OpCo – A DAO-adjacent Entity for Strategy Execution

[danielo]

I appreciate Entropy’s efforts wranglign cats and advancing a detailed proposal.

I’m voting Against this proposal as: TLDR the purpose outlined seems to contradict the design (details to follow)

@Entropy

It is of utmost importance that Arbitrum DAO maintains a decentralized and bottoms-up system for bootstrapping new projects, DAO contributors, and setting strategies, including creating and steering the DAO’s vision, mission, and purpose, as well as approaches to achieve the goals and decision-making. As such, OpCo will be focused on the Ecosystem Support and Financial Management initiative categorie

• the anchored budget for the CEO (aka chief chaos officer) is anchored as what a mid-large corporate executive would earn, alas here we’re talking of an OpCo, which should have a more focused scope (there is no management of hundreds or even thousands of employees, the strategy is still set by the DAO in theory, etc.).
• there are no mechanisms to avoid the OpCo becoming a bottleneck (the ideal being hte OpCo as an ecosystem orchestrator, coordinator, and enabler of other iniciatives through working with the community). The only assurance provided is defaulting to the DAO governance which is an inssuficient mechanism.
• 600k to setup the entity is excessive. We have scoped setting a Cayman Company for our needs for 20k for year 1 not counting legals nor director. Add an extra 10-15k for a professional director. And ok, let’s add legal consultation for 50k. We’re at about 100k if we’re making this more complicated. Say we increase the scope futher… 200k and then are being charged premium because Arbitrum is a big brand so 300k. How do we get to 600k? GCP is setup to manage 200mn, here we’re talking a 10th of that. So I’m a bit lost about what’s being considered here. Transparency would be reassuring.
• Why can’t the Foundation cover for some of the mentioned needs? This is more of a clarification question as my understanding of the legal constraints or otherwise direction of the foundation is limited at this point.

We encourage Entropy to conside these points and revise the proposal before a Tally vote. We’ll reconsider our position if reassurance can be provided towards making the OpCo an enabler for an open platform as opposed to a centralisation chockepoint.

Setting up multiple, lower cost and more targetted operational vehicles would be preferred IMO. These could have a single legal wraper and centralised compliance, etc. to reduce costs, but I don’t see why we need such an expensive and top down centralised entity with such a broad mandate.