Hey @maxlomu thanks for taking the time to respond, I know the delegates have their hands full atm and we really appreciate the attention to this proposal.
Thanks - we agree the Pluralistic vision is key for decentralization - and that a series of grant programs can make that a reality.
Thanks for the question - and lets talk about the meta-issue: ensuring grant impact / value.
During a series of Grant Round operator discussions at ETHDenver this was the common theme, how to quantity grant value or impact. Although many agreed this was the next step in the maturing of web3 grant programs, there was no consensus on the best method or metrics. While there are quantifiable metrics that can be put in place (TVL, tx volume, users, builders, delegate sentiment, # of grants distributed, amount of innovation), the nuance in those metrics needs to be worked out. We expect this is going to be both a science and an art - and is exceptionally important work that we are committed to moving forward in Milestone 1B.
In our proposal - this work falls into two lines:
In Milestone 1B, we intend to work across web3 and (to some extent) explore how IRL grant programs manage this. As we invent / reapply methods, we will validate the work with the Board in order to establish a workable baseline for grant value/impact.
The ideal state: the ability to compare one grant program vs. another for relative value creation.
This is going to be really hard, but itâs work that needs to be done. And thank you @maxlomu for the question and your work in Arbitrum.
Hey @Curia Thanks very much for your for your support! And we really appreciate your feedback, we believe the more voices we get into this conversation - the better.
We are in 100% agreement here and we are committed (and invested in) the success of Arbitrum.
Yes, in Milestone 1, we clearly recognize our communications on the program and project level needed some help. Here are some steps we put in place, and some thing that will help us get better in the milestone 1B:
We built a reporting site for grant programs and projects - here you can see all the programs and most of the 250+ projects funded by Plurality Labs.
We committed to monthly updates and progress reports - here is our January Report
We hired! Kyler formerly Operations Manager from the DAO Research Center is assisting and when this program passes, we will hire a Coms person to focused on Arbitrum Grants - communicating and reporting. We canât wait!
Thank you @Curia for your questions and for your support!
I very much appreciate your support for a pluralist grants program. To me, if it isnât pluralist, then it isnât decentralized!
I understand your concern about the exact deliverables. We think that they are clear because it is a bridge extension of milestone 1. This means that the whole DAO will see our monthly reports and the deliverable scorecard. On the deliverables scorecard, you will be able to see our updated deliverables in column e. I believe these are specific enough to satisfy your inquiry.
Thanks again for your support. Iâm looking forward to proving you right in placing your conviction behind our team and principles!
Thank you for your participation and seeing this. We feel that it was clear that we provided value, but unclear as to how well it was documented. Hopefully, we will clear any doubt during this bridge period.
I am glad to see Plurality Labs is moving forward with the next phase of their program. It is clear that there has been a lot of thought put into this proposal and the willingness to be flexible to the DAOs requests is greatly appreciated. I also think PL fills an important role in Arbitrumâs Grant space as an innovative and experimental program. I donât really have much to add that already hasnât already been asked / said. Iâll just make a few quick points / thoughts.
Itâs clear that PL has learned from milestone 1a and Iâm very glad to see reflection and improvement upon any shortcomings. I probably hadnât realized it at the time, but in hindsight communication could have been better and it looks like that is being addressed. Question here: may just be my reading comprehension, but from below â so for sure there will be a specific person hired for a Comms role?
Investing in communications: Our bias was for action. We cared about creating value and learning - and put blinders on for everything else. We should have hired a Marketing or Comms person. We didnât. Going forward, weâll button up. We have a good story to tell. Weâre excited to tell it.
The advisory board is an interesting idea and Iâm curious to see how it plays out. I think it is something worth trying at this exploratory stage.
ThriveCoin - If it was in an earlier post I apologize, but is there any place to get info on them? Mostly out of curiosity, but also it seems they will be a big part of Milestone 1B. i.e. - I saw reference to their âbest practicesâ a few times as well as bringing their expertiese to this project. I think it would be good for delegates to get a feel for the methodologies and vibes of that team, or if there is a brief summary of some of the other projects theyâve worked on.
All in all, I will be voting âForâ this proposal as it currently stands. I trust PL based on their track record with the DAO and the members on the team. As well as itâs clear that while Milestone 1a wasnât perfect (nothing ever is!), the team is looking to evolve and improve the process â which ultimately is the purpose of funding these endeavors. Iâm looking forward to continued success.
Edit 3/17/24: In order to save thread space I will re-iterate here that I have voted âForâ this proposal on Tally. My opinion since the snapshot remains the same and I appreciate that my questions above were addressed promptly by the Plurality Labs team. I have full confidence in this project and looking forward to seeing where 1B takes us!
We are voting yes to funding Plurality Labsâs 2nd milestone. Having a robust community led grants program is pertinent to Arbitrumâs success and Joe and the team have been excellent stewards of Arbitrum and its DAO. The addition of a DAO-aligned advisory board is very well received.
Weâd like to voice some concern around Plurality Labs joining Thrive, who is also a crucial member of the Optimism ecosystem. On a longer time frame, we would like to see Arbitrum DAOâs main grants program have have exclusivity agreement with the Foundation or at least not work with primary competitors with ulterior motivations being the main concern. While this is a future desire, it is of our opinion that this not be a barrier to funding Plurality Labs.
Thanks for your support, Bob! I appreciate you noticing our flexibility and our dedication.
Yes. We are planning to hire a communications specialist dedicated to Arbitrum. On the Thrive team, we hired a Executive level marketing pro, but we are waiting for the Arbitrum proposal to pass before hiring the dedicated talent. This is great because they will have the support of the Thrivecoin pro when we do hire them!
We were open to partnering because of a shared ethos and similarity in vision of where the puck is going. Decentralized validation by humans in a way that can be trusted is key to impact measurement, outcome evaluation, and survey legitimacy. These are needed components of a Pluralist funding framework.
We will likely run one program using Thrive to review all grants. We may also do some others which will utilize their best practices from other deployments. However, the dedicated team here will also continue guiding the experimental use of any funding mechanism which has unique value and potential to scale. Plus, the board will have oversight and right to veto the selection of these programs.
We will clean up the work of the first milestone and make it absolutely clear how our program creates outsized value for its cost!
The below response reflects the views of L2BEATâs governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and itâs based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.
After thoroughly reviewing Plurality Labs Milestone 1, we voted against their Milestone 2 proposal. Our feedback was that weâd like to see them continue and finish their first milestone before moving on to the next. Following our feedback, and that of other delegates, Plurality Labs created Milestone 1B(ridge).
Although we will be abstaining from voting as weâre part of the Advisory Board mentioned in the proposal, weâre overall supportive of the proposal and looking forward to what the outcome will be.
404 DAO appreciates Plurality Labs/Joeâs efforts in Milestone 1 as well as the work that was put into crafting this bridge proposal to address the concerns previously raised by governance.
In reviewing the work done in Milestone 1 and the subsequent reports provided by the Plurality Labs team, we identified a few questions that we ask the PL or ThriveCoin team to answer:
There is currently still 1,553,079.3 ARB in the multisig used for Milestone 1. As @krst pointed out on January 30th in L2Beatâs response to the Milestone 1 report, there was at that time ~1.9m ARB in the multisig with 1.535m allocated but not yet distributed. And in the January report it was stated that 1.307m ARB was allocated but not yet paid out.
We can see that funds are still being sent out on approximately a weekly cadence, but can you please clarify if this dashboard is up to date? We would like to see where these remaining funds are allocated to and any updated timelines that the DAO can expect for these Milestone 1 programs to conclude.
Is there an update on the responsibility of the Board and the creation of a Charter, as you alluded to here? Primarily, we are interested to learn how the board will hold Plurality Labs accountable for the original deliverables stated in AIP-3.
Questions regarding ThriveCoin and its involvement in Milestone 1b:
a. Can you tell us more about the qualifications of the ThriveCoin team members that will be assisting Plurality Labs in Milestone 1b?
b. Additionally can you please expand on the extent of their responsibilities or the resources provided that will help ensure Milestone 1b does not replicate the shortcomings of Milestone 1?
c. Can you provide more details on which tools & technologies you plan to use in Milestone 1b? Are any of these owned by ThriveCoin (e.g, ThankArb, which was used in GovMonth, is a ThriveCoin product)
d. Are you able to provide links to ThriveCoinâs Github or Docs? We struggled to find any technical or detailed explanation of ThriveCoinâs products.
Thank you again for your time and effort to create a pluralistic grants framework in Arbitrum! We look forward to your responses to our questions.
The Savvy DeFi DAOâs Arbitrum Council has decisively voted FOR this proposal.
Having closely followed the evolution of this proposal, we appreciate Plurality Labsâ steadfast dedication to the decentralization of grant decision-making.
Prior to advancing to Milestone 2, we believe it is essential to introduce a preliminary phase that will enable the PL team to effectively showcase their objectives with precision and execution.
We appreciate the work PL has been doing; drafting the 1B(ridge) proposal to address delegatesâ concerns is great.
Having the board in place is a no-brainer as it provides that additional oversight. There was other notable feedback from delegates during meetings and it is good to see PL implement them in this 1B (ridge) proposal.
Also, to further reiterate one of the suggestions from @Immutablelawyer, a compensation structure for the board is nice to have and will foster better commitment. Looking forward to more documentation from the team and the success of this initiative.
Thanks so much for your feedback and questions @404DAO. Iâm happy to respond:
Thank you. This means a lot. We are always working to be better, and weâre appreciative that you see it.
Yes, while nearly all funds from Milestone 1 have been committed, Programs are still allocating funds in alignment with their timelines - some of which have been delayed for reasons outside of our control.
Kyler Wandler, now a full-time team member (previously from DAO Research Collective), is consistently updating the dashboard. Heâll be updating the DAO on the cadence of dashboard updates and estimated conclusion dates for still-outstanding Milestone 1 Programs.
The draft board charter has been circulated, and theyâve had starting conversations and feedback on it. As soon as it is ratified, we will update the DAO here. The board will serve in an advisory and oversight capacity - giving crucial insight into the needs of the community and support on everything from program grants decisions to how best to create value for Arbitrum.
You had many questions about ThriveCoin as well. Iâm happy to quickly answer them.
We have dozens of people on the team, so I wonât list all of us. But here are some of us:
Daniel Jacobs, founder (me). Multiple time founder, CEO, exits. Background in building âcontribution economiesâ to scale. I tend to be a fairly behind-the-scenes guy, but hereâs a Forbes article that shares some of my background and passions. Also, I did my first meaningful crypto project way back in 2013.
Rilind Mehmeti, CTO. Rilind was an OG crypto builder and CTO. He built some of the first experimental stablecoins and staking smart contracts. He then went onto lead engineering at my last company and do a stint at Amazon before I convinced him to play together again.
Vigan Abdurrahmani, Head of Blockchain. Vigan has been in engineering leadership at BitFinex for years, one of the top exchanges. Heâs also worked with Rilind on a multitude of âtop secretâ projects - both inside and outside web3.
Gerard Hernandez, CFO. Gerard is currently on the Board of the ApeCoin Foundation - the only board member person to be elected twice. He has large enterprise CFO experience, but heâs also about as degen as it gets, deeply involved with ApeCoin and supporting other top projects.
Martin Hui, Head of Customer Success. Martin was Head of Legal M&A for North America for all of Morgan Stanley before coming here. At least, that was his day job. At night⌠web3. We convinced him to leave the collared shirts behind and come to the light.
Scott Mandel, Head of Marketing. Scott built and drove forward a conceptually aligned but adjacent web3 organization to ThriveCoin - Complex Labs. He was also Head of Community at Flexa, global leader in digital payments, and early web3. He also was MD at Risk Rewards Ventures.
The Thrive team is devoted to the success of Milestone 1b(ridge). We are builders - doers - more than we are talkers, so you will see our commitment in results. We will provide technology that supports Plurality Labs in validating, rewarding, and attesting when value is created with grants programs. We will provide best practices for strong operating procedures and help ensure readiness for scale.
In terms of additional resources, we hired Ben (GitCoin grants lead) and Kyler (DAO Research Collective) to support the PL team before Milestone 1b(ridge) has even been passed. Additionally, weâll be providing engineering resources that helps drive value creation and preparation for scale. Weâll do what is needed to support enormous value creation for Arbitrum.
Sure. Hereâs our public documentation on GitHub. FWIW while we plan on decentralizing later this year, weâve somewhat stealth about our work. This is why - despite enormous growth - weâve kept documentation sparse. In the coming months, weâll open up and publish much more material on the work weâve been doing, which we believe is crucial to the future of web3.
Thank you. This work is very close to all of our hearts. We appreciate your belief in us, and we are very excited to continue to build and create enormous value for Arbitrum.
@krst - thanks to you and @Sinkas. Thanks for the coaching, thanks for the feedback, and thanks for pushing all of us to do better. We appreciate all that you do for the DAO and thank you very much for joining us on the Board. We recognize that serving on the board drives you to abstain in this vote, but we appreciate the support!
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The support from @SavvyDAO means a lot to us, thank you. We are dedicated to decentralization and to running the experiments needed so we can scale for value⌠this is exciting stuff!
. @WinVerse thanks for the comments and the support. We are really happy with the feedback from the delegates and think we are in a stronger position than ever to deliver value and scale.
To your point regarding compensation of the board - we agree. The board represents the highest context members of the DAO and real grant expertise and they should be compensated. We suspect that will hit the agenda shortly.
Out team Cp0x voted FOR this proposal.
We support the efficient distribution of grants, which are represented by Plurality Labs.
We support the improvement of your team of experts.
Thanks for the kind words and your overall support.
Due to the delayed start of many programs, we have many still operating. At the end of January, we decided to âright sizeâ any running programs and made the decision to end others. This is why the allocated amount changed relative to the amount not yet paid out.
Our February financial report - to be shared next week - has us at 1.14 million ARB yet to be paid out and 514k ARB unallocated after the right sizing of all programs. This amount will be deducted from the Tally request and rolled into Milestone 2.
Here is the update on programs shared at our board meeting. (@BenWest will be sharing the board details including the charter in a separate thread)
We believe itâs important that the DAO keep pushing for grant programs that aim to efficiently distribute funds for grants at scale, which is why we appreciate the effort put into drafting this proposal and giving it another shot.
However, I do want to state that we do want to see quantifiable objectives for this proposal before it goes to Tally, these are not quantifiable objectives
I understand itâs a very difficult task to do so, especially since this program is, as its name states, âpluralistic.â Having specific KPIs might be complicated, but I think that since the idea is going to be to double down on winners, we could have KPIs based on the winners from milestone 1a so that we can effectively determine what programs are working and which arenât.
That being said, Iâm excited to see the progress that the team made since the start of the program and the effort put into improving this first milestone.
I shared this to @maxlomu as well, but I should probably make it explicit here. This bridge will be an attempt to clarify and execute on all standing deliverables from Milestone 1a. There are some that are delayed due to the delayed start of programs, some had dependencies, and others are replaced with more important ones based on our learnings.
This deliverables scorecard has our Milestone 1B deliverables in column E.
The Princeton Blockchain Club will be voting FOR funding Milestone 1B(ridge) at the Snapshot stage. Supporting a wide variety of community grants programs is important to us, and we think the addition of the Plurality Labs board should help increase the impact of this proposal.
Big thanks to Joe / the Plurality Labs team for incorporating delegate feedback from the previous vote!
We will be voting in favor of the proposal. Our decision is rooted in the achievements from Milestone 1a, which demonstrated significant progress towards decentralizing the grant decision-making process and now continuing to implement the grants ecosystem. Integrating the plurality labs board will help streamline the decision-making process and more efficiently allocate resources. We believe this approach aligns with our vision for the ecosystem and sets a solid foundation to scale in Milestone 2 if implemented correctly.
Thank you @DisruptionJoe and @thrivegiraffe for answering our questions above, we greatly appreciate the additional details!
At this time our team is still reviewing the documents & sheets provided by PL in their Milestone 1 Review, the January Report, and the information provided above and have therefore voted ABSTAIN in the snapshot.
We look forward to seeing more data points outlined in the upcoming February report as well as the advisory board charter before the onchain vote. Additionally, like @cattin, we would value quantifiable objectives wherever possible and KPIs based on the winners of Milestone 1a. Overall, the Grow, Coach, Cut approach is a great strategy but for it to be effective we strongly believe it needs these quantifiable measuring points.
