MSS Post-Mortem
The Multisig Support Service (MSS) was originally proposed to address a growing issue in the DAO: every initiative was spinning up its own multisig, often with overlapping signers. This was inefficient, hard to coordinate, and, most importantly, very costly to the DAO.
MSS aimed to address this by offering a shared multisig setup that would be used by all initiatives, thereby reducing costs and removing ambiguity regarding custody of funds for proposed initiatives.
For this post-mortem, we purposefully focused on just the pain points and things we’d do differently (aka ‘lessons learnt’) and didn’t include any quantitative data. We believe the latter wouldn’t have any significant insights.
Pain points
There were several friction points, especially early on:
- Coordination issues: Confusion over responsibilities, missing signers, and unclear workflows led to frequent delays.
- The scope of work was de facto larger than initially expected or planned, with chairs having to study non-trivial protocols to create the initial setup of vaults, streams and generally operate.
- Too many signers: The 9/12 setup was secure, but slow. Getting everyone to sign took time, especially when some signers weren’t responsive.
- Unclear leadership: Having three separate “Chairs” created ambiguity around who was supposed to do what.
- Lack of standardization: Payment request processes varied, reporting in the forums was inconsistent, and roles weren’t always well-defined.
These things added up and, at times, slowed down the very programs MSS was meant to support.
What we could do differently
If we were to run this back, here are some things that could be improved.
- Appoint a single MSS lead to manage ops, signer coordination, and be the point of contact. For added flexibility, the difference between signers and chairs could be removed, and the MSS lead/PM could assign ownership to various multisigs based on the workload.
- Reduce the number of signers. Something like 3/5 or 5/7 would still be secure, but way easier to coordinate.
- Set up better signer expectations. There should be stricter rules regarding activity and liveness of signers —perhaps even periodic check-ins, similar to Security Council drills– and signers should be promptly removed and replaced if they’re unresponsive.
- More flexible signer changes if a signer becomes inactive or steps down. Replacing a signer shouldn’t have to involve a DAO vote. Perhaps having ‘reserve’ signers could help.
- Standardize payment flows. There should be clear guidelines and steps for how initiatives request funds to be moved by the MSS.
- Improve financial transparency with a more standardized reporting format and cadence.
- Plan ahead for ARB-to-stablecoin conversions to avoid signing delays and budget issues caused by price swings. Include buffer amounts in proposals that have stablecoin requirements to account for price fluctuations.
- Formalize the Foundation’s role, as they were already involved in KYC/KYB.
Final thoughts
MSS was a pretty basic piece of DAO infrastructure—and that’s kind of the point. If we can’t manage a handful of multisigs efficiently, we should probably be more cautious about tackling anything more complex, especially when the initial setup is already complex. Still, it was a worthwhile experiment that saved the DAO money and helped us learn a few things about decentralized operations.
Update 17/7
The stream for JuanRah’s compensation for ARDC has ended on July 12th, as originally planned. This was the last item that was under the MSS’s control.