JoJo Delegate Communication Thread

JoJo · September 27, 2024, 10:25am

October 2024 voting

Snapshot votings

[Non-Constitutional] Whitelist Infura Nova Validator

Vote: For

Research on context and retention

Vote: For

An EIP-4824 powered daoURI for Arbitrum DAO

Vote: For – Use ENS txt records

LTIPP Retroactive Community Funding Selections

Vote: Tokenguard
I was quite impressed by their presentation during the Incentive call of this week: they are one of the few providers who decided to try and go more in depth in the data analysis, regardless of LTIPP council not selecting them in the previous months.
I would have normally voted against funding any initiative, but this one bears to me a push forward to keep the team engaged in our DAO: their data while imperfect is to me a good step toward the right direction analysis wise.

Establishing a DAO Events Budget for 2025

Vote: For

Establishing a DAO Events Budget for 2025

With the primary proposal + changes I want to show my overall support.

As a Dao, our goal is to, generically, evolve and get better. While this concept is abstract, from a pragmatic pov it means filling the gaps we have and remove friction.

One of the biggest friction we have is what is in between good proposals from good contributors vs the final outcome; often times than not this is about having not only a budget, but a budget by a certain date. With the previous even we saw that you need to move with weeks and sometimes months in advance, and the event budget will likely remove this friction (same as the treasury initiative to have a certain amount of stables, in our pocjets, will allow to remove friction from programs that requires a usd denominated budget; OT here, I know, but to me it has the same overarching goal of removing friction).

(V2) Arbitrum Research & Development Collective

Vote: For, 2.09M

[NON-CONSTITUTIONAL] - Arbitrum Research and Development Collective [Term 2]

I am voting in favor.

I think we need for our DAO this collective. We spin up ton of initiatives, and some goes in parallel, are highly technical and/or require smart contract implementation. We need to be able to asses the risk and we can’t make the responsability fall back on OCL.
At the same time we need a data science unit; we need to crunch data and understand what is happening both in our world and in the rest of the crypto world.

I don’t have a very strong opinion on the budget. Immutablelawyer I know it would be quite difficult, but maybe in future could be interesting to try and highlight the difference of amount of deliverable (or whatever kpi you deem fit) between budget A, B and C. I am pretty sure that 90% of users here who didn’t work in an audit or research firm don’t know the cost of bread. Because of this, I am going with the middle choice of 2.09M.

As a final thought, I hope that when we are going to have to renew this initiative in 6 months, we will have opco capable of internalize this whole structure. I really think we will need risk and data analyst, constantly, moving forward.

On a more general note, I support the council added on top, I really think analyzing the work can be a very complex task not suited just for a single advocate; the payroll structure (1/3 upfront, and the rest split 50/50 before/after deliverable) is for sure better in term of alignment. I also think it’s more of a theoretical solution than anything, “hours” in crypto are what they are, they are easy to game (not saying anyone would do that) and are a not so meaningful measure compared to IRL jobs in which you just use a badge. But I understand the need to address some concern, and the need to at least try to find solutions.

Thanks for the hard work.

[Non-Constitutional] Arbitrum Token Swap Pilot Program

Vote: Against

[Non-Constitutional] Arbitrum Token Swap Pilot Program

I’m voting AGAINST this proposal in the temp check.

First of all, motivation seems unclear.

[Non-Constitutional] Arbitrum Token Swap Pilot Program

By embedding Token Swaps as a vital element of Arbitrum Ecosystem Development and critical programs such as LTIP, Arbitrum can continue pro-actively incentivizing ecosystem growth

This is what is stated here. In the initial discussion, which I don’t know why it wasn’t linked, it was instead presented with a different motivation.

Proposal [Non-Constitutional] Arbitrum Treasury Token Swap Program

Token swaps are a form of treasury diversification that increases Arbitrum alignment of protocols. In our view, token swaps should be the final stage of ecosystem support by the DAO, which could begin with a small Questbook grant and finally graduate to a direct token swap with us.

The initiative has been moved from treasury diversification to growth of the chain, with a partial common goal of alignment of the protocols. But even here, the treasure example to me doesn’t hold: we are giving for granted that, if our treasury would have held magic, treasure would have stayed in our ecosystem. I don’t think this holds true.
For these reasons, seems like the end goals are a bit unclear.

Also, and maybe is me, I think this program is more a “virtue signal” than anything. Let me try to analyse the reasons why a protocol should do a token swap, knowing that the following are the terms.

[Non-Constitutional] Arbitrum Token Swap Pilot Program

Non-Sales Clause
Arbitrum DAO and the third-party DAO will swap tokens with a 3-month lock. After the three month lock, the tokens will unlock 10% monthly for ten months. If no Arbitrum Treasury Management team is in place within nine months of executing the token swaps, the Pilot team will propose a solution for managing these tokens before they unlock.

Using for OpEx / Incentive program
The protocol will start to receive to get unlocked arb, at a rate of 10%, after 3 months. I see little reason for a protocol to get into this deal for covering opex since these are the terms; but neither the terms are such that the protocol can use the sum easily to spin up their own incentive program, at least not before several months (and they could do it through their own token at that point).

Using as yield generating mechanism
We still don’t have staked arb. We are currently working on it, but will take some time to be implemented; as such, is quite difficult to project the economics in an exchange. Matter of the fact, most token swaps are done because not only you signal alignment, but also because is bad optic for yourself to farm your own protocol with your own token but is instead ok to farm a friendly protocol. How can we even put the real value proposition of arb if we don’t yet know how staking will look like?

Using for voting power
This is the only case currently that would make sense to me: a protocol wants to participate to the governance of Arbitrum. But, looking at the list of the 19 protocols whitelisted, almost all the upperhalf of them is already participating to the governance; the lower half, will be quite difficult IMHO to involve them in governance unless there has been specific contacts on this regards. Happy to be proven wrong, would be good to have more builders involved in our DAO directly.

There is also a final consideration on the management of these coins. Assuming swaps will go through, and let’s even assume we have everything vested, at that point there is definitely a different reputation consequences for the protocols selling the arbs, or for our dao to sell the protocols’ tokens.
For the protocol, selling the arb token will likely be ok, or even go unnoticed.
For our DAO, it will likely be negative (“you don’t support external protocols”) to sell non arbitrum native protocols’ tokens. It will be extremely negative to sell instead the token of arbitrum native one (“the dao doesn’t even support GMX/Camelot/insert name of native arbitrum protocol”). It could potentially be ok to utilize them in yield generating strategies through a treasury manager, but the amount exchanged, since we have a cap of 500k, won’t be worth the hassle in my opinion; plus, we are assuming that there will be good way to generate yield or that we will also have a treasury manager. TLDR: whatever token swap we do, it will be quite difficult for the DAO to sell these tokens.

In my view, the DAO should take a totally different approach to align protocols to the chain and foster growth: we should invest in protocols.
This doesn’t mean buying the token, but literally participating to raises of the protocols, and get a portion of the equity. This, to me, would make way more sense.
We are not there yet because we need legal infrastructure that we don’t have for example. But to me, not having yet the tools doesn’t mean we should go for the path highlighted above.

As a final note, i want to say I appreciate the work done so far. I think the proposal is for sure better than the initial one, and I think the people added (paper, castlecap) add a ton of experience and professionality to this group. Despite this, I really can’t find a way to frame the token swaps idea as a good idea for our DAO, sorry.

GCP Council Re-Confirmation Vote for Tim Chang

Vote: For