The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on our combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting AGAINST this proposal in its current form.
We reviewed this proposal in parallel with the Triple Dip proposal, and unfortunately, in our opinion, neither is worth supporting at this point.
Our main concern here is the same as with Triple Dip - this proposal doesn’t even attempt to answer the core question: What valuable contributions are we looking for in the DAO? What is the role of delegates and contributors, and what is actually expected of them?
Are delegates meant to act merely as notaries of decisions made by AAEs? Are contributors simply “fans” who promote tweets, attend events, and contribute to the vibes - but don’t necessarily help drive initiatives within the DAO? If that’s indeed the expectation, that’s fine, but it should be stated clearly. But this would mark a shift from what the DAO used to represent - and from where, in our view, most of its past successes originated.
Without a clear understanding of our end goals, it’s difficult to support an incentive program that’s meant to help achieve them. This proposal doesn’t outline such goals; instead, it references the OpCo as the entity that defines and understands them. At this point, it seems delegates are expected to simply trust that process without sufficient clarity on how those goals are established.
Beyond that high-level concern, we also have issues with some of the mechanisms proposed:
- The Peer Assembly structure feels overly complicated. Complexity might be justified if we were facing an overflow of contributors and needed to filter based on social reputation - but that’s not our current reality. DAO activity seems to be at an all-time low. In the past six months, we can hardly recall any initiative that gained meaningful traction among delegates. The AAEs operate in isolated silos, with little feedback or input from the broader community. Given this, we see no reason for such a complex gatekeeping mechanism for potential contributors.
- The proposal puts too much power and responsibility in the hands of OpCo and Program Manager. And we’re more concerned about the responsibility part, not the power part. In our view, the fact that PM was responsible for assessing impact and assigning rewards was detrimental to the program in the past. It consumes nearly all of the PM’s capacity and leads to endless debates with little added value. Simplifying, we’ve seen ten times more energy spent on assessing impact than on producing it. We should reverse that ratio, not institutionalize it.
- We also question the reliance on peer reporting for identifying meaningful contributions. This approach disadvantages contributors who add value quietly without campaigning for peer recognition. It assumes peers have broad visibility into the DAO’s activities, which rarely happens in practice. In our opinion, this setup risks evolving into a closed circle of like-minded contributors isolated from the rest of the community - a feedback loop of people patting each other on the back.
There are additional technical details we find problematic, but going through them one by one doesn’t seem productive here.
However, one example worth mentioning is the recurring contributions exclusion clause, which seems to specifically target our past contributions - even citing monthly calls as an example of activities not eligible for rewards. To be clear, we don’t mind; we’ve never done this work for rewards but to bring value to the ecosystem, we’ve started those calls way before the DIP program. Still, we disagree with the spirit of this clause. Furthermore, if those contributions were not considered valuable, it would have been more natural (and civil) to communicate that directly before designing an incentive mechanism to exclude them.
Finally, we would like to repeat the statement we made in the Triple Drip proposal, as we find it important overall in context of those two proposals being voted on almost in parallel: