Team 9: Bringing Transparency to Arbitrum DAO's Treasury: The Arbitrum DAO Dashboard

DAO Programs & Initiatives GovHack Brussels
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Team 9: Bringing Transparency to Arbitrum DAO's Treasury: The Arbitrum DAO Dashboard

Track: DAO Budget & Revenue

Team Number: Team 9

Team Members:

Challenge Statement:
Currently, Arbitrum delegates lack a clear picture of the DAO’s financial status, and proposers are unclear about how their proposals impact finances. To ensure long-term sustainability and informed decision-making, insight into the current state of DAO spending is essential. This proposal does not aim to define a budget for the DAO treasury but to lay the groundwork for it.

Team Lead Contact: Prometheus and T

Presentation Link: Loom Recorded Presentation Link

Proposal

Team 9: Bringing Transparency to Arbtirum DAO's Treasury: The Arbitrum DAO Dashboard

Proposal type

Non-Constitutional

Proposers

  • Prometheus
  • T
  • Jason Windawi
  • Liz Yang
  • Matt Fiebach
  • Sam Martin
  • Daniel Ospina

Abstract

This proposal addresses the DAO’s need for an aggregated view of its expenditures. Currently, delegates lack a clear picture of the DAO’s financial status, and proposers are unclear about how their proposals impact finances. To ensure long-term sustainability and informed decision-making, insight into the current state of DAO spending is essential. This proposal does not aim to define a budget for the DAO treasury but to lay the groundwork for it.

The final deliverable is an aggregated dashboard reflecting the spending of Arbitrum DAO in 2024 available for all via a public website similar to this expenses dashboard created for MakerDAO. If there is interest around continuing the initiative, we will submit an additional proposal to extend the scope to maintain the dashboard.

Motivation

The DAO lacks a unified view into its expenditures. This means that delegates must make decisions without a clear picture into the DAO’s current financial status. On the other side, proposers also have a lack of clarity on how their proposals impact DAO finances.

To ensure that the DAO is sustainable over the long term and to be able to continue to fund important initiatives, the DAO needs insight into the current state of DAO spending.

Additionally, a view into current spending is a prerequisite for creating an eventual budget for DAO spending (please note that defining a budget for the DAO treasury is out of scope for this proposal).

Rationale

We believe that an aggregated dashboard of financial data would enhance transparency into DAO finances. It would complement existing initiatives like the monthly R3gen Finance “Token Flow Report,” which provide financial reporting on a monthly basis. These reports are highly informative, presenting an overview of key facts and figures, inflows and outflows, treasury holdings, DAO initiatives, and more. As a complement, the DAO would also benefit from a historical perspective on this data. However, the information is presented in a static format and is not dynamic.

Such a dashboard would not only complement existing initiatives like the monthly r3gen Finance reports, but also be directly helpful by saving time and providing data for these reports. Additionally, it will offer a dynamic and customizable view of the state of finances for DAO members. The added flexibility of an actively maintained dashboard would also allow for more rapid iteration in response to evolving DAO needs and feedback, and to incorporate new findings from efforts by the ARDC and other groups within the DAO.

Specifications

Powerhouse Decentralized Operations Platform as the basis

We propose that Powerhouse create the aggregated dashboard to track Arbitrum DAO spending. Powerhouse began as MakerDAO Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling (SES) Core Unit in the MakerDAO supporting the incubator program and building the operational infrastructure of one of the largest DAO experiments to date.

As SES, team members helped teams to organize operations and connect them with relevant service providers. Early 2023, SES was reenvisioned from an advisory service provider into a full-stack decentralized operations provider for scalable network organizations.

Powerhouse translates business workflows, processes, and information systems into software to power large on-chain organizations. Its platform is offered as a modular open source system as public goods. The objective of Powerhouse is to help DAOs scale by overcoming coordination failure.

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Figure 1. An Overview of the Four Powerhouse Products

Currently, Powerhouse is also running live operational software for Arbitrum LTIPP on https://www.arbgrants.com where they tackled the largest pain point of ongoing incentive reporting on the Arbitrum Discourse Forums. The arbgrants module is an example of verifiable off-chain reporting flow that would be used to capture data for the proposed dashboard.

Implementing the ArbitrumDAO use case

This proposal’s budget will be used to ensure that Arbitrum-specific requirements are taken into account.

An overview of the four-step process that will result in the data collection for driving the initial aggregated expenses dashboard.

  • #1: Capture the governance proposals and included budgets. Either through manual input from forum posts or a verifiable grants pogram platform automated with an api integration for easy data retrieval.
  • #2: Track onchain flows from treasury to project wallet (e.g., for a specific approved proposal)
  • #3: Money leaves the initiative wallet leaves to become actual expense
  • #4: Project team submits transparency report with expense categories to Powerhouse

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Figure 2: Four-step diagram

Included data

This section will be reviewed and tweaked throughout the discovery phase of the project.

  • View of the allocated and proposed budgets with a direct link to the associated governance or grants proposal that describes the project scope, spanning the 5 expenditure categories outlined in the r3gen Finance “Token Flow Report”
    • Arbitrum Foundation
    • DAO Core
      • ARDC
      • ADPC
      • DIS
    • Ecosystem Incentives
      • LTIP
    • Direct Grants
      • Questbook
      • Plurality Labs
      • Rarible
    • Grants Programs
      • STIP
  • The proportion of each budget that has already been transferred to the project multisig(s) and how much of that has been converted to stablecoins
  • The actual expenditure of ARB and stablecoin tokens, i.e. what funds have already left the project multisig(s)
  • Categorization of the transactions sourced from an expense report submitted by the project managers indicating what the money was spent on

Other considerations

  • Making use of open source and verifiable data sources for both off-chain as well as on-chain data.
    • Making use of on-chain data with the help of indexers and direct references to the wallets involved in transactions, locations and tracking of funds and expenses.
    • Implementing off-chain data with the help of manual reports that are verifiable by attaching EVM signatures of the contributors to the data inputs and modifications of the reports.
  • We will capture both on & off-chain data in machine readable format. This will allow data analysts and developers to easily make use of the data to drive dashboards, widgets & charts through the help of a GraphQL API.

Steps to Implement with Timeline

Please note that the timeline below may be revised to be shorter depending on the results of Step 3 (discovery period). Additionally, the timeline reflects the team’s current bandwidth restrictions which may be relaxed following the roll-out planning.

  • Step 1: Beginning of July 2024: Post proposal on the Arbitrum DAO Forum

  • Step 2: End of July 2024: Proposal passes (assumption)

  • Step 3: August - mid-September 2024 (4 - 6 weeks – flat fee of 8K USD): Discovery process to identify sources of budgeting/expenditure data for the dashboard + best way to provide the input, whether onchain or offchain (manual vs API integrated) inputs

  • Step 4: September - December 2024 (up to 3 months – flat fee of 49K USD): Creation of a proof-of-concept dashboard with pre-scoped metrics

  • Note: Proof-of-concept dashboard will implement onchain data + API integrated offchain data. After the proof-of-concept dashboard is rolled out, we will take into consideration feedback from key DAO delegates, advisors, etc before implementing the manual offchain inputs, which may be more difficult to source

  • Step 5: December 2024 - February 2025 (up to 2 months - 33K USD): Roll out production dashboard

  • Note: Production dashboard will implement the pilot dashboard metrics, and also add manual offchain inputs, which may be more difficult to source

Overall Cost

Discovery phase: $8,000 USD

Proof of concept: $49,000 USD

Production release: $33,000 USD

Total: $90,000 USD

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