[Non-Constitutional]: Empowering Early Contributors: The community Arbiter Proposal 2.0

Proposals Finalized AIPs
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Posting here on behalf of the Treasure DAO ARC.

First of all, thank you to Mysterymen for providing additional information, not only regarding the contributions made by the Arbiters but also in answering questions from various community members on this second version of the proposal.

After reviewing the updated version of this proposal, collecting additional information and much discussion amongst the ARC members, we want to offer insights into why we are voting against this proposal.

  1. The Arbiters were given a one-time award by the Arbitrum Foundation of 6500-7000 USDC on average. Per Mysterymen, the exact amount per Arbiter isn’t available because of privacy reasons. If we take the lowest possible number, this comes out to 6500 * 25 = 162,500 USDC that the Foundation paid out to the Arbiters on the 16th of September 2023. The price of Arbitrum was 83 cents or less. So in ARB terms this amount, when the payment was paid equates to, at least 162500 / 0.83 = 195,783 ARB.
  2. If each member converted that USDC into ARB they would have about 7831 ARB per Arbiter in terms of voting power on DAO proposals.
  3. The argument regarding obtaining voting rights therefore does not make a lot of sense. There was nothing preventing the Arbiters from participating in the airdrop activities and so comparing against the airdrop amounts is not very relevant. It is a completely separate event with a different criteria. As with all airdrops in Web3, there are community members who maximize for airdrops across wallets vs. those who may have much more activity from a single wallet. The rewards are often not comparable. We do not see this being relevant to this proposal

In conclusion we believe that the Foundation’s one time reward addresses the WHY of this proposal which was

However, Arbiters did not receive airdrop retroactive rewards after the establishment of the Arbitrum DAO. Arbiters, as an important early contributor to the Arbitrum ecosystem, have not been given any right to speak and vote in the development of the Arbitrum DAO.

The payment allows the Arbiters to have the ability to vote in the matters of the Arbitrum DAO. It is also unrelated to any airdrop they may or may not have received as part of the community wide Arbitrum airdrop.

Thank you,
Treasure DAO ARC

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Hello Ali and Treasure DAO ARC, @thechaingamer.eth

Thank you for your discussions and responses with Treasure DAO ARC. But arbiter would like to explain more to Treasure DAO ARC, other delegates and the community.

  1. What the arbiter had been seeking was a ARB retroactive award. However, due to legal and other restrictions after the airdrop, the foundation can only consider part of the arbiter’s contribution in the discord and provide limited USDC rewards to the arbiter.

And the arbiter only knows the amount after the USDC reward distribution is completed. The arbiter can only passively accept it.

When considering USDC rewards, the foundation only considers part of the arbiter’s contribution in the Arbitrum discord, and the evaluation metric is only the number of mesages that help community members. This does not include all contributions made by arbiters in the Arbitrum discord as well as prominent contributions outside of the discord.

  1. The Arbitrum Foundation stated that if arbiters believe that other contributions have not been retroactively rewarded, arbiter can seek remaining grant from the Arbitrum DAO.

Someone from foundation can confirm above info, if you’d like.

  1. Arbiter, as an early contributor, spent a lot of energy and time on the development of Arbitrum, and was even online for 16 hours every day during Odyssey. If this energy and time are focused on airdrop activities, arbiter believes that there will be more airdrop rewards. But arbiter chooses to practice the Arbitrum community spirit and focus his time and energy on promoting the development of the arbitrum community.

  2. The amount of retrospective rewards from Arbitrum to early adopters and ecosystem project airdrops, does not take any price into account.
    arbiter believes that it is unfair to tie the price of arb to arbiter’s retroactive rewards.

  3. The Optimism community attaches great importance to early contributors and has retroactively awarded 800,000 OP to four types of contributors: ambassadors, translators, Nerds, and TechNERD (contributors in the optimism discord between 2021 and 2023).
    [Non-Constitutional]: Empowering Early Contributors: The community Arbiter Proposal 2.0 - #13 by Mysterymen

Of course, arbiter also takes into account the concerns and doubts of delegates.

But Arbiter faces more than 17 types of contributions, from 2021 to 2023, two and a half years of continuous contribution. There is indeed not enough ability to establish a reward evaluation system.

Arbiter also hopes to seek more suggestions and opinions from delegates on and evaluation system and the arb retroactive reward amount. (arbiter will continuing to reduce the retroactive reward amount)

In conclusion, the arbiter believes that the retroactive reward amount can be reduced. But it would be inappropriate to completely dismiss the remaining contributions of arbiters in the Arbitrum discord and the outstanding contributions outside the Arbitrum discord.

Finally, arbiter kindly ask the Treasure DAO ARC and other delegates to give arbiter more consideration, support and understanding.

Arbiter representatives will also participate in today’s Arbitrum public governance call, hoping to have more communication with delegates.

Best,
arbiter

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Thank you, Mysterymen.

I will follow up on this ASAP.

Thanks,
Ali

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#10 Arbitrum Open Governance Call (17.1.2024)

arbiter participated in this public governance call. And made some statements and explanations about the 2.0 proposal. There were also some discussions with other delegates.

Relevant to [Non-Constitutional]: Empowering Early Contributors: The community Arbiter Proposal 2.0.

You can jump the recording to 53:00-55:23

Open discussion begins at 1:01:00. Other delegates had discussions on the 2.0 proposal. Especially some great discussions by Griff. Thank you @Griff

Other delegates and Arbitrum community, your insights and comments are extremely valuable for the future of the Arbitrum community and are critical to arbiter’s 2.0 proposal. We welcome your comments, feedback and interaction with us.

Thank you all,
Arbiters

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Just following up here on behalf of the TreasureDAO ARC.

Mysterymen, thank you for providing all the information and answering questions. We will support this proposal at a maximum of 5K ARB per person, meaning a total of 125K ARB as a reward for the Arbiters. We say this for the following reasons:

  1. We’re certain the Arbiters have provided value to the ecosystem. As is indicated by the Foundation’s earlier reward of 162.5K USDC
  2. Out of the 25 Arbiters only a few received the maximum reward the Foundation could give out (10K USDC being the cap)
  3. We appreciate the Arbiters putting together all the “proof-of-work”, however, it has been very hard to parse through all of it, and really understand how much time and effort was spent.

Due to the reasons stated above, we believe awarding each Arbiter an additional 5K in ARB tokens would be a fair result.

Thank you,
The TreasureDAO ARC

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Ali, thank you and TreasureDAO ARC

After discussion, arbiters agreed to reduce the retroactive reward amount of this proposal to 125K arb. I will update the retroactive award amount at the top of the proposal later.

Thanks,
Arbiters

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Empowering Early Contributors: The community Arbiter Proposal 2.0 has been posted on the Snapshot for hot check

https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0xf949b8c0629644390752cc09ba1ae641116fdf10733d32c35f8968e3ce79a399

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I voted for this temp check on Snapshot. I appreciate the work the Arbiters did to contribute to Arbitrum and think they should be rewarded. I think the amount is reasonable.

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Our team voted Against this proposal.
I think, that any offers that provide drops or grants should be competitive.
This proposal provides funding only to a limited number of people, and does not provide the opportunity to receive a similar drop to the same people who were active at the early stage of Arbitrum development.
Our comments to adjust this proposal to improve the fairness of financial distribution was not taken into account

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gm folks, thanks for pushing the v2 of the proposal on Snapshot.

Thanks for pushing version 2 of the proposal on Snapshot.

I’d like to share a few thoughts that I believe should be addressed before we proceed to the vote on Tally.

  1. The proposal could better highlight and summarize the impact the Arbiters have made on Arbitrum. I noticed that version 1 presented some metrics more effectively than version 2.
    Highlighting the impact is important because we should start move as a DAO from output driven KPIs (“I have answered xx tickets”) to impact-focused metrics (“we have onboarded xx new users”).

  2. It seems the proposal on Snapshot omits the fact that Arbiters have already received $7000 each. Mentioning this would offer a more full, fair, picture.

On that note (and I’d appreciate confirmation on this), my understanding is that an Arbiter’s total compensation over 2.5 years amounts to (with no additional payments within this period):

*** 5000 ARB (valued at $9500 currently)**
*** $7000 cash**

This totals $16500 for 30 months of contribution, averaging about $550 per month.

These figures seem fair to me, and if they’re accurate, I’ll be inclined to vote in favor.

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can you elaborate on this? I am not aware personally.

I am also inclined for the yes after reading your numbers, basically 550/m is the equivalent of the cost of a discord mod in a lot of daos… and I think the contribution here was higher (in term of value) :slight_smile:

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This is an extremely comprehensive post. @Mysterymen deserves to be rewarded for putting this together; if not already compensated or not if otherwise receives compensation precedent to this topic. . .Or however
that process works in Arbitrum Governance.

@Mysterymen can we connect? I have a couple topics of interest losely related to some of the subtopics that are presented in your post.

-accessor, ensdao.

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Hi MaxLomu,
Thank you for your valuable feedback

  1. Due to the failure to fully preserve the contribution data and the failure to effectively record the community impact indicator data. We can only provide estimates.
    Prior to the tally vote, we will update data on arbiter’s community impact metrics at the 2.0 proposal.

  2. Regarding receipt of USDC donations from the foundation, we will update it in the 2.0 proposal.

3. Yes, we confirm that we have only received donations of 6500-7000 USDC (per arbiter) from the foundation. Apart from this, there are no other donations, retroactive rewards and airdrops of any kind.

Someone from foundation can confirm that average if you’d like. You can also seek confirmation from foundations and communities.

Thanks,
Arbiters

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Hi accessor.eth,
There is no precedent for similar topics receiving retroactive rewards in the Arbitrum DAO.

But there is optimism DAO’s retroactive rewards for community contributors (Retroactive Public Goods Funding) for reference.

Of course, feel free to contact me and arbiters

Best,
Arbiters

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We will vote against this proposal in its current state. Considering that Arbiters, having received $6,500 to $7,000 over an average of 1.5 years (Abiter), equates to approximately $466 USD per month. This seems reasonable compensation for a Discord moderator role, which is typically not full-time. To ensure fairness and inclusivity, we propose a retroactive rewards process for all early contributors, including Arbiters and other early contributors. Each contributor should submit their contributions for evaluation with KYC to ensure transparency and fairness. Implementing KPIs could help in awarding each contributor fairly, reflecting the value of their individual contributions.

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Hi, @Curia
Thanks for your feedback. arbiters provide the following explanations and clarifications

  1. The average time for an arbiter to contribute to arbitrum is 2.5 years. And the contributions of arbiters outside of the Arbitrum Discord are even more prominent. (Detailed instructions are provided in the proposal)
  2. The arbiter initiated this proposal at the suggestion of the foundation and other delegates. Arbiter has tried to use many evaluation systems to evaluate arbiter’s contribution, but none of them can fully evaluate it.
  3. Arbiter submits everyone’s contribution list. Please see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YjSCrAYJg2A1T5r8YpZx5BbfLQeyhBePqPtW5pA83dU/edit#gid=127633825
    Arbiter is a very early contributor to the Arbitrum community. There are so many contributions that have not been preserved or recorded.
  4. delegates are very welcome to help arbiters establish a very detailed evaluation system to evaluate arbiters’ 17+ contribution types.
  5. According to the requirements of the foundation, all arbiters have completed KYC.

Best,
Arbiters

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Is there any particular reason delegates are choosing to abstain from this vote? We’d love to hear the rationale behind that.

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Thanks.
Based on this I voted FOR on Snapshot.

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Delegates who voted for Abstain did not leave any comments, suggestions or feedback.

In the 1.0 proposal, we have comprehensively improved and modified the proposal according to the opinions of the delegates.

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The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.

After we first reviewed the original proposal, we voted in its favor during the temp-check and then provided our feedback with points we wanted to see addressed before the on-chain vote. Our feedback wasn’t addressed and we ultimately had to vote against the proposal. In their revised proposal, the ask amount has been significantly reduced, and there has been a good-faith effort to list the contributions made both on a collective and on an individual basis.

We understand the position Arbiters find themselves in when trying to justify the requested amount for contributions that are hard to track and measure or assess their impact. And it became very apparent when we tried to think of an amount ourselves - which was impossible to do without relying on arbitrary decision-making.

Having said that, and given the concerns we raised in the original proposal have been addressed in the revised one, we’ll be voting in favor of the proposal during temp-check, and during the following on-chain vote if the temp check is successful.

However, we want to take the opportunity and state that we do not see this proposal as something setting a precedent, and we suggest that the DAO shouldn’t entertain such votes in the future unless there’s a very strong reason to do so.

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