JoJo Delegate Communication Thread

[JoJo]

December 2024 voting

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Snapshot votings

[Non-consitutional] User Research: Why build on Arbitrum?

Vote: Arbitrum + 2 Others (OP + SOL)

@JoJo

I don’t mind this research, on several fronts, so I am voting in favour with the 2 other ecosystems: it makes sense to do a research that even if scoped, or preliminary, can give us some insight.

Few things tho:

• agree with pedrob, this could have stayed on the forum for a while more to be honest
• also agree with 0x_ultra that methodology to select builders will be key. You might be for sure more expert than us in this topic, top of my mind selecting exclusive builders vs cross chain ones, and builders that started at day 1 here vs new builders approaching, can give us not only info on the why, but also how this why and the general perception of the chain has evolved over time
• it obviously make sense to coordinate with ardc as you posted or in general any other entity that might arise in the dao that can have connections or interest in this topic. In general this is something that I hope for every initiative.

Designing and operating the reporting and information function

Vote: For, More Salary - no bonus

@JoJo

I want to support this proposal, but I also have some doubts.

This doubts are not on the function. I think we need an overall reporting authority with experience in the dao.
Is also not on the person. I think Alex has stick around in our ecosystem for a while, showing he is willing to work and contribute here, both in virtual and in irl meetings.

I think there is value in the mission. And I think Alex is well positioned for this task due to his experience in the DAO.

As every initiative, in the end the evaluation comes down to the following paramters:

1. mission: does it have value? I already provided the answer above
2. cost: is the cost fair?
3. kpi/evaluation: is it easy for the dao to evaluate this initiative, during and post?

While I briefly answered to 1, 2 and 3 are still up for discussion.
What follows comes down to the fact that, is quoted, we will have around 1.03 FTE in 1 year (please clarify if that is not the case, understanding that there is a 45k discretionary budget to potentially hire other members).

As far as I understood (and claude helped me spoiler) we are talking, for the 1.03 FTE, of

• $150k as base for 1y
• $125k as bonus (will consider your prices for arb and convert them knowing it will be likely adjusted)

Basically, a $12.5k monthly salary, with a $10k bonus.

This, for reporting and oversight work, is the high side of the barrel I will be honest. I would expect a level of scrutiny that is almost at a military grade level, to be blunt. I would expect you to physically chase people who don’t answer you in telegram to get the info you need, and this is no hyperbole, cause sometimes is just so hard to get info from people in chat.
The main doubts from a quantitative standpoint comes from basically plugging the whole initiative, and the persona, at an OpCo level, when OpCo is still in discussion. I easily see this initiative, if it moves forward, being incorporated by opco, and likely at the same initial price. But, if we had the opco live now, would it be done in these financial terms? Not sure.

I will vote in favor of this initiative to signal support, for 1) the initiative 2) the persona running it. I can’t in all honesty agree with the financials, which imho should be revised down.
It’s a bit hard for me to suggest numbers: you reference the senior opco level, but in an org like the opco (in any org, tbh), the scope of work would probably naturally expand based on the needs and would be leveraged in a team to bring additional value as the needs come over time. On what is a 12.5+10 potential monthly salary, I could see for example a reduction to 10+5.
There is also the problem of the quarterly evaluation and release of bonus which as other mentioned doesn’t seem to be addressed, and needs a clarification.

On top of everything, we have a 45k retroactive for the 5 months of GCR working which is 9k/m and you mentioned a discounted rate of 0.75%. I appreciated your hard work, but the 75% rate on the proposal seems high: again is hard to suggest numbers here, if i had to take an educated guess, would maybe put 50% of base which in my suggestion above is 10k, so overall 25k. No hard opinions here, except that charging 75% on the base seems too high.

I want to finalize all of this by iterating that I want to support Alex. I want to see him being more involved in our DAO, work here full time, be happy about what he does, and provide value to us. I sincerely see him as a good contributor to the ecosystem, so I want to see this initiative moving forward. I don’t currently see the numbers proposed matching the expectations of the DAO tho, just that, and I think this can be fixed, which would make me extremely happy.

On this, I am voting in favor, expecting a broader discussion and adjustment on tally on numbers and on way to evaluate the bonus.

Arbitrum D.A.O. Domain Allocator Offerings) Grant Program - Season 3

Vote: Abstain

I’m the proposer so, naturally, have voted Abstain. Would have voted to have 5 domains including Orbit of course.

[NON-CONSTITUTIONAL] Arbitrum Onboarding V2: A Governance Bootcamp

Vote: For

@JoJo

I voted in favor of this proposal.

I share some of the concerns expressed above: it’s a bit unclear the value that the initiative will have 1 year from now because we don’t know where these trained analyst will end up being, if in protocols, in our dao, in others etc.

At the same time, I want to be mindful of a trend we have been seeing lately and that few delegates shared privately with me, which is new contributors, in the DAO, entering with a decent amount of criticism in every initiative without necessarily providing solutions or alternatives (or, when that is done, is done through solutions that are quite superficial and don’t necessarily tackle the initial issue). This is partially due on how the DIP is structure, in which de facto commenting increases the amount of point, and part due to the human nature: sounding pessimism and being critic is the easiest way to sound smart to be blunt.
(note: nothing against seed here or anyone in particular. It is what it is, and is a byproduct of our dao growing more and more over time).

For the reason above, I hope this program will indeed elevate the quality of new contributors, and this is why I am voting in favor. I share the concern that of the 193k allocated only 30k goes to analysts: to me it means that the expectation, end of program, is to have 20 kickass black belt governance analysts, I am expecting no less with an opex of 160k.

I also think we should find a way for weaponize these new analysts, and right now one of the biggest gap we have is the protocols’ participations. We should find a way to advertise this pool of participants to protocols (a bit hard: every team tends to internalize people that they trust, not necessarily suggested by third party sources).
I also suggest to select people with also a technical background, that have experience in designing protocols, tokenomics and lst. We don’t need only people that know about governance, we also need people who are technically knowleageable, cause up to some degree we saw partially the limitation of knowledge of delegates during the working group for designing arb staking. I would really like to have more people that have been builders to be trained in governance.

Finally, i agree that DIP kpi are not the right one here. Success, to me, means that the trained analyst end up contributing to our dao, either through specific dao roles, or by being integrated in protocols as part of their personnel etc.

All in all I don’t have all the answers to the questions above, and I hope @RikaGoldberg and gang will iterate between this and tally to try and address some of these concerns.

ARDC (V2) Supervisory Council Election

ARDC (V2) Research Election

ARDC (V2) Risk Election

ARDC (V2) Security Election

Votes:

• Supervisory elections: Pedro and James for comms, Entropy+Tamara OPS
• Research Election: Castlecap and Blockworksresearch
• Security Election: OpenZeppelin
• Risk Elections: VendingMachine/Nethermind

@JoJo

ARDC (V2) Supervisory Council Election

For the supervisory elections, I am voting for pedrob and jameskbh for the communications.

There is a great set of candidates here, but for these 2 specifically I have had the pleasure to know and work with both of them. And I think at this point both deserve more space in our DAO: the skillset they have is quite complementary (james technical and entrenched, pedro very comms oriented, and both extremely present) and they would not let a single detail slide without overviewing it first.
I honestly don’t think we could get a better team for this complex task than these 2 nice folks here, and the DAO would only benefit from the value they can provide.

I am also voting on entropy + tamara since is the only candidate for operations. I am glad we will be able to see them working together, and I am looking forward to see tamara bridging her experience from Lido to the ARDC.

ARDC (V2) Research Election

This is quite difficult due to having only 1 elected member. I will have to split my votes:

• 63% will go to CastleCapital + DefiLlama. I have worked and meet the castle team, and encountered them the first time with the STIP feedback. It was impressive: tailored feedback for each one of the protocols involved. Quite a lift at the time, and I had then the pleasure to have them alongside me as advisors in LTIPP and STIP.b. I think they have a very good and pragmatic approach. On defillama, as most that are here I have been using their open and free tools forever. The thing that has always struck me was the agility in execution on their side, with defillama website being updated in matter of days when there was enough request on twitter. This agility shows 2 things: ability to listen to stakeholders and ability to quickly iterate. I would like to see them working in our DAO
• 37% goes to BlockworksResearch. I cannot not support them after what I saw in previous ARDC. I did read all deliverables from all deliverables, and without taking anything from the others, the blockworks reports where just better. Not necessarily more in depth (they were tho), but with an angle that was imho the right one to have followup actions on our side as a DAO, at least up to some degree. For example, their team with Carolina was the only one able to produce normalized data for the incentive programs, something that was the groundwork to even understand if the programs were successful or not.

It’s to be honest a shame that we can’t have both these teams working in our DAO.

ARDC (V2) Security Election

I am voting for Open Zeppelin. Not only they are good, they have been following Arbitrum since almost inception, and have multiple roles in our ecosystem. While diversity of vendors can sometimes be a strength, the experience that Open Zeppelin has in our ecosystem is just too much of an advantage here.

ARDC (V2) Risk Election

Split my vote, 50/50, for VendingMachine and Nethermind. I think all the companies here are quite professional, and as for the comms/ops we should have more than one member. That said, the scope of work presented to me by these 2 was the most valuable, specifically the all around framework from vending machine, and the lst analysis from nethermind.

Unifying Arbitrum’s Mission, Vision, Purpose (MVP)

Vote: For

@JoJo

Thanks for this.

Voting For on the proposal.

We have here the natural continuation of the discussion on mission, vision and goals that started a few months ago after EthCC, with a proper formalization and plan here.

We had the chance to discuss some of these topics, live, in Bangkok, and was a pretty awesome discussion, oriented toward what we all collectively think Arbitrum should be from a high level view point up to the connection with strategic key ideas that can be then translated in actual program andi initiatives.

This is not an easy discussion. We are likely all here (in crypto, not necessarily in Arbitrum) because we “believe in something”: financial sovereign, unlockin equal opportuninties, efficiency of capital flow, just name one, there are thousands of reasons. But asking someone “what is Arbitrum for you” and then “ok, now that I have your definition, what is your plan to make that vision that you have happen” would more likely than not not being followed by a proper answer.

What I like here is that we went for an abstract question, with a process to try and translate it into operational plan. When the vision is approved, we will be able to define in a second phase, the sos, strategic goals. From the strategic goals, in a third phase, we will be able to go more concrete by establishing buckets of capital and budget spending to reailze these goals.

The byproduct is that, if we do phase 1 and 2 right, we should be in a position that for every initiave, old or new, we will be able to evaluate if it fits the vision and the underneath strategic goals. This should definitely give us more clarity, and help for example in the definition of stuff like incentive programs for which everybody and their grandma has an opinion, but not necessarily understand the consequences and the effect from a higher point of view.

Partner with ETH Bucharest 2025

Vote: For, without POAP

@JoJo

Understanding the concerns of entropy for this, I might want to highlight that the discontinuity of programs, in this case the D.A.O. grants program, is something that is causing most of this situation, and should be generally tackled better by us as a collective (one of the reason why we gonna move to a 1y program instead of 6 months over 6 months).
That said, and because of the reason above, I am voting in favor with no poap. I don’t necessarily share the concerns about the dao event budget since this will be fixed, hopefully, in a couple of months; but at the same time I don’t see the benefit to add 15k of costs which are an increase of 25% and counting on top of the base of 55k.

I think the organizers are doing a great job tho and that these events can become de facto a staple for the eth and arb community in countries that don’t necessarily have one “champion” yet.

Full support on my side, hoping to have the time to drop there by the time is live

OpCo – A DAO-adjacent Entity for Strategy Execution

Vote: For

@JoJo

Already gave plenty of feedbacks, here, here and here, plus some more scattered. And in general, as a judgment on specific topic, have engaged in this interesting convo.

To me situation is relative straight forward:

1. we need a legal entity that is controlled by the DAO. If we want to hire people, agencies etc is the only way to do it. And I think we need to upscale some operations in tandem with other initiatives, that will require an operative arm such the OpCo.
2. we need an entity that is “empowered” to carry the mission. Here empowered, very abused word nowadays, means several things: enough financial capital to operate, a mandate that is both precise but also loose enough that the DAO can tap into it, and obviously the right head
3. as for any venture in any work environment, is mostly about the people. We will need the right people to run it, we will need the right head, proactive, capable to propose a vision compatible with our needs, and a set of people around it capable to implement this vision. This will likely mean a mix of people outside of the dao, and potentially inside the arbitrum ecosystem (not necessarily the dao).

The points above to me are first, compatible with what most has judged as a too long of a mandate. De facto of the 30 months, we can consider the first 6 months burned between setting up the entity, source the ceo (and possibly the cfo), find the oat, negotiate first 2 salaries, get the operations up and running with a first few sets of people being the operational people alongside the 2 c-suite. Even just writing this down, 6 months could be optimistic considering the summer in between.
That’s why 30 months is the bare minimum here.
On the capital, as stated previously, I prefer the OpCo having more than it needs and eventually give it back then the opposite situation; if I read the prospect above with the people + salaries, the 22M arb is compatible with a full fledged org, with again no obligation to spend it all (and here, spend = overhire = controlled by oats).
I also think that salaries proposed are not that out of the world: remember, anybody in there won’t be able to partake in any other initiative in this dao, or others dao, or protocols. This is quite big: the opportunities in the crypto space are quite abundant, having this exclusivity does bear a premium; and the bonus is necessary to align performances (otherwise you risk people doing the bare minimum, and we don’t even want to have to tackle a situation like this, we want people that grind everyday).

The main risk of this proposal is finding the right CEO, this was discussed already, and will be one of the most important key success factor.

Not only i am voting in favor, I vote in favor with the hope that scope will be expanded by the dao overtime.

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Tally votings

Arbitrum Hackathon Builder Continuation Program

Vote: For

@JoJo

I’m confirming my snapshot vote on tally.
Would like to add few things for danielo

1. first thanks for posting a small table with breakdown of costs, this is what we spoke privately, helps to better understand costs vs invstment
2. a suggestion for the future. I understand the holiday pause can be annoying and somehow disruptive for the flow, but in future you shouldn’t rush any proposal to tally this much. I am voting in favour only cause I think the model is worth experimenting upon and there is monetary commitment from RnDao, and don’t want to kill the initiative, but if it wasn’t for these 2 I would have likely abstained or even vote against. A lot of other proposals are in this very same situation, with different flavour of course, so please let’s avoid this happening again.

Treasury Management V1.2

Vote: For

Confirming previous snapshot vote