kind of conduct is unacceptable.”
- “This penalty should also be seen as a warning: if this behavior continues, we will take further action.”
You can read their complete rationale here.
I want to point out that according to the passed DIP 1.5 onchain proposal, SeedGov only has the legitimacy to penalize delegates by executing a DIP Ban (which they’ve done before for two delegates that were trying to farm the DIP rewards), or a DIP Suspension (which was never done, at least to my knowledge).
Therefore, I believe SeedGov lacks the legitimacy to use a 0/0/0/0/0 rubric scoring system for comments to reduce the average of the Delegate Feedback metric and penalize delegate behavior as they see fit. If they want to penalize delegates, they can only ban or suspend delegates from the program.
I believe that for the Program Manager of the DIP to resort to this kind of tactic, where the subjective assessment of the Delegate Feedback metric is weaponized to determine who qualifies for incentives and who doesn’t, is a clear abuse of power by SeedGov, and puts them in a situation where they clearly can’t be credibly neutral. Even worse, this behaviour is a surefire way to guarantee that valuable and committed delegates disengage from the DIP, since from a talented contributor’s point of view, the juice is not worth the squeeze, as this example aptly illustrates. Therefore, I believe that the 0/0/0/0/0 scoring of these comments of mine, with the intent to penalize me explicitly, is not legitimate nor legal under the scope of the passed DIP onchain proposal, and this situation should be corrected.
Arguing for the merit of my comments that were used to penalize me
Now, let me argue why I believe my comments, which were explicitly scored by SeedGov with 0/0/0/0/0 to penalize me, were actually a good example of me acting as a delegate and doing important delegate work for the DAO, are also the kind of contributions we should be incentivizing other delegates to do more of, and therefore deserve to be disputed and rescored/invalidated for the month of May.
Comment about the SOS Submissions
Let’s first go through this comment of mine, where SeedGov argues that “we found it disrespectful toward one of the most dedicated and active delegates/contributors in the Arbitrum ecosystem. It is also unfounded, as L2Beat has selflessly organized several calls to help facilitate the SOS Submissions and move the initiative forward”.
This comment of mine is a response to the previous comment from @Sinkas, in which L2BEAT argues that none of the SOS submissions put forward by several members of the DAO are good enough to be voted “For”. In my comment, I ask what I believe to be a fair question (which hasn’t been replied to, for more than a month now) as to why L2BEAT didn’t submit their own SOS proposal that would cater to their preferences of being something that can be materialized and wouldn’t pigenhold ourselves into something.
The reason I asked this question is that I believe being in the role of critiquing and pointing out flaws in the current options, while simultaneously not providing alternative suggestions, improvements, or solutions, is one of the main reasons our DAO is not effective right now. I believe that a delegate like L2BEAT needs to participate meaningfully in the process, as a participant rather than a moderator, before they have the legitimacy to say that not a single one of the current SOS proposals merits a “For” vote on their part.
That’s why I added the “you can just do things… you know?” part. It was a critique of L2BEAT’s stance during the entire SOS framework process, where they acted critically towards all SOS proposals submitted by contributors, and didn’t create any improvements, suggestions, or mergers of proposals that catered to their preferences. And they could have.
I believe that my role as a delegate in Arbitrum DAO is to pay attention to what is happening in the DAO and point out this type of behavior L2BEAT demonstrated, which doesn’t contribute to better outcomes in the DAO. Having one of the most respected delegates like L2BEAT saying that none of the SOS Submissions are good enough and not creating one themselves is not helpful for the DAO. It’s destructive to the goodwill and effort of other contributors who invested time and energy in this process.
SeedGov decided to penalize me for this comment because they “found it disrespectful” toward L2BEAT, and also “unfounded, as L2BEAT selflessly organized several calls to help facilitate the SOS Submissions”.
From my perspective, nothing in my comment is inherently disrespectful. Furthermore, if L2BEAT themselves found my comment disrespectful, in accordance with the delegate code of conduct they subscribed to, they should have reached out to me privately about this, and I’m sure we would have sorted it out. They didn’t reach out to me about this. In fact, they still didn’t reply to my comment.
I would also like to point out that L2BEAT was (fairly, in my opinion) compensated with DIP Bonus Points for organizing those SOS calls, so it wasn’t that “selfless” of a contribution as SeedGov claims.
I would also like to point out that L2BEAT can very effectively defend themselves from criticism, as they’ve done many times before, both in the forum and in the delegates’ Telegram chat. They don’t need SeedGov to police the questions/comments other delegates say to them in the forum.
All in all, I believe that this comment of mine should be considered invalid for the purposes of the DIP, because it didn’t have an impact on the discussion, since it wasn’t even replied to.
Comment about the Arbitrum D.A.O. Grant Program performance
Regarding this other comment, SeedGov argues that it has “a particularly concerning statement in which Paulo insinuates that Castle’s actions are one of the main reasons builders avoid Arbitrum and choose other ecosystems instead.”. They also argue that “Paulo fail to contact any Castle Labs team member privately to understand the nature of the alleged discrepancy (as clearly outlined in the Code of Conduct)” and also that it “insinuates that the team might not care about dedicating sufficient time to reviewing grant applicants”.
Before going through each claim one by one, I would like to highlight that “insinuates” is pulling a lot of weight in this argument by SeedGov. We all know it’s always challenging to communicate effectively in online forums, especially in written form, without being misunderstood. But in this case, SeedGov dismisses any nuance regarding what I said and immediately adjudicates an insinuation that was not stated by me at all, and then uses it as justification for the 0/0/0/0/0 scoring penalty. This opens the door to a dangerously subjective assessment and bias, where Program Managers can essentially adjudicate that someone is insinuating something about another individual and weaponize that subjective assessment to penalize them, which is effectively what is happening in this case.
This behavior by SeedGov as the Program Manager effectively censors speech, something they are not entrusted by the community to do, as only forum admins can currently do so by removing forum comments that violate community guidelines and the delegate code of conduct, therefore being a clear overreach of their power and over stepping of their mandate. And even worse, in this case, this behavior is censoring speech of a controversial or contrarian nature, which is the kind of speech we’ve learned to understand is necessary for DAOs if they want to become the most resilient and capture-resistant forms of organization.
If you read my original comment carefully, I believe it’s clear that I didn’t insinuate that “one of the main reasons builders avoid Arbitrum and choose other ecosystems instead” is because of @castlecapital’s behaviour. In my original comment, I start by asking, “what’s going on with the New Protocols and Ideas domain acceptance rate?” and all subsequent paragraphs in my comment refer to the acceptance rate of this domain, not anyone’s behavior.
When I say: “ This is the main cause for good builders to shy away from Arbitrum, forever. When they get rejected a “smallish” grant, from the only program that is supposed to be the allocator for early stage builder in the whole Arbitrum ecosystem, it sends a very bad signal.” The “This” at the beginning of that paragraph relates to the original question and central point of my comment, the low acceptance rate, not specific Castle Labs behavior. And I say so from personal experience, as both a builder and someone who is regularly contacted by fellow builders in the ecosystem looking to build on Arbitrum, as I mentioned in a personal anecdote in a subsequent comment in the same thread.
Regarding SeedGov’s claim that what I said in my comment “insinuates that the team might not care about dedicating sufficient time to reviewing grant applicants”, I can confirm that this was indeed targeted at a specific behaviour of Castle Caps, given that they rejected a particular application with a set of questions that seemed part of a template (as @jojo subsequently confirmed in this comment) and with feedback to the answers to those questions that seemed also a default template feedback that ignored information that the respondents volunteered in their answers (as the applicants subsequently alluded to in this comment). When reading the whole forum thread, the application in question, for Arbitrum to fund the Signals Protocol by Lighthouse, (who some would even consider a competitor to proposals.app and therefore I personally shouldn’t even be particularly concerned that they didn’t get funded by Arbitrum DAO) was rejected based on information that the applicants considered to be interpreted by the domain allocator in an incorrect way, and that the applicants tried to correct, to no avail—reinforcing the idea that Arbitrum is not very welcoming to builders, as highlighted by these comments in this thread here and here.
When carefully reading this part of my comment:
“It feels like @CastleCapital is either being too conservative with allocating these funds, or they just don’t care enough to spend the proper time to vet the projects that apply and reject them too soon.”
It’s clear that I’m proposing both of these options as hypotheticals, since I don’t understand why we would want to throttle the acceptance of grants for the new protocols and ideas domain, given that we approved an onchain proposal to spend $1.5M USD in this term, for this domain. I’m hypothesizing what the reasons would be for that. I’m not insinuating anything specifically about Castle Capital’s team.
Then, finally, regarding SeedGov’s claim that I have “failed to contact any Castle Labs team member privately to understand the nature of the alleged discrepancy (as clearly outlined in the Code of Conduct)” I have to say that this is simply not true and a grave misrepresentation of fact by SeedGov. I indeed contacted Castle Labs founder, @atomist, as well as the program manager @jojo, about this exact issue, on April 17ᵗʰ 2025, almost a whole month before I posted this comment of mine, which was penalized.
Here are the screenshots of the Telegram chat, along with the zkTLS proof of the third message in that group chat, where I tagged the intervenients in that private group chat, including Atomist.
I subsequently inquired about this acceptance rate discrepancy during the May 7ᵗʰ Arbitrum Reporting Call (GCR), as seen in the linked recording, where I asked the same question about the discrepancy in the acceptance rate between domains at the 35-minute mark.
Given all of this, I think it’s clear I was acting in good faith in my comment, that I followed the community guidelines and the delegate code of conduct I subscribed to, that I’ve been paying attention to the several activities and programs in the DAO, that I’ve been asking relevant questions, that I spent a significant amount of time researching about this issue before commenting, and that therefore, this is the kind of delegate behaviour we should be aiming to have more of in this DAO, and incentivize with the DIP.
I hereby request that this comment of mine be scored appropriately and not penalized with a score of 0/0/0/0/0.
Thank you!