Thanks for your well thought out comments, its much appreciated! I also like the effort you took to dig into the reports produced by @Avantgarde , @Aera & @karpatkey . more useful content coming in season 2 of our WG!
If you haven’t already you will find it worthwhile to read our working groups end of season insights and future directions for some of the issues you’ve raised.
Here are some considerations for why we should move ahead with STEP 1, in addition to the excellent points raised by @GFXlabs
A. One of our most hard earned insights was that many of the best projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem don’t want free money or STIP like grants. What they actually want is the DAO to invest a portion of its treasury into their financial product, so they get the legitimacy of saying “ArbitrumDAO is our customer and they make money from our product”
STEP 1 is the first framework addressing this need and the lessons we learn here could play a big role in actually reducing expenditures for the DAO, by converting our grant programs into investment ones where we can recall the collateral. Delay here means STEP 2 where we sustainably support de-fi products in arbitrum gets delayed, which means ecosystem support grants continue being the only game in town.
B. Most diversification in DAOs, Maker included, has happened via treasury managers or closed door committees. Delegates only get to vote yes or no on the deals negotiated by these representatives. In my view, this process lends itself to corruption and we need to figure out a better process to diversify that retains the spirit of DAO democracy.
STEP 1 is unique in having a committee only for screening out providers deemed as being risky & for providing opinions to delegates on each applicant, but the ultimate award of funds is based on votes received by each provider. This will yield valuable learnings on its own accord for how we approach diversification and also potentially increase the utility of ARB as a governance token for not just elections to posts but actually deciding proportion of funds in a contract between provider A & provider B
C. As Karpatkey’s report notes, our DAO spent 5% of its treasury over the last year, which means 20 years of runway at the rate we are spending. My takeaway from that is we need to guard against foolish spending, not overspending.
Given that we are currently in the middle of the L2 wars, where no chain has yet begun enjoying the power law, we need to be less conservative and make bold bets. Well thought out, bottom up frameworks should move ahead & not be beholden to top down consensus , which in itself may be a chimera that isn’t possible to certifiably obtain (as you noted with the efforts on the temp-check polls).
I hope these are helpful and to have your support in the snapshot !