Background
Name: karpatkey
Position I am applying for: Council
TG: @coltron1 @jameskbh
Twitter: karpatkey
Affiliations (Currently I am working with, invested in, etc.): We manage treasuries or serve on treasury committees for protocols such as Balancer, GnosisDAO, and Ethereum Name Service, and we hold multiple crypto assets in our own treasury. Our treasury data is open and freely available on our treasury reports.
Why You
Why would You be the best candidate for this position?
Council members must provide unbiased and knowledgeable oversight to this program. As an asset manager, karpatkey has served multiple DAOs and protocols in positions requiring high trust, discretion, and responsible decision-making. At the most fundamental level, our service provides knowledgeable and impartial oversight that enables protocols to execute DeFi strategies safely.
Although we have a well-established and rich history in DeFi, our governance team brings an additional breadth of knowledge to the protocol grants space. Coupled with our DeFi knowledge, we possess a unique perspective that would be valuable in reviewing applications and devising this program’s rubric.
The karpatkey representatives fully dedicated to our council seat are @coltron.eth and @jameskbh . These karpatkey members have cross-protocol experience both reviewing and authoring proposals and grant submissions. While @jameskbh has extensive expertise in the Balancer and Aura ecosystem as a reviewer and applicant for grants and incentives, @coltron.eth has directly served as an ENS DAO steward, facilitating and reviewing numerous grant streams over the past two years for a major protocol.
Further, a council seat doubles down on our commitment to being hands-on delegates. Our representatives have already attended weekly governance calls and in-person DAO meetups, and we are eager to increase karpatkey’s involvement in a way that provides value to Arbitrum.
We are not large delegates with outsized influence in the Arbitrum DAO, and we approach this position objectively and seriously.
What do you think a good incentive application looks like?
We will favour applications that are well-rounded and close the loop on the grants or incentives cycle. One primary issue we see across many different ecosystems related to grant submissions is a tendency to over-promise at the submission phase and provide far too little follow-through towards the end of the grant life cycle.
For incentive applications that we would favour, we want the Arbitrum community to clearly understand how the application’s promised impact will be achieved and how they will address anticipated challenges. Although each application will have unique benchmarks and goals, we would like to see the minimum criteria from applicants:
- Clearly defined outcomes - How does this competitively impact the Arbitrum Protocol?
- KPIs - Which significant data will be used to evaluate success? Is there truly quantifiable data absent of fluff metrics?
- Open reporting - How will the applicant provide dashboards or consistent reporting?
- Risk Management - How will the applicant mitigate any capital, reputational, or gaming risks from their strategy or strategies?
As noted in the next section, a clearly established rubric will be crucial in guiding submissions to fulfil the desired outcomes from this program.
What are your goals for this program?
The pilot phase is critical to determine if this program will continue successfully. Because of this, our goals for this program in this phase are foundational so that additional iterations have a basis to achieve more refined goals. Ultimately, we want to see a quantifiable impact on the Arbitrum protocol that can become sustainable over the long term.
A high-level list of our goals for the pilot phase is below:
- Design towards repeatability and sustainability. We want to see straightforward rubrics and processes that lend to repeatability.
- Improve on lessons learned from STIP. There is already a case study in the form of the STIP lessons learned; we want the Arbitrum grants landscape to be robust and a product of cumulative improvements.
- Promotes measurable and transparent outcomes. With the significant value being dispensed by this pilot program, it is paramount that there is end-to-end transparency from the submission phase to the program retrospective.
Additionally, we must mention the crucial importance of the rubric to promote receiving “good” incentive applications. The rubric allows the council to establish a predictable filter so that the applications received are focused on delivering to attract new users and liquidity to Arbitrum with metrics that are meaningful to the LTIPP council and DAO.
For any questions about this application, please contact us via this @karpatkey forum account or our representatives (coltron / jameskbh) individually on Telegram.