Then this was unfortunately a mistake from the AF’s end, as their asks were not denominated in ARB 
Refer: Arbitrum Research & Development Collective: Elections & Applications
The Arbitrum Foundation’s grant agreements always follow what is in the Tally proposal. In this case, the Tally proposal outlines the applicable caps for each member & the election procedure (not payment related). All service providers signed the grant agreement with knowledge of the ARB cap for their role. The USD denominated payments in the subsequent Snapshot proposal is not considered as part of the grant agreement. It seems that is a good decision as well as it may mean the Arbitrum Foundation would be in breach of the agreements if it cannot fulfil the USD payments.
The ArbitrumDAO can always pursue a subsequent proposal, like the one above, but its important that we are clear on what the service providers agreed too. This is a good situation to highlight that payments are typically better denominated in ARB than USD.
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My understanding was that the Arbitrum Foundation only denominates in ARB to avoid this issue. But there may have been an exception made here.
Nevertheless, unless I am missing something, it still seems logical that if the bills were agreed to be paid based in a USD denomination, then the ARB should have been converted to that denomination when it was recieved to ensure the service providers could be paid or a cap put in place for the amount of ARB that would be paid over the course of the program.
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Hey @raam ,
I understand your point - yet the Tally proposal clearly stated that the service providers had to provide their fee schedules and the the ARB Amounts were caps to not be exceeded (and not the fees to be paid to Service Providers).
Hence, if the AF Agreement followed the Tally proposal, it would ancillarily lead the elections that were to be had via Snapshot (as this was in the Tally proposal that it would work this way - so was a detailed explanation of the election process).
Whether the original proposal was meant to be in USD or ARB seems a clear no:
- Joint applications must abide by the applicable cap to the corresponding seat to be applied for as voted by the ArbitrumDAO;
- An applicant may not apply as part of a joint application with other applicants & then proceed to apply individually for another seat.
- The Fee Structure/Ask must not exceed the applicable cap as voted by the ArbitrumDAO.
1.715 Million ARB + Multi-Sig Budget.
- 665,000 ARB [Security] [Applicable Cap]
- 665,000 ARB [Research] [Applicable Cap]
- 335,000 ARB [Risk] [Applicable Cap]
- 50,000 ARB [DAOAdvocate]
Given that the shortfall is due to the ARDC’s offering USD compensation without actually holding USD or a plan to hedge or mitigate ARB price swings, a positive resolution could be:
- Publish a plan of how to dispose of the current ARB + new ARB to ensure this isn’t repeated.
- Scale down the request so that governance is not bearing the full cost of this shortfall. Splitting the difference as @alicecorsini suggests seems reasonable.
- Everyone just try to be more cognizant of currency risks when drafting or voting upon proposals.
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Hello everyone!
Just to have clarity on this matter:
The agreements were signed by the members of the ARDC with the values in ARB. Those values were the cap (max amount in ARB that would be possible).
Question for you @raam, if possible: Did any entity enquire why the agreement has a different value than the snapshot proposal?
@Immutablelawyer The application was set on USD with values different from the cap (values from snapshot). So, every month, the payment was XXX ARB to match the values below - the only exception was L2Beat.
If, per the Tally proposal, the ARB CAP was the values shared below, and that was what was signed by all the parties, in theory the amount due was paid (or almost completely paid, correct?)
To recap:
- Tally proposal set a cap in ARB
- Applicants made their proposals on Snapshot in USD - equivalent
- Legal agreements were signed with ARB cap values
- Now there is not enough ARB to complete the payments
Given this is not an outcome wanted by any of the parties involved (I assume), I agree that a compromise should be made, and more funds sent to the mutisign, but I don’t see that the value is naturally (or even so, mandatory) the amount of ARB to match the USD amount asked for.
In my opinion, this is a topic that requires more discussion.
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In answer to your question, all ARDC providers reviewed the agreements and there were no questions related to grant payment.
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Personally, I think this may be a fair middle ground. Potentially worth including this as an option in a Snapshot rank order vote.
As an update on the above proposal, we have taken the decision to work on a re-structued ARDC proposal as opposed to conducting an injection to the current ARDC term.
The proposal for the re-structured ARDC will go up within the next 1-2 weeks!
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Look forward to the proposal and to better understand if Arbitrum is receiving value for the costs each service provider charges. ~375k USD per month across 5 service providers should be 25+ experienced people working full time, I’d expect significant output.