Hello and good morning. After a successful first phase, we are currently through the elections phase with 4 snapshots live until Thursday. In the meantime, we have hosted two calls for all candidates to pitch their candidacies: you can find the recordings in the following post.
While we are on the election phase to determine the future DAs, is time to discuss the proposed changes for Tally. Based on the public and private feedbacks received, the three areas to target improvements: Grantees accountability, Program and DAs operations, Compliance to future changes in the DAO.
Grantee Accountability: it’s clear that the DAO wants to have better results from the program, where better = more stickiness of teams, less frauds (which can be unfortunately frequent in low sized grant programs), better results over time. For better accountabilities of the team these changes will be introduced:
- KYC: it will be mandatory for two people of the team. The signed document will have to match one of the identity of the KYC members who kyced. This will add friction on whoever tries to impersonate others.
- Identity verification disclaimers: a clause will be included when filling for a grant, in which a team might optionally need to participate in video calls with the DAs with cameras turned on. Failing to do so might lead to be rejected for the grant.
- Completion milestone: to increase the incentives for grantees to complete their proposal and to complete both the final report and the followup questionnaire, up to 15-20% of the grant will be released 3 months after the final milestone, pending evaluation from the main DA which will take in account the success of the project. In this way, not only we will have the complete documentation from the grantee, but also we will guarantee that a portion of the grant goes to teams that effectively keep going with their activity 3 months after the release of their product.
Improvement in operations for the program and the Domain Allocators: there have been reports and feedbacks on how the DAs can operate better, and how the program could also improve through technological improvements, to guarantee more quality in the program. The following will be implemented:
- More in depth guideline for due diligence for DAs: thanks to Entropy, we have worked together, on a set of easy to follow but comprehensive guidelines to do due diligence on projects. These guidelines are a mix of verification of identity through socials and check for open source data. While DAs are not in the business of being on-chain sleuths or osint researchers, we can’t give for granted that they have strong experience in verifying all the contextual data that can give more confidence of a team being genuine.
- Improvements in transaction execution time: to avoid bottlenecks in releasing grants, the structure of safes will be changed from the previous 2/2 to a 2/3 for each domain, with the main two signers being the respective DA and the PM, and a third backup signer being another DA. To increase security, any specific pair of DAs won’t be a signer of multiple safes.
- Improvement in how the Questbook platform generates the transactions: to mitigate and possibly avoid cases such as double transactions, we will ask the Questbook team to improve the generation of transactions through their platform. Specifically, the message that is generated by signing a milestone directly in the platform won’t be encoded but will be in clear text for the DAs to have a further way to verify that the milestone queued is the right one, as well as some other improvements such as checking if the address input by grantees is formatted in the right way for the system to ingest it.
- Secondary ledger: the PM will keep a manually updated spreadsheet with all the transactions generated for each project.
Compliance to future DAO changes: several delegates requested the program to be in compliance with changes to the rules of the DAO in the future, specifically regarding communication, oversight and other details:
- Standardized communication format implementation: while the PM will regularly communicate to the DAO on a monthly basis through the governance calls and with a unified report consistent across all domains, the communications might change in the future in case the DAO will agree on a general standardized format cross-program.
- Future oversight council compliance: as for comms, in case the DAO will agree on a general unified oversight unit, the program will adhere to it.
- Hourly commitment and rate: for both the DAs and the PM it will be mentioned the amount of hours preallocated to them (80 for DAs, 60 to 80 for the PM) and the hourly rate ($100 per hour).
As per the timeline, and unless there is a meaningful desire from the DAO for profound changes and discussion of the proposal, the plan is to publish it on Tally Monday the 27th, to go live for a vote Thursday the 30th. We want to use this current week to address any further concerns, so all delegates are invited to provide feedback on the above changes.
As a final note, there could potentially be some adjustments to the compensation based on internal feedback from delegates. To be clear, the current discussion doesn’t aim to introduce more budget to the program nor make meaningful changes, but rather suggests some modifications in the overall distribution; if there is a consensus, it will be posted in the forum beforehand.