Hi @karpatkey and @Bob-Rossi I am checking in if our proposal can be moved onto Snapshot for a vote? Thanks.
The DAO requests that proposals are given at least 1 week minimum of discussion before voting, which was done here. So from a procedural standpoint you are good to go.
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Hello @CastleCapital thank you for your feedback here, and understanding our situation went beyond one of normal price fluctations that can occur.
Regarding my request for compensation for myself as I am a grant winner and should be in line with the compensation of the others, I agree with that in connection to what I should have received, along with the other grant winners.
However, I would like to share again with additional context, details of how my unplanned community advocacy role and efforts drove this proposal and shared learning experience forward. Please review this first summary post, including one winners commentary:
“As the founder of daospace, I want to express my gratitude to @karakrysthal for her tireless efforts in addressing the issues faced by many grant recipients. Her persistence in pushing for resolution was instrumental in getting things moving with the Arbitrum team.”
My efforts were driven beyond being just a grant winner, but one that deeply cares about financial inclusion and is also in strong support of the potential for grant funding to be a meaningful channel for early stage projects to get off the ground. My work with my organization centers on DE&I for women in emerging tech and Web3. Right now, the data shows that 6% of VC funding goes to women in Web3, yet these alarming stats are greater than that in general tech (1-2%). While there isn’t data yet being collected on the % of grant funding going to women, from our rough estimation it is less than 10%. My organization is launching a 6 month working group for blockchains and protocols with grant programs, where we are facilitating DE&I education, and fostering collaboration and shared learning on grant program best practices.
I hope this provides more context for the work we are doing, with the hopes that grant program operators do work out their challenges and processes, and Arbitrum, for example, can be one that can lead by example from its learning and ability to adapt, even at its size and complexity.
I am going to push back on your request that I remove my personal compensation for my work and edit that out of the proposal. I have estimated at least 50 hours of my own unpaid effort over the last 6 months has gone into what you are seeing now on these forum posts, from behind-the-scenes work that includes:
- Coordinating and managing communication in a separate Telegram group from the grant winners TG with now 15 parties that were a part of the grant program management, and/or grantees that wanted to share their voices directly to the program managers with their issues.
- Holding and attending many calls with these parties, which led to Thrive Protocol hosting listening and feedback sessions with us
- Many hours of efforts in collecting data from the grantees and those program managers in DM’s, and reviewing the Telegram group data
- Organizing this data into these forum posts, and additional posts, tracking down of grantees, many more DMs, and then reviewing and fact checking all data points with Coingecko and helping winners navigate creating their status updates
- Presenting this data on the DAO forum call, and responding and following up with commenters here
I am happy that you have found the information presented invaluable, which has happened due to the persistent focus of these efforts.
This provides as much context I am aware of that I can provide to my energy spent and intentions behind my efforts. Again while my financial compensation was not an initial goal in my advocacy work, as I was presenting it to this forum I then understood it was fair to be valued financially for this. I am also an early stage founder and work 80-90 hours/week on our project to get it off the ground, and this has been a significant addition to that workload.
Thank you.
Thank you. I am not a part of the ArbitrumDAO so am not able to put in on Snapshot, but will ask @DisruptionJoe if he can.
Or if someone else may be able to @Bob-Rossi or @karpatkey or … that would be great thanks. I have had this proposal up for two weeks while making further clarifications and my initial forum post 3 weeks ago. If we might be able to move this along that would be great so the grantees can get building if this passes, as I believe there will be a couple more weeks of voting to go through if we are moving through the steps.
Thanks
We view this proposal as comparable to the issue of the Terms of Tenure for the STEP Program Manager. From the discussion here, we felt that whether there is a guarantee against ARB price fluctuations depends on the contract for the grants. In this case, it’s about whether grantees were supposed to return the extra amount when they received more than the amount they were scheduled to receive in the program due to ARB price fluctuations.
If not, we believe that compensating for ARB price fluctuations would require the DAO to review the whole reward structure of ongoing and future projects, which would increase the overall cost to the DAO and become problematic.
However, we think that grants to projects that are currently active are good for the Arbitrum ecosystem. As proposed above, we consider it might be good to reopen the grants on a smaller scale, allowing projects to receive the amounts they should have received while maintaining fairness.
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The detox period is for liquidity incentive programs (like STIP, LTIPP, etc), but it doesn’t mean that the DAO can’t fund other proposals like this one.
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I should have added “may” on that sentence, you are right.
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I don’t have enough delegation to post snapshots. I’m happy to vote for this because of the effort you put into it. I don’t believe that precedent is everything and this individual case can be resolved separate from other cases.
Even after leaving the Thrive team, I still do feel that they had to deal with the same timing based issues which were out of their control and probably lost over $300k.
M1A service fee was paid out over the course of the engagement. This was in their control as it was drafted in the proposal, however, it was a very early proposal to the DAO.
M1B required them to wait for the negotiations with the foundation to be finished before the service fee was sent. This moved the date of receiving from early April to mid July.
I doubt they would speak up about this issue because they want to be a great partner, but I do think if this proposal passes, then it may be a sign that they should be able to recoup some uncontrolled loss due to processing time. (They have not expressed any desire for me to make this statement. It is 100% my suggestion.)
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This is very helpful, Kara, and I really hope it works out 
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The biggest difference between the cases is the DAO voted to approve a $ contract in the snapshot election for the STEP program.
Whereas in this case grantees were provided guarantees in ARB only.
I empathize with their situation, but if the ARB price had increased in value i dont think they would have come to the forum for returning the amount. Whereas in STEP we had to return the excess in the implementation budget after fulfilling obligations made in dollar denomination.
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If we had been paid out in a normal time range (2 weeks, maybe 1 month), not 3,4,5 and 7 months later we wouldnt have asked for compensation.
Currency fluctuations are to be assumed within these normal time ranges, but this again was an extreme delay.
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Hello delegates! We are looking for a delegate voting power to post our proposal to Snapshot so it can go up for voting. We have had a month of comments coming in and it looks like theres close to an equal amount of people in support of our proposal to those that are not.
We can take it into a vote to see the results.
Thank you.
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Never chimed in the discussion so far, but let me reiterate what others already posted: in a grant program that is denominated in non stable currencies, the change of value in payment is expected.
Is quite unfortunate that this resulted in delay and a blocker for most projects; but this doesn’t necessarily entile the project to further compensantion because nobody would be here if arb would have gone from 2$ to 4$. And this is something i can say first hand because not only i have been in several grant programs, i also have been in programs with payments denominated in arb, in which grantee never complained when price was going up, but had some reservation when it was going down.
This to be clear is not to flip responsability on you. I simpathize with your situation, and having served a lot of small team with grants I know how important these milestones can be just for the survivability of a team, or to effectively ship the product. There was a problem in the program, a lot of delays, that had bad consequences on the operation of project. This will mean that the dao, next time, either won’t vote for the same people to run the program, or for the program itself.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the dao should compensate people who requested the grant and saw the dollar value going down. We could, at scale, apply this to the LTIPP program, in which 60M of arbs got distributed, with proposal coming in when arb was way above 1$, and projects receiving the stream for users up to the point in which it was worth 0.4$. While different (we are talking about opex in your case, incentive to users in this case), should there be an argument for it as well? The answer is obviously no.
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This proposal is reasonable. Due to payment delays and the drop in ARB value, winning projects have lost funds, and project progress has been impacted. Compensating for these losses is not only a recognition of the winners’ efforts but also enhances community trust.
I suggest clarifying the funding process in the future, such as setting a clear payment schedule to avoid similar issues. I support this proposal as it addresses real issues and provides valuable feedback for future funding improvements.
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It may be worth a lot of thought and discussion to see this proposal. The blow to projects from gold delays and token value fluctuations cannot be ignored, which not only affects the progress of the recipient’s project, but also the team’s morale and confidence. This proposal reminds us that DAOs need to pay more attention to the timing of fund disbursement when funding. With the need for transparent reporting and progress tracking raised in the proposal, DAOs should establish a better grant management system in the future to ensure that the execution and payment process of each funded project is clear and transparent, so as to avoid similar situations from happening again.
The impact caused by the above is not just a single point case study, it is already like this, it is more necessary for everyone to focus on doing their own thing, how can we do better with the existing resources, the past is very difficult to define in.
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Thank you for this proposal, and apologies for the delayed response. In fact, similar issues are widespread across Arbitrum DAO since ARB has dropped 70% over the past six months. I think they asked for providing reasonable compensation is understandable, but it may seem unfair to other teams facing similar situations. If the original reward was set in ARB, then I don’t think compensation is necessary, as the high volatility of early-stage tokens should be a common understanding among all Crypto practitioners.
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Thank you for presenting this proposal. I am sorry that the market correction is causing great difficulty — I can totally relate. We should have new procedures to stop this from happening again. Participants can be discouraged by these setbacks. Even though I don’t know why payments were delayed, I do think a solution that benefits everyone can be applied. I hope you can find the delegate to have the enough voting power.
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I voted in favor of this proposal based on its soundness, demonstration of value, and transparency, while suggesting that DAO improve its future incentive payout mechanisms to avoid a repeat of similar issues.
Reasons for supporting the proposal:
1. the proposal is transparent, citing specific losses and project status.
2. the compensation can help the project team to restore morale and accomplish the outstanding deliverables.
3. it helps DAO to build better trust mechanism and prove that the governance system is willing to take responsibility.
Recommendations:
1. it is recommended that DAO improve the payment process to avoid similar delays from happening again.
2. Teams receiving compensation are required to submit regular project progress reports to the DAO to ensure that funds are used for the originally planned objectives.
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voting For on this offchain proposal because Arbitrum is family, Arbitrum is home, Arbitrum is freedom, Arbitrum is you, and we should all take care of each other and support those that have been short changed.
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Thanks for the feedback as this is a pretty tough proposal to make. At the end of the day, we think situation is pretty straight forward, but not a happy decision to make.
The original grant was issued as 2,500 ARB per winner, not a specific USD equivalent. As tough as it is, there should be inherent expectations around price movement. This could be both good or bad. I thing that some recipients we’ve seen do is short a perp in equal value to be delta neutral to price movement when approved for the grant.
Additionally, this one vote would set a somewhat dangerous precedent for the DAO. Overall, this is not very scalable or sustainable for the DAO. The nature of crypto is volatile, and accepting grants in tokens comes with that risk.
That said, the delays and operational inefficiencies highlighted here are important learning for the DAO. Streamlining KYC processes, setting clear payout timelines, and possibly considering $ based grants for future rounds could mitigate similar issues going forward.