The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting FOR, although we are quite critical of this proposal.
In general, we are supportive of restructuring the DIP program and reducing DAO’s spend on it. However, the restructuring should come first, with cost reduction being a byproduct rather than a primary goal. We should first clarify what we want to incentivize delegates and contributors to do, what activities are desirable, and which activities will be rewarded.
From the current proposal structure and justification provided, it can be inferred that delegate participation is most valued in terms of voting and meeting quorum. The proposal states that the delegate workload is lower than it used to be and provides an explanation for this:
Lower activity in the DAO … due to a more institutionalized environment, with the emergence of Evaluation Committees, the OpCo, Entropy as Governance Facilitator, and both the Arbitrum Foundation and OCL playing a more active role in the DAO
As we mentioned during the DIP call, this statement so far is rather questionable. Almost all initiatives that are ongoing right now in the DAO originated from DAO contributors and delegates’ initiatives:
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There would be no Arbitrum Treasury Management if not for STEP, which came from the Treasury Sustainability Working Group that came from Plurality Labs’ Firestarters program
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There would be no DRIP if not for STIP and later variations, DETOX discussions, ARDC incentives analysis, and various proposals (like the IOSG wake-up call proposal) coming from the DAO to improve on the incentives.
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The D.A.O Grants program comes from the Questbook Delegated Domain Allocator program
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Arbitrum Audit Program originated as the ADPC Audit Subsidy program
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AGV is a DAO-originated and DAO-led initiative
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Hackathon Continuation is a DAO-originated initiative
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OpCo originated from delegate discussions at ETHDenver
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DAO Events Budget originated from DAO-led GovHack events
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SOS discussions are being driven by the community, while AAEs, other than Entropy, are not. participating in them
Many initiatives within the DAO, such as the Arbitrum Ventures Initiative, DAO events, and marketing working groups, were put on hold under the assumption that the AAEs would take them over and drive them forward. However, nothing has materialized on that front yet.
We would argue that the current lower activity in the DAO is not due to an increase in the activity of AAEs, but rather because of a lack of activity from them. We were, and still are, supportive of the Vision for the future of Arbitrum proposed by the Arbitrum Foundation. However, we must acknowledge that, four months after its publication, we have seen very little initiative from AF or other entities to make it work.
In our opinion, that does not justify lowering the incentives for delegates, unless the goal is just to limit the community activity in the DAO and reduce the delegates’ role to just ratifying future proposals put forward by the AAEs. This current proposal does not address these issues, therefore, we would like to amplify @Arbitrum Foundation’s request:
On another note, we see significant room for improvement in how the DIP is structured and what kind of tangible outcomes it brings to the DAO, e.g., a clear delineation between contributor and delegate is needed. Consequently, we believe that the work on a 2.0 version of the DIP should be accelerated.
We hope the Arbitrum Foundation will take a more active role in the public discussion around the program, aligning it with their vision for the future of Arbitrum and clarifying expectations for contributors and delegates.
Due to our concerns, we were initially considering voting against this proposal, but after discussing it with @SEEDGov, we understand that this new format allows us to reduce SEED overhead on delegate assessment, which will allow them to put more resources into working on the new version that will address proper clarification of contributor paths and delegate roles. So we decided to support it.