Our team, DspytDao, votes FOR the STEP Committee recommendations because they prioritize a balanced approach to ecosystem growth and risk management.
The selection of six diverse and reliable providers ensures focused and effective treasury diversification. The committee’s thorough evaluation and clear criteria align with our commitment to sustainable growth and sound investment.
Supporting these recommendations will enhance the resilience and future potential of the Arbitrum ecosystem, ensuring strategic and prudent utilization of resources.
WOW. I am really impressed with the results. This is one of the easier yes’s I have had in the DAO.
I feel a little weird about working with Blackrock and a bunch of ex-Goldman Sachs people… but i think that’s just my own anti-tradfi prejudice shining through. In reality, bringing these orgs over to Arbitrum, while also diversifying our treasury is a huge win.
@thedevanshmehta, his crew, and the STEP committee did a fantastic job. Excited to see the results and would expect us to triple down on this program.
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.
We’re voting FOR this proposal.
We trust the judgement of the STEP council for the recommended allocations to each respective service provider, and therefore we vote in favor of ratifying the decision to begin the distribution.
One thing we’d like to note however is that the recommendations should be denominated in % of the available funds, as opposed to denominated in ARB. The reason for that is that the sum of the recommended amounts, when denominated in ARB, is less than the dollar amount that STEP has at its disposal, given the fact that they converted ARB to stables at a better average price than current prices.
I have voted “For”. The Committee was elected for their expertise in this manner and I trust the research that has been put in to get to the allocation noted above. I see no issues with it.
We believe the program is a great step to experiment the treasury diversification and trust the committee’s recommendations of the providers. We are also curious about the reporting mechanism and how the DAO can continuously review how the investments work.
We have no complaints regarding these recommendations–it’s exciting to see the DAO diversify into these more traditional vehicles. We also feel that the team should have more leeway in the future when deciding these, so we don’t find it necessary to push this through a Snapshot vote (although it helps with visibility). All this, of course, hinges on effective and transparent communication regarding the progression of this initiative. It would therefore be nice to have the “We’ll also be writing up a lessons learnt post, for future guidance in running a STEP program” post sooner rather than later.
Michigan Blockchain will be voting FOR. The amounts seem reasonable as well as the diversification of the list of service providers. Should lead to low risk yet decent growth of the treasury. Would also be great to see which of the listed considerations were used to choose the 6, rather than why the other 11 weren’t chosen.
Regarding the reporting procedure, Steakhouse will publish monthly reports at the close of each calendar month, with the initial report posted the month following the first deployment of capital from the program. Each report will include the following information:
Transaction activity during the month
Market price and investment notional amount
Monthly profit/loss
Performance comparison to US Treasury benchmark
Liquidity metrics
Portfolio covenant compliance
Any relevant operational updates from the issuer
Additionally, once capital is deployed, Steakhouse will create a Dune dashboard for real-time reporting on the portfolio, to the extent possible with on-chain data.
We welcome feedback on the reports as they are published and will integrate additional data as the community sees fit. To that end, we also plan to hold periodic office-hours where the community can ask questions and provide feedback directly.
This is a good point. Since the ARB foundation has been dollar cost averaging the last few weeks, i expect @cliffton.eth will provide the average selling price once the process is complete and then we multiply the amounts recommended by the average selling price.
One of the key lessons learnt is that we should ideally create limit orders and wait until they are triggered to get the best price. The full post is still forthcoming, but one of the key recommendations will be to pass the next version of the proposal much in advance, direct the foundation to create limit orders at set price points, and hopefully they get triggered before the next iteration of STEP goes live anytime in 2025.
This is the natural evolution of several months work, experimental but also important in size, that we need for our treasury.
As i told devansh in other channels, what i don’t like is the fact that the trimming from the initial 17 projects to the current 6 has not been publicly motivated. While I can understand some issues in disclosing details on unreleased products, the space would likely benefit most in understanding why a protocol was selected, and why another was not. I strongly suggest, for a potential next iteration of this, to change this specific course of action.
The following comment represent the views of @SavvyDAO as I’m part of their team as Governance Analyst:
Savvy DAO voted for this proposal due to its thoughtful approach to treasury diversification and the expertise demonstrated by the committee. The selected allocations are well-balanced and reasonable.
Thanks for this feedback, we were indeed more opaque than the LTIPP program which set a new benchmark for transparency.
One of the issues in giving public feedback is that we gave the option to providers for sending in details that are private.
Most of them availed this option and sent private information, so giving public feedback that relies on their privately sent data is ethically dubious. There are workarounds - such as getting the green signal from the service provider to share opinion on them publicly - but this time around we’ve chosen to make the criteria public while anonymizing who fell afoul of a specific stipulation.
Here are some of my initial thoughts around the next edition of the STEP program & how we should go about it;
This time, the foundation dollar cost averaged the ARB over some weeks through coinbase. For the future, I suggest limit orders at set price points, so the program only gets executed when the orders go through (partially solves the problem of diversification dampening ARB price).
To throw some unbacked numbers out there, if our average liquidation price in this STEP is 80 cents, we should keep limit orders at or upto 2x this amount, such as $1.5. This way, we can only embark on additional diversification once ARB price hits this number and the order executes.
If we go with this approach, we need a steering committee ASAP to work out details such as
what price targets limit orders should be set at for what amount of ARB (i recommend we stick to the same amount of 35 million ARB or 1% of treasury per year)
defining upfront how much can go to existing providers vs new ones
specifying total number of providers to be chosen in advance, otherwise there’s a principal agent problem where the committee may want to select fewer (to reduce surface area of failure) while the DAO wants more selected to enable ecosystem growth (even if theres a cost in capital or credibility)
recruiting members of the STEP committee for examining applications & determining their pay. This time, each member ended up getting around $15k, the market rate cost of their time to review 30 applications and come up with recommendations was approximately double. Fixing their stipend in dollars rather than ARB, & not over-engineering it by tying to metrics, is recommended
Finally, we should use the RWA program led by @sid_areta & @Bernard to see how we can get new blood into STEP programs. This time it was a tightly run ship by a few, for the future we need avenues for ARB DAO community members to step up & contribute in its execution. Would honestly be thrilled if someone else is able to over as facilitating member in the next edition!
Voted a yes FOR I believe the program is a great step to experiment the treasury diversification and trust the committee’s recommendations , experience and expertise of the providers.