I did vote in favor, but my concerns did grow in the last couple of weeks.
Do we need to allocate the idle assets in the treasury? Of course. But we have to be clear on what the main purpose is.
In the last few days, delegates called for a more comprehensive call to discuss parameters such as yield, risk allocation and overarching goal of this program. The answer that we got, so far, is that previous iteration was more oriented toward growth of the ecosystem, and this one will be more oriented toward pure yield for the DAO.
I wholeheartly disagree with the statement above.
In the last season, allocation was toward AAVE, Lido Eth, Fluid, Camelot.
The one from Camelot was suboptimal as allocation due to the passive nature of the deployer (the foundation) which, talking with the risk committee, would have not been able to manage the position in a more active way.
The allocation in Fluid for sure helped the protocol bootstrap in Arbitrum and the Drip is continuing the job. That said, i hardly see how this could be defined as “oriented toward growth” of the chain" as others framed it.
I don’t want to only point out to semantic. I think we need to be all on the same page of what
- allocating toward growth really means
- allocating toward yield really means
- what are the risk/rewards of both choices.
So far former two points are, in my humble opinion, not properly laid out, the latter point is just not discussed at all.
I won’t campaign against the current season, is not worth it, and it does bring benefits to the DAO. Reaching sustainability with a treasury that is concentrated in mostly one coin (arb) is a good goal.
I would invite Entropy, the Foundation and the delegates to reflect on the following point tho: does moving, for example, from a 2.6% net yield to a 3.2% net yield, bring us anything meaningful beside having on 8500 ETH a further 51 ETH so a further gain of $200,000 for us? In my opinion it does not.
There is a lot of underestimation about the second order effect of making the DAO the first customers of Arbitrum protocols. Any 0.x% more yield we could get on the ethereum we have will greatly be outpaced by any positive mindshare that changes how the ecosystem is perceived by participant; and it will reflect on our treasury because this is one of the multiple reasons why the price action of Arb as a coin has been lackluster compared to any benchmark.
I am perfectly aware i am mentioning a rather complex topic, arb price action, that can’t be reduced to a bullet list or a few sentences; but whoever is out there talking with users, and builders, know that we do have a perception problem in our ecosystem.
With my vote in favour I hope that we do indeed put the idle assets at work to produce yield as we should, but also that we start to properly frame the intent behind our action while having a more thoughtful and omni comprehensive scenarios of the choices at our disposal and what they means not only for us as a DAO but as ecosystem.
In the end, does it matte if we become a self sustainable DAO if no one is left in our chain beside us?