After posting our rationale, we had several delegates ask us for some clarification on our point of view here, so I think it makes sense to add it here as well.
We value Entropy’s work, and we are fully supportive of the continuation of their work in the DAO. However, we are not 100% satisfied with their past performance, especially given the objectively high price tag. We conducted an internal assessment of the past term and shared it with Entropy. We believe that having a single counterparty to report to will likely help alleviate concerns about future underperformance.
Of course, we place a lot of trust in the non-existent yet OpCo and the OAT. The success of this proposal, or lack thereof, highly depends on the OAT and OpCo working closely with both delegates and Entropy.
While we fully trust that this relationship will be constructive, we think it’s reasonable to expect OAT to present (ahead of the onchain vote and movement of funds) their view on how they plan to assess Entropy’s performance and how they want to structure the 10M ARB incentive pool. For example, OAT can perform a similar exercise to the one we did — conduct an objective assessment of Entropy’s first term. It doesn’t have to be very deep; it’s doable in a couple of hours and would help a lot with understanding how they think about this task in the future.
From our side, we expressed in private conversations with both Entropy and OAT members that we expect the majority of this budget to be structured as an investment from the DAO into Entropy. We already have past experience with this being done by the Arbitrum Foundation (within RnDAO’s Hackathon Continuation Program), which strongly supports a similar request from @tamara and some other delegates. We believe this will help align Entropy and the DAO on their future success. While we agree that such a deal needs to be negotiated privately, it should be finalized before we are asked to commit funds onchain.