We’d like to formally introduce Entropy Advisors, a governance operations focused business that will be working exclusively with the Arbitrum DAO over the coming months. This company is being built by Matt Fiebach and Sam Martin, and bootstrapped with the help of the Arbitrum Foundation as a grant recipient.
We were the first two employees at Blockworks Research, where we built a Saas-based research product offering deep investment insights to institutional crypto investors via long-form research, onchain analytics, and a governance screener. Matt spearheaded the services and governance operations, while Sam focused on the product and day-to-day operations. We scaled a team from 0 to 14 people, grew a daily newsletter and a twitter/X account to 10’s of thousands of readers/followers, launched and hosted the 0xResearch podcast, and more. We have developed vast networks within the crypto industry, and plan to leverage that network and experience to help the Arbitrum DAO operate more efficiently, effectively, and professionally.
We have identified some pain points within Arbitrum DAO through our experience working directly with the DAO over the past year. Some of these problems include:
● DAO Alignment
Arbitrum DAO does not have a neutral party to broker proposals, ensure high quality RFP applicants, and generally serve as the steward for proposals. The DAO doesn’t know the ulterior motives and incentives of proposal authors, and there is often a lack of alignment between both of these entities.
● Collective Action Problem & Proposal Stalemate
Situations where there is a recognized need or solution that would benefit the broader ecosystem, but individual actors lack sufficient incentives to take action due to asymmetric benefits/costs. There is a lack of dedicated resources to execute strategies and see them through the lifecycle.
● Procuring & Maintaining Contributors
The Arbitrum DAO has trouble attracting full-time, high quality talent given its lack of ability to hire/employ these individuals. There is no incentive to be a full-time DAO contributor. Even with economic incentives (eg ARDC,) many of the top businesses within the industry at their respective specialty miss on these opportunities simply because they are unaware of the opportunities.
● Strategic Partner Onboarding & Growth
The Arbitrum DAO primarily relies on the Foundation as its BD arm, but having an additional Arbitrum aligned entity to assist in finding strategic partners could yield a richer set of partners to choose from.
● Stakeholder Relations
Information pipelines are broken between key stakeholders of the Arbitrum network including the Delegates, Protocols, the Foundation, Offchain Labs, and other service providers.
We started Entropy Advisors to alleviate some of these problems within the Arbitrum ecosystem. This list is non-exhaustive, and we would love to know if the community sees any pain points that Entropy could help solve. Candidly speaking, we are here to help the DAO in any way that we can!
Congrats guys! These are all great focus areas to tackle the overall themes of governance enablement and growth. I particularly think your first point about DAO Alignment is a key consideration that will have the most impact on Arbitrum’s ability to scale its governance community. Looking forward to hearing more from Entropy soon!
All of the above are valuable, high level idea. What if someone wanted to instead submit to you a more precise and scoped project, unrealizable due to lack of bandwidth? Is that possible?
Amazing team, setup, and angle. I can definitely see how this strengthens the DAO without adding further complexity, thanks to the absence of incentive mismatches.
It would probs be beneficial for the DAO to have transparency and examples of what the support can look like, so people know for what they could loop you in. I imagine you already have plans for this.
P.S.: To share my experience, when you proactively reached out and offered support with funneling applications to the Security Service Subsidy Fund (thanks!), it made the model tangible for me.
Thanks Bernard! Before officially starting, we heard from delegates about a desire to have representation at ETH CC and proactively helped @KlausBrave get a proposal to the DAO to achieve this goal. Currently, we are working on 3 proposals in tandem. One builds on this first initiative in order to ensure Arbitrum DAO’s future presence at the industry’s most popular events and to enable the DAO to host more novel IRL initiatives over the long haul.
The seconds relates to a 12 member elected multisig committee that will significantly reduce costs associated with multisig signers, ensure signers are competent with multisigs, and reduce friction for contributors creating proposals.
The third looks to create some oversight/accountability within the DAO, so that newly stood up initiatives can have a pre-established mechanism for oversight to include in their proposals. Expect all in the forum over the coming month(s).
We are additionally talking with shared sequencing companies, auditors, research firms, risk firms, treasury diversification firms, and more about ways they can get involved in the DAO. As new tangible opportunities for sophisticated contributors and service providers come to fruition, we will be one party resourced and able to help increase visibility into the opportunity, steward applicants through the process, and hopefully create better pools of applicants for the DAO’s RFPs and committees.
This is incredible, congratulations. Also, very necessary. Your background and experience are very important here.
I think the fellowships from the onboarding working group are a great starting step as well, as all 5 are involved next month in creating proposals for different initiatives.
The point about the stagnation of proposals due to incentive asymmetries is very relevant. It is crucial to find ways to motivate collective action and remove barriers to the implementation of valuable proposals.
It is encouraging to see the suggestion to diversify the sources of searching for strategic partners. This can open up new opportunities and strengthen the network of Arbitrum DAO collaborators.
