Thank you for this @ITUblockchain
Had to abstain on behalf of DAOstewards for these same reasons
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The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We are voting AGAINST this proposal in the temperature check, but we are open to discussing it further before it goes to onchain vote.
We want to start by saying that we definitely appreciate early contributors and we’re on board with the idea of retroactively rewarding their efforts. However, with the current state of the proposal, we can’t vote in favour of it for the reasons outlined by other delegates as well.
Specifically, we would like to see:
- Some more information about the group of Arbiters and their contributions. We understand that quantifying that data is a difficult task, but right now its non existent.
- A justification and breakdown for the requested amount, since right now it seems that it’s arbitrary.
Moreover, we see this retroactive reward as a gesture of appreciation of great work that those individuals were doing for the community, not necessarily as a compensation for the amount of work they’ve put into it. And as a gesture of appreciation we believe that the proposed amount is too high. We would be much more inclined to support this proposal if the amounts were 10x lower.
On the other hand, if that reward was supposed to be the retroactive compensation for the work they’ve put, we should rather have a clear and open framework for incentivising such activities in the future and based on that framework assess individual contributions for retro compensation.
With the voting deadline upon us, we’ve chosen to vote against for the reasons outlined above, and we hope that these issues will be addressed and the proposal resubmitted for the DAO to review and vote on its updated version. We are happy to discuss this proposal and provide any additional feedback if needed, we would like to remind that we’re available every Thursday at 3pm UTC at our Arbitrum Office Hours (https://meet.google.com/jkj-nnop-arc).
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Michigan Blockchain will be voting FOR this proposal on the temperature check. We believe it is critical to recognize and support early ecosystem contributors such as the Arbiters and utilize retroactive funding as a mechanism for distribution. Prior to this proposal going onchian, however, we would like to see further transparency as to who will be the recipients of the retroactive rewards as well as their contributions that qualify them as one of the recipients.
We hope this proposal enables future contributor rewards as well as establishes a framework of transparency and a systemic approach for determining rewarded amounts going forward.
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Blockworks Research has voted ABSTAIN to this proposal.
We support the idea of rewarding Arbiters but need more context around the amount of time and responsibilities the group has had. Additionally, if the main responsibilities have been Discord moderators of sorts, we would prefer to see a program created that incentivizes further contributions in a sustainable manner rather than solely a one-time retroactive payment (though the program can still include this).
This is not to say that we don’t believe that the Arbiters have done significant work worthy of the compensation requested, rather, we’d just like to see examples of it and metrics to justify such a spend.
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Hello, thank you very much for your recognition, for the Arbiter individual contribution is difficult to quantify, on this issue we have already explained in the proposal, this proposal is for the Arbiter contribution in the past 2 years of the reward, for the future reward and plan we are still planning, we also very much hope to continue to build the Arbitrum, this proposal is passed, we will be in the future of the contribution of each Arbiter to make a detailed statistic, so that for the future of the contribution of the program implementation of a more transparent, and a better quantitative distribution of rewards to each Arbiter.
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Hi, as stated in the proposal, because many of the previous contributions were not well kept and documented, everyone’s contribution could not be quantified, so I hope this can be understood, of course, what you mentioned about the plan for future contributions, we are already in the process of planning, but this is not included in this proposal, thank you!
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Arbiters contributed voluntarily for 2-3 years. During this time, the Arbiters requested no payment, as their contributions were voluntary. Nobody knew if Arbitrum would evolve into a DAO, but since the DAO has been established, it would only make logical sense to distribute voting power to community members who have made the most meaningful contributions. That’s the essence of a DAO. Had there been no DAO, then the Arbiters would not have made this proposal and requested for voting power.
The distribution of voting power should be proportional to the impact that community members have had, and we believe that 20,000 ARB tokens (2x max airdrop) is reasonable and fair. If we were to reduce it by 10x, that would equate to 2000 tokens each. This essentially means you’re valuing the contributions of the Arbiters close to the lowest amount distributed during the token distribution airdrop. Such an evaluation doesn’t seem proportional at all.
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We are sorry to say that since we didn’t have anyone to keep track of everyone’s contributions in the beginning, a lot of them weren’t saved, and it would have been unfair to submit them according to the existing saved individual contributions, so we’ve summarized some of the contributions we’ve collected so far, and because of that we’ve agreed that the rewards will be divided equally, and that the rewards will be paid out to the wallet of each Arbiter.
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Wait, but I think I miss the connection between this proposal and the airdrop, weren’t the Arbiters eligible for the airdrop as well? And here I’m not valuing the individual contributions of the Arbiters at all, but as my second point states if this was supposed to compensate Arbiters for the work they’ve put in Arbitrum community then we should evaluate and price those contributions for past and future contributors.
I want to stress it once again - we’re definitely not against rewarding contributors, quite the contrary, we’re very supportive of it, simply the numbers and composition of recipients in this proposal seem quote arbitrary (and high) and we’d like to understand them better.
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The comment by @krst highlights a crucial point: it sets a precedent for any individual who has contributed to the Arbitrum ecosystem to be able, in the future, to request recognition for past contributions. As DAOs, it is essential that we handle these incentives with caution and clarity.
As a member of the Latam community, I am familiar with several communities, individuals and influencers who have contributed to the growth of Arbitrum. This same approach could be adopted by any other contributor to the ecosystem. While quantifying these contributions is a challenge, I believe that, at a minimum, we should demand greater specificity in these proposals and ensure that the rewards are as fair and transparent as possible.
This is a personal opinion, it does not represent the opinion of the SEEDLatam delegation.
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The reason I referenced the airdrop was to provide a benchmark against which we could measure our contributions. Ideally, the Arbiters would have been included in the airdrop, given its intent to distribute voting power to Arbitrum contributors. However, the team chose to reward only on-chain activity. Yet, as we’ve observed from numerous protocols that transition to a DAO, off-chain community contributions are often recognized. We feel that receiving 2x max airdrop amount is fair, considering the time and effort the Arbiters have invested in making the community a better place and this might even be on the conservative side. It’s important to understand that the ARB token is a governance token, thus it represents voting power. Given this perspective, we believe, that an allocation of 20,000 ARB tokens is proportional to the impact the Arbiters have made and the time, energy and efforts they have put into it. This voting power would allow Arbiters to have a bigger say on the future of Arbitrum.
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Well said. Overall, I believe the STIP is beneficial, but it has also blurred the lines with the overall purpose of the token. Even going over votes for this current snapshot, 20k ARB would still be a small voice.
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First and foremost, I want to stress the importance of retroactively rewarding DAO participants who help in the ecosystem in any capacity. Every DAO member has contributed to helping Arbitrum get where it is today.
I strongly support this proposal and what it represents, but not in its current form. I have voted Against this temp-check and for the time being, and I am open to revisiting this in the next iterations. I believe in the importance of supporting the DAO through retroactive rewards to contributors.
A few points:
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Although there is a spreadsheet (Arbiter.xlsx - Google Sheets) It is unclear who the final beneficiaries of this retroactive reward are. It would be very helpful for transparency to have all of the 25 estimated people (formally) detailed in the proposal.
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It is unclear what did each user contribute, specifically. The bullet points outlining a summary of all that has been done are very clear, but it lacks specifics that will help delegates gauge the value contributed.
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It would greatly help the voting and decision-making process if the proposals could outline concrete actions taken by Arbiters, with links and real-world examples. Better and more concrete metrics would be extremely appreciated.
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Echoing comments and concerns posted by ITU Blockchain and Curia. Should the ARB distribution be uniform considering Arbiters had different levels of participation? A more detailed approach to all of the contributions and the people involved will help a lot to bring more clarity to these points.
As said by Mysterymen there is some difficulty in measuring contributions due to the lack of documentation through time, is there nothing that can be done (as a group) to try and reconstruct it?
Looking forward to the next steps and comments to be able to move forward with retroactive rewards for DAO contributors.
Edit: I want to clearly add that I would vote in favour of this proposal should we have a (better) complete list of recipients with their contributions greater measured.
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Hi @olimpio We appreciate your feedback (and the great work that you do for the crypto community)
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The @SEEDLatam delegation has decided to vote in Favor of this proposal at the Temperature Check.
Rationale
We believe it is important to retroactively reward Arbitrers who collaborated in the growth of the Arbitrum ecosystem in its early days. These early collaborations are important and beneficial to the ecosystem and should be recognised and compensated.
Consideration
We would like to clarify that this decision is subject to change for voting in Tally, as we would like the proposal to include the following details in the next phase:
- List of the 25 members, with their discord user, Twitter (or other social media if possible) and the address where they will receive the funds
- Criteria considered for the election of the members
- Description of their contributions and tasks they performed. Link and metrics, we know this is difficult, but we believe there is surely data to collect.
- Multisig address where funds and signatories will be received
Conclusions
We should keep in mind as DAO that this kind of proposal opens the door for other contributors to ask for retroactive payments for past contributions. Perhaps in the future, we should establish a general framework to be able to filter this type of proposal.
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Hey @ITUblockchain a couple points I can hopefully help to shed light on based on what I know:
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No new Arbiters have been added after September 2022, and no new Arbiters will be added. In terms of future contribution, it can be seen as a legacy or OG role in the discord, but the proposal in discussion is for a retroactive reward and not a future or ongoing one, so this fact wouldn’t be too valuable I don’t think. I can’t speak to the criteria of how they were selected as that was substantially before my time.
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For Ambassador program, it isn’t set up in a way to reward users through ARB incentives, rather there is budget allocated for Ambassadors to submit applications for hosting events, workshops, education and things of that nature so that those costs can be covered and supported by the Foundation. Furthermore the Ambassador program isn’t for acquiring customer support or moderation, but rather for spreading Arbitrum/Web3 adoption globally through content, education, workshops, events etc. For moderation and customer support we recently (summer of 2023) began hiring full-time moderators at the Foundation.
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Thank you, Elias, for clarifying the two points we mentioned.
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great to see here community who are supporting Arb Eco Sys 
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Update on criteria - Essentially in the first year+ the Discord needed help with active moderation and community engagement due to bandwidth, and there were people (Arbiters) who were quite active and asked to help out, and thus the role was incepted and given to people who wanted to participate with a recognized role.
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We would like to respond to the issues raised by the above representatives as follows:
Thank you guys very much for your input. We have re-collected more contribution information, as well as the arbiters respective wallets, discord, twitter, etc., and added them to the original proposal contribution list, but this is only a portion of the contribution data that we were able to collect again, and we are very thankful for the support of the DAO representatives!
List of Arbiters’ partial contributions and arbiter profile info,For the sake of DAO reps checking for updates, we’ve listed them separately
arbiter simple example table of contributions in different categories - Google Sheetsarbiter simple example table of contributions in different categories - Google Sheets
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Why aren’t more specific links to Arbiter’s contributions provided?
When we first became Arbiter, we all joined and contributed to Offchain Labs out of love for Offchain Labs, but Arbiters didn’t know each other and didn’t realize that OffChain Labs would issue airdrop rewards in the future, so we didn’t designate a person to manage and save the information of everyone’s contribution, Arbiter himself did not save his own contributions, and due to some of Arbiter’s local regulatory policies on the cryptocurrency industry, a lot of information is lost and invalid, So some incomplete information that we didn’t provide. -
Why are rewards not distributed equally according to each individual’s contribution?
As mentioned above, due to a lot of data loss and failure, some Arbiters have been helping other members as supporters of the discord community, but some Arbiters have not been serving the community as supporters of the discord community, but rather have been conducting AMA’s and promotional activities, etc. outside of the discord, and to singularly evaluate the contribution of a certain Arbiter, it would be Obviously not fair, this will directly erase the results of their contributions, so Arbiter unanimously decided to submit all the contributions in summary and the rewards are also evenly distributed, so as not to destroy the unity of everyone but also to let the Arbiter who has made contributions to get the rewards. -
why ask for 500,000 Arb bonus and not more or less?
We finalized the total reward of 500,000Arb based on other communities’ rewards ratios for early contributors (e.g. Across allocating 20M ACX to the community) and based on Arbitrum’s benchmarks for initial on-chain activity rewards, and we think it’s fair to get 2x the max airdrop amount and even conservative considering the time and effort Arbiter has invested in making the community a better place. and effort, this may even be conservative. It is important to understand that the ARB token is a governance token and as such it represents voting rights. From this perspective, the allocation of 20,000 ARB tokens appears to be proportional to the impact Arbiter has had and the time, energy and effort they have invested, and this voting power will give Arbiters a greater say in the future of Arbitrum. -
Why does this proposal not have a framework for Arbiter’s future contribution programs and rewards?
We are simply seeking a one-time retroactive reward from the DAO for our contributions over the last 2 years. The Arbitrum foundation has recently hired their own moderation/customer support team, and have initiated an Ambassador program. Therefore planning future contributions is not something we can assess at this time as Arbiters. -
Will rewards be distributed to multi-signature wallets?
We will ask Foundation to collect all the wallet address’ and provide to the DAO for verification
Additionally, the Arbiter with Discord ID BILLY#7943 has voluntarily forfeited his reward and split it equally amongst the other Arbiters, so we will be modifying the original forum proposal and will be changing the 25 Arbiters in the original proposal to 24, so that the final calculation will be: 20,833.333 $ARB tokens per member x 24 Discord Arbiter = 500,000 $ARB
@ITUblockchain @cattin @olimpio @axlvaz_SEEDLATAM.eth @krst @BlockworksResearch @Michigan_Blockchain @Curia @GFXlabs @eli_defi
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