I am not opposed to more research being conducted on treasury backed vaults, but I would like the end goal to be an RFP process rather than funding an entity to build TBVs from scratch.
For example, I believe Curve’s crvUSD that introduced soft liquidations via LLAMMA pools would be highly compelling for the use case being described. We even granted Curve ~240k ARB a few weeks ago to create a market for ARB/crvUSD/CRV and soon LRT/WETH pools. Why would we not want Curve (and others) to be able to throw their hat in the ring for this type of initiative?
I also think the price tag is too high here - I think 100k ARB is more inline with the proposed outputs. We have the ARDC for a reason, and if DAO treasury utilization for borrows is something that is desired, we should utilize the resources we have already paid for to conduct the R&D. An added benefit of utilizing the ARDC would be the lack of bias in the report.
I have reservations as a whole on the proposed TBVs, as a vast majority of the DAO’s spend is not expected to be returned. In the cases where we DO expect a return (see the GCP), the value is so large that a TBV would be rendered entirely infeasible anyways. I understand people here are bullish ARB and want to avoid selling it, but does this actually make sense in practice? My gut tells me no…