I am going to go point by point here having followed the proposal closely from the beginning.
First a general introduction: I do understand how a proposal that was ideated in eth denver 2024, started a proper discussion in bruxelles at ethcc in 2024, that was voted on snapshot in december 2024 and in tally in february 2025, with elections coming a few months ago, might need updates.
A lot changed in the last year, including the political panorama, how OCL and AF wants to interact with the DAO and broader ecosystem etc. This whole premise to say: it can make sense to put forward a discussion to change a few points that are now deemed by the OAT as too restrictive.
I’ll be honest at the time it didn’t make too much sense to me how opco would not be able to interact with service provider. Let’s assume the normal path:
- the DAO wants to engage in a certain activity
- it tasks the OpCo to do so
- but neither the DAO nor other AAEs have the expertise to put forward this initiative
- at the same time, OpCo has to manage the initiative in that set of strategic and operational details that requires 90% of the effort
- the DAO goes through a procurement process to find a third party (and likely assigns to opco to manage this procurement process? who deals with that?)
- the DAO choose a provider with an election based process.
I do get that the ability to elect a service provider is something the DAO wants to retain. At the same time, looking at the past, I do find difficult to see how the DAO can do a better choice compared to the OpCo and the OAT, knowing already the OAT composition and knowing that they will (hopefully) find the right people to work in it.
At the same time opco managing this choice means we remove a lot of friction from any process.
This could be one of the most controversial point for the DAO: basically using funds allocated initially only for people of OpCo and for the ops strictly for OpCo, to be used to fund also initiatives instead.
I am unsure if this is a positive or negative thing right now. It might create a natural tendency to spend maybe a bit less on people because there will always be the back idea of allocating funds to initiatives. I also see this being contested by delegates who are advocating for putting in circle less arb as possible, and so we are potentially saying that all budget could be utilized even if not all on people. I don’t necessarily care about this last point knowing that few have hundreds of millions of unlocks and so this is mathematically speaking a small amount; I do care instead about the process behind, from Opco, saying “we spend X on this initiative” vs “dao has to put X for this initiative”. And the fact that there might be a disagreement on what X should be, and how OpCo would approach the decision of onboarding the capital cost if below a certain threshold, or outsource to the DAO if above.
This is probably a nuance at this point in time; as long as the reasoning of deciding on internalizing vs asking to the DAO is made clear in each situation, I think it could be ok. But I would like to avoid a situation in which, in an entity that should have had almost $8M earmarked to pay people, we end up spending instead $1M and put aside $7M for initiatives. Is not about overspending on people, but having opco being a real force operating on behalf of the DAO.
This is one of the thing that makes the most sense. As of today opco can’t offer equity nor anything that is “really” appealing in a world in which you can get stock options, carry etc. We need to make the company attractive.
This was probably a big oversight to begin with, and I wonder how many people have not run in the elections due to this very strong limitation. I am one of the few for example. Another point that I strongly support.
Focusing on the public side of job positions, and disclosing privately to the OAT what could be seen as a potential conflict for other to evaluate, is likely for the best.
We live in a tokenized world. Do I have a conflict of interest if I have OP tokens in my portfolio, or if I particpate to the Echo Coinbase group? Unlikely. Does it make sense to disclose this to peers for the sake of transparency and for them to evaluate if there could be any strange situation? Yes.
This is another critical point.
I do see how enlarging the scope can make sense. We don’t want OpCo to be a black hole of initiatives; it will likely not be looking at the budget that will rather large is not infinite, even through external requests.
The main point is for the OpCo to evaluate, in good faith, if they deem themself up to the task of properly ideating, executing and managing certain strategies, without internalizing for the sake of control and for the sake of being capital efficient.
It will fall in the same framework posted above: each time there is a meaningful decision, clearly explain to the DAO and other AAEs why it should fall into OpCo, why alternatives are not necessarily advised, and how OpCo should potentially be a better executor.
On one side, I do see OpCo managing intiatives outside the initial “ecosystem growth” and “financial” verticals. Looking at people currently in the OAT, we are indeed on the right path to have a very good team, well interconnected in the ecosystem. At the same time we don’t want to
- have OpCo onboarding any initiatives that can’t be executed by AF, OCL, Entropy, AGV because there are “no alternatives”
- have the DAO assign to OpCo any initiatives that can’t be executed by AF, OCL, Entropy, AGV because there are “no alternatives”.
It means that people in the OpCo (OAT, Chief etc) will not have to be complacent about their role, and have a constant critical thinking about why they are indeed managing or not managing certain initiatives.
This is not a virtue signal: I am cautiously optimistic in enlarging the scope of the OpCo. But in this whole transition we are collectively experiencing, from DAO executed operations to AAEs taking the lead, we want to constantly ask ourself if we are not losing the plot.
Personally, I am quite confident we won’t.