I will be voting for, with 5 domains. As I stated above this is one of the most successful DAO-led projects and I think it’s important to continue it. It serves an important niche of smaller-scale projects and is done in a cost-effective manner. I look forward to seeing how the 5th domain evolves.
I am long-term concerned about bandwidth of the domain allocators, but JoJo has indicated it should be okay for the upcoming season. I think something to think about as the program goes forward is considering ways to make sure it is sustainable long, long term. Whether that is additional roles or backups incase one of the allocators has to leave and a new person can come in with sufficient knowledge. But ultimately that is a small issue that I am confident the team can handle when ready / relevant.
Having participated in the Questbook program, we recognize its well-structured approach and appreciate the improvements JoJo has highlighted from Seasons 1 and 2. With that said, support renewing the Arbitrum D.A.O. Grant Program with 5 domains, building on the success of funding over 190 projects with strong outcomes. Adding the Orbit Chains domain addresses evolving ecosystem needs, and we are excited to see its potential while acknowledging it requires focused attention moving forward.
I’m voting in favor of the renewal with five domains. Given the positive results of the previous seasons, I’m happy to support the 3rd iteration. I appreciate how the lessons learned from previous seasons were integrated into the new proposal.
Concerning the voting option, I think that the inclusion of Orbit as a vertical offers significant benefits for projects considering launching their own chain and currently deciding on a stack, builders on orbit chains and the growth of the ecosystem as a whole. By incorporating this domain, we create a more attractive ecosystem for innovative projects and we essentially create a pre-existing free grant program for any chain deciding to choose Orbit as a stack. Of course this approach not only encourages the development of new chains but also addresses fragmentation issues.
Thanks @JoJo for this proposal, can’t wait to see the projects that will emerge from this initiative!
I have voted to renew 5 domains, adding Orbit. The work done by this team has been positive, a look at Questbook’s page (https://arbitrum.questbook.app/) shows in a very good level of detail what’s happening with the funds, who is getting them, who approved them, and where funds went on-chain. Also, Milestone-based disbursements are a very good incentive structure. This is great for long-tail grants.
With a good structure and system, Questbook to target the right audience to provide the grants for the Arbitrum ecosystem. the Arbitrum D.A.O. (while we don’t necessarily like the naming of it as it’s confusing with DAO) should continue with the new addition for the important offering of the Arbitrum ecosystem, Orbit. We appreciate @maxlomu 's contribution to the Orbit domain grants as well.
how does this work onchain? do each domain allocators keep these funds in a SAFE?
have you thought about adding some sort of checks and balances to the process? How free are the domain allocators?
if this works well, why are we not expanding the scope here? If we were to triple the money in this system, do you think we could be able to spend it intelligently? How would we do it - more domains, more domain allocators in the same domains, bigger grants?
Yes, there is a safe for each domain, that currently is a 2/2 with the DA and the PM.
We are going to move for operational purposes to a 2/3 with the main DA, the PM, and a second DA, with a rotation such as a couple of DA doesn’t have access to more than 1 safe. This is due to the fact that during season 2 we had some issues, with one of the person not being available, and so inability to disburse funds for several days which could have impacted grantees.
Sorry, would need more details in here. To what are you referring to?
There was a reflection about increasing the size of domains, potentially scale the domains to more than a single DA etc. In the end there are better low hanging fruit to take, such as plugging in other initiatives (the AF/GCP), better support builders, do better due diligence on our side (more on this on the @Entropy report). One other reflection was done on how the DAO always discuss about the fact that “we spend too much money”. For now, the expantion has translated in doubling the time, and having a 5th experimental domain; nothing stops the dao, in 6 months, to vote to double the budget and personnel or to add new domains.
Bigger grants, this is trickier: the placement of the current program is entry level in the arbitrum ecosystem, with Foundation grants being right above. While we could increase the amount, we would need to first make some reflections from an ecosystem standpoint imho.
Blockworks Advisory will be voting FOR (+1 Orbit Domain) this proposal.
We believe that there will be an interim between this proposal and the next iteration proposed on Tally. We think as it stands the current proposal should pass a temperature check, but the domain allocation program should be subject to more reporting. Additionally, it’s time for the DAO to choose categories with priority. We’re allocating equal funds across all domains when some of these domains are clearly unequal or have downstream benefits to Arbitrum that are hard to measure and thus harder to reward. Should an Orbit receive the same value as other domains here? Personally, we don’t think so.
As wrote in the proposal (while only at high level), the reporting should match the following:
monthly report for all domains, in a standardized way. One of the gap is that there is no standard between domains and DAs right now
month report in governance call. TBD which one, so far the GCR seems the natural choice, but we should keep it flexible based on what the dao will conduct over the year
likely, a 6 months more profound reporting, and maybe an ad hoc call, to see where the program is going. We can discuss if this should be done quarterly, don’t necessarily see the benefit but keen to adapt if there is demand
mandatory reporting by grantee participants in the forum, which for now is a limited and non standard initiative
an analysis on the followup interview, the one 3 months after completion, to translate data into lessons learned. I can’t really provide details on this because likely this interview will be prepared down the road, but the goal is to unify the data.
Any idea on the above @BlockworksResearch? If you think is not enough, or should be different.
Can you provide your specific example here? Orbit will already receive half of the funds of other domains, even tho some delegates have expressed how they would like it to be $1.5M as the others.
On domains having different leverage, I could potentially agree, but at the same time I can acknowledge that different people might have different priorities in mind, with some folks wanting to favor for example Education/community/content cause they value physical presence on the ground as more valuable than financiang Dev tooling for example, or viceversa.
What I mean is that while there is a merit in thinking “not all domains are born equal” or “not all domains bear the same effect on the ecosystem”, I honestly don’t think we should lower any of this domain since the spending per month is up to $125k, an high absolute amount but relative low amount. So, if we want to make this domains unequal, a solution could be during the year to vote to allocate more funds, and potentially more personnel, to a specific domain, which is in line with the modularity we have in mind for this new iteration.
The following 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.
We’re voting FOR the proposal and choosing the 4 domains option.
The DAO needs a grant program, and the Questbook DDA program has proven to be a sensible approach to one. We were in favor of establishing it and then extending it. Now, although we do have some small concerns, we’re also generally in favor of renewing it for a longer timeframe.
Some of the things we’d like to see better explained and addressed before the proposal goes to an onchain vote are:
Questbook’s platform costs
The cost for Questbook’s platform seems rather high for the features and utility it offers. We’d like to better understand why the cost is as high as it is.
Program Manager compensation
The PM has lower compensation compared to the domain allocators. While we understand that the volume of work might be smaller, we want to ensure that the compensation is adequate enough for delegates to be able to have reasonable expectations from the PM.
Time commitments from DAs
As things are right now, DAs are to receive $8,000 a month for their work, but we have no way of knowing what their time commitment looks like. Whether we are to expect 10 hours a week or 40 isn’t mentioned anywhere.
Future reporting and oversight
If the DAO is to establish a reporting standard or an oversight council of sorts, we’d like to see the program adhere to it. Adding a clause to cover that in the event it happens is probably good enough.
Better communication and maintenance
We did a very surface-level check on the communication around Questbook (specifically on the platform and on Discord) and there wasn’t a lot of information for the applications that were accepted. We want the PM to do a better job ensuring that DAs are being very thorough (that also applies with due dilligence on applicants, to avoid cases like this).
Thanks for the feedback. Let me go point by point here
In the previous iterations, Questbook had a single management of both the PM and the platform, for a total of 10k/month. This was, likely, a way to optimize costs on their side, which now fell off with the decoupling of platform/role.
For the utility, as we have seen so far the biggest part is the public availability of information and the accountability part: while this depends mostly on how DAs engage with the grantees, we see that if milestones are properly reported as comment in questbook it becomes easier to effectively track the flow of information; same thing for analysing approved versus rejected proposals.
But I would like to leave the word to @Srijith-Questbook for a better analysis.
To be perfectly clear, the PM having less compensation compared to the DAs has been something dragged from the previous seasons. And it has been, up to some degree, an anomaly compared to most grant programs, both here and in other ecosystem, in which usually the PM has a more prominent compensation. That said, while I don’t have a specific answer for this (and i will contact you privately to clarify your point of view here), I am seeing several delegates suggesting different type of compensation, either in quantity or structure or both, which at this point could be worth exploring.
The $8K salary is from season 2, in which we mostly quantified the work as an 80 hours per month work at a comp of $100 per hour. This is also just a reference number: there has been a very different way to engage from the different DAs, likely also due to the very different nature of domains.
As stated in previous comments, we are likely scraping the bottom of the barrel on the DA side. The work is almost linear based on the amount of proposal inflow, the more proposals in, the higher the amount of work, and we can honestly expect the inflow to grow since this has been trued between season 1 and 2.
For this, first check my previous comment to blockworks; that said, totally fine in including this clause and adapt over time, knowing 1y is a long time and a lot of things can change.
I’ll contact you privately on this: discord archives after some time the discussions so not sure if everything that was discussed was still there; on that very specific case, and in general situations like this, I am currently working with entropy to mitigate the issue, and will post more in the report thread
After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation has decided to vote “Renew with 5 domains (adding Orbit Domain)” on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
Rationale
Having participated in Seasons 1 and 2, our opinion may be biased, but we agree with other delegates that this is one of the DAO’s most successful programs.
That said, there are a few suggestions we would like to make:
We agree with what some delegates have expressed: a compensation model incorporating a bonus based on work performed should be explored. From our perspective, some Domains receive a higher volume of applications than others, making them more labor-intensive. Therefore, we see no issue with implementing an equitable base compensation for all Domains, complemented by a bonus tied to the marginal workload that a specific Domain entails compared to others.
Not only do we support the inclusion of the Orbit Domain, but we also believe there should be flexibility to expand the budget in the future. We understand that this wouldn’t pose a problem due to the modularity proposed by @JoJo.
Regarding @Krst’s query: at least in the “Education, Community Growth and Events” Domain, the review and follow-up of all work associated with the Domain takes approximately 5 hours per day. Over 5 days (Monday to Friday), this equates to a total of 25 hours per week.
However, there have been instances where we’ve had to add a couple of hours on weekends for revisions due to a heavy proposal load. For example, proposals requesting more than $25K require a sharper review and, at times, calls with proposers who could only schedule meetings on weekends.
Considering the above, we estimate the total average time commitment to be around 30 hours per week or approximately 120 hours per month. This translates to a rate of $66.67 per hour.
We hope you find this information helpful.
In our case, we have published monthly reports for the Domain in our Reports Thread, detailing each approved project, its geographic distribution, and the remaining funding.
Regarding due diligence, we would like to mention that we have identified and rejected at least 9 scam applicants, all cases involving individuals attempting to impersonate someone else. No applicant advances past the initial review stage without verifying their identity. To ensure this, we not only check their social media profiles but also hold meetings with cameras turned on. We agree that these practices should be replicated in all domains and from our perspective Jojo is very well positioned to ensure this.
The snapshot vote passed with majority voting for 5 domains.
Next steps are the following, as reported in the timeline:
candidacy for the 4 domain allocators to be elected: will be posted tomorrow, and be open until the 5th of January
election at the first suitable date which should be the 9th of January; if the DAO wants, we can have one or more calls to allow candidates to have their public pitch. This might delay the election a little bit
after the end of snapshot election, a Tally vote.
In the meantime the discussion can take place in this thread regarding any meaningful change or addiction to provide to the proposal before it goes up for an on-chain vote; so far it was suggested to add a clause for reporting to adhere to any convention the DAO might vote upon in the future, as well to adhere to any general oversight council that could be elected by the DAO. This will be accommodated.
There is also an ongoing discussion, from several delegates, about potentially changing/raising the overall compensation of the team. While I am personally hesitant in increasing the overall OpEx, will take the time to privately contact few delegates to ask their opinion on the matter.
As a final note, it could be worth reflecting on the name, which was chosen to have an higher ownership for the DAO on the program, but that maybe could be rethought by people more savvy on marketing topics.
Castle has voted FOR Renew with 5 Domains on Snapshot. We feel that the program has had positive impact for Arbitrum and are supportive in extending it.
DAOplomats voted Renew with 5 domains on Snapshot.
The Domain Allocator program has been a sound initiative and @JoJo has done a great job coordinating. We are particularly excited about the introduction of the fifth domain and looking forward to how that shapes up.
However, we want to reiterate our suggestion of getting an updated metric on the S2’s completed projects before this goes live for onchain voting, as that would give us more confidence to support this then.
Thanks for the response - I appreciate the reflections on expansion. Let’s see what the DAO decides in the future but I think if we can get a report in 6 months of the results so far, as well as an update to the results of the previous season, I’d be in support of adding more budget.
My question was about how you handled checks and balances in terms of controlling the power of domain allocators, you answered it in the first part of the post so thanks for that.
Thanks for the feedback to all the delegates, @krst answering your question below.
The platform costs of Questbook are for the following reasons:
In the first season, we subsidized the costs of the product with the program manager’s fee, season 2 Questbook decoupled the platform cost and the program manager fee differently so that the PM role doesn’t get tied to the product itself. However, following through, even if the PM role is not tied to Questbook, the platform will still be taking care of both the legal and KYC sides, performing a semi-pm role in the background, aiding the main PM of the program.
Questbook is constantly adding new features to make the program smoother, last season we managed to automate agreement sending and KYC verification from within the Questbook platform itself. In the coming season, we will automate checks of the KYC names and the Agreement signed names automatically (previously we have been doing this manually) to make the overall application and due diligence process even smoother.
We are also integrating more details like Github account proofs/other proof of works proof that a user claims in their application process using zktls to verify their claims and further improve the due diligence process and make it more trustless.
We are actively adding more checks so that things like this will be avoided automatically, giving DAs more data and proofs to work with in their due diligence process, reduing overall human error possible.
Ofcourse, we are always open to any new feature suggestions and will be adding them along the whole season per demand of the DAs and PM.
The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, and consensus of various committee members.
The DDA program is a continuation of the initiative previously implemented by Questbook. It has proven to be one of the most successful programs for the DAO, yielding a strong track record of impactful projects. Given its success, we are open to supporting the program having 5 domains.
Snapshots for the elections will be open in a bit more than 1 hour. We have a total of 15 strong candidates, both incumbents and new one, you can read all their application here
There will be 2 calls for them to attend and pitch their candidacy, one Monday at 7PM utc and one Tuesday at 10AM utc. Both will be recorded and made available in this topic and in the candidacy one
by the beginning of next week will post a list of addition and changes to the Tally proposal based on public and private feedbacks so far received. The discussion is obviously open, so if you have anything to add now please feel free to do it!