Quite complex to evaluate and also very thoughtful.
At first glance, after reading once or twice, seems that the innovations here compared to any incentive program so far ran through the dao are at several levels:
- from an operational/implementation standpoint, a “quest type” of approach on rewards, oriented toward users’ actions more than usage of protocols
- from an strategic standpoint, the introduction of managers (which should basically work alongside orbit chains to create the plan for users’ actions) feels like the evolution of the advisors we just had in ltip: they not only help on paper to craft the plan, but also get their hands dirty through the boost manager. And council has a similar role in selecting grantees
- from an economical standpoint: alignment in rewards of incentive managers to the chain and the dao through a portion of fee generated.
I can’t say any of the above is bad. It is, indeed, quite good. All of the benefits stands around how powerful the tool is, and my main questions are currently on this topic.
How flexible is the tool? So far we have been seeing incentives crafted by protocols, in the most basic usage could have been “arb distributed pro rata on top of a pool vault”. Which is quite easy to achieve, quite passive, can’t steer too much actions except for the usage of assets in the pool in case of composability (if any, and if user is willing to).
But we have also being seeing more complex mechanism on top, such as rewarding users coming from other chains and using other protocols, to turn an incentive program into a potential vampire attack.
Now, this is only an example of course. What I would like to understand are the tools capabilities, flexbilities, and how this translates in complexity of implementation.
Would even dare to say that looking at a demo of what is doable, or even a simulation of the tool applied on a certain period of time on top of a real protocol, would be very very interesting.
The secon main question I have is the relationship between council and managers: i see that managers are whitelisted by the council. Is not clear to me if this means, practically, that managers are selected internally by the council, or elected by the dao and ratified by the council, or elected by the dao and whitelisted in the tool by the council, or what is the framework underneath. And also, if a chain can select a single manager, or if all managers will potentially compete on all chains (which seems the case looking at diagram, but how does that practically work when 2 competiting policies are up?). I think the role of the manager, while clear on an high level, needs a bit of a clarification on the implementation level.
Beside the 2 questions above (tool capability, we need a drill down, and specificity of managers), i think is great to see a growing economic alignment of parties. I see in general a blend and an evolution of what we have seen in previous (stip) and current (ltip) grant program, which is a great way to itereate.
The fact that is applied to orbit also helps us tackling a need that we had, which is a program specifically tailored for this important part of the arbitrum ecosystem.
Very nice job man, very nice.