proposals.app proposes a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to enhance the usability of this governance forum, so that delegates, tokenholders, and forum readers can have more context and information about our DAO proposals. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of one year, for a total of $60,000 USD.
Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders. We believe that one of the main reasons for this is the clear lack of foundational DAO tooling that prioritizes true composability and aggregates data from multiple (even competing) offchain and onchain sources, thereby providing a more comprehensive and enjoyable user experience for DAO delegates and tokenholders. We believe that to achieve this, DAO tools should be free and open-source, operate under a non-profit entity that ideally has public financial records of its operations. At proposals.app, we strive to uphold these beliefs.
Andrei and I have been building DAO tools since mid-2023, starting with Senate, where we previously piloted two forum integrations (one with Uniswap, and another with Aave), and more recently, we’ve been working on proposals.app, where we’ve developed dedicated tooling for Arbitrum DAO’s governance needs that was funded through a questbook grant last October. More specifically, we’ve designed and developed a unified governance aggregator that brings together, under the same platform, the discourse forum comments and both offchain and onchain votes, so that delegates can access the complete history of every proposal in Arbitrum DAO. We launched it publicly on April 5ᵗʰ at ETH Bucharest 2025, and you can check it out at arbitrum.proposals.app and share your thoughts about it with us in our telegram chat.
We’re now proposing a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to bring some of the exclusive proposals.app features we have in our app, to this governance forum. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of 12 months.
We believe that these three features will enhance usability and accessibility in this governance forum for all users, regardless of their level of maturity.
These three features, as demonstrated above, are:
With these three proposals.app feature integrations in this forum, we believe will see bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions, from a more diverse set of delegates and tokenholders, who will have more context about who is commenting on what, about when proposals are up to a vote and where and when to vote in each moment of the proposal lifecycle.
We shared a short demo of proposals.app and these three proposed feature integrations on the Open Governance Call on June 3rd, and you can see the recording of that demo and presentation, as well as some Q&A, in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MToHsWqQxs
Constantly improving and caring for the governance processes in Arbitrum DAO is essential to maintain a healthy, engaged, resilient, and decentralized DAO. In Arbitrum DAO’s case, where tokenholders and delegates actually have on-chain control over protocol upgrades and treasury spending, it becomes even more critical that they vote with as much context and information as possible in each and every vote.
Additionally, in token-weighted voting DAOs, not all voices carry the same weight. Powerful delegates commenting and giving feedback on proposals are crucial signals of support. On the other hand, newly created forum accounts with no voting power, which are becoming more prevalent in the age of AI, make way more noise than signal and disrupt the discussion flow. Proposers and readers should be able to distinguish between the two and everything in between, much more easily.
As stated in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, we should strive to follow our stated Community Values, and specifically:
Neutral and open: Arbitrum governance should not pick winners and losers, but should foster open innovation, interoperation, user choice, and healthy competition on Arbitrum chains.
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters, so that we can attract more and better delegates and voters by providing them with tools that suit their particular needs and help them engage in governance in an easier and clearer way.
We also strongly believe that at least one of those front-ends should be fully open-source. Regarding the obvious matter of the resilience of Arbitrum’s DAO governance, we believe there should be a fully open-source front-end for Arbitrum’s DAO governance that would allow delegates and voters to continue participating in governance permissionlessly. proposals.app is fully open source and will continue to be. proposals.app and its future developments can also be self-hosted by anyone (like we’re doing now) under a new domain name, at any time, by anybody in the world.
To implement these three forum feature integrations described above, we will create three distinct Discourse theme components, rather than Discourse plugins.
This way, admins of Discourse hosted instances (like the one for the Arbitrum DAO forum) can easily install each one of these feature integrations from a GitHub repo link (where the code will be fully open-source and auditable, of course) and manage the updates for each feature integration independently, as we evolve and maintain them after the initial deployment.
As mentioned above, this is how we previously integrated with the Uniswap and Aave governance forums, in the past.
We will design, develop, test, and deploy these 3 Discourse forum proposals.app feature integrations, in the following order:
Voting Power Tags – Showing discourse users’ voting power alongside their usernames in every topic and post in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum. To achieve this, we must retrieve all previous delegation data for the $ARB token and maintain a mapping between the top discourse users and voting wallets on Arbitrum DAO. This voting power tag will always display the current voting power of each delegate by default. Upon clicking on it, the delegate's voting power at the time the comment was posted will be displayed instead.
Live Votes – In every proposal posted in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum, which goes up for an offchain or onchain vote, we will display a component at the top of the forum proposal page, which shows that there is an active offchain or onchain vote, the current live results of that offchain or onchain vote, and a link to vote on it. To achieve this, we must map all forum proposals and their respective Snapshot votes and onchain votes, as well as index all voting data from either Snapshot’s API or the onchain Arbitrum DAO Governors (both the non-constitutional Arbitrum Treasury governor and the constitutional Arbitrum Core governor).
Proposal Notification Emails – In the Arbitrum DAO governance forum homepage, we will display a “Setup Proposal Notifications” button, which will open a modal for forum users to subscribe to email notifications, so that they can receive timely emails whenever a new proposal discussion is posted on the forum, when an offchain or onchain vote starts, and when an offchain or onchain vote is about to end. To achieve this, we need to maintain a GDPR-compliant list of emails and newsletters, as well as a dedicated subdomain and address to send email notifications from, ensuring optimal email deliverability for those email notifications.
Following the successful approval of this proposal and the initial onchain transfer, we will hold a project kickoff call and begin building the first integration, the Voting Power Tags, which we can deploy and deliver within one month. Then we will work on the Live Votes integration, which we can also deploy and deliver within one month. Finally, we will work on the Proposal Notification Emails integration, which we will also deploy and deliver within one month.
In total, it will take us 1 month to deliver these three feature integrations to the Arbitrum DAO after the project kickoff call, which should happen after a successful onchain vote. During this time, we will work with all Arbitrum DAO delegates to gather feedback on this functionality and improve it to meet your needs. After deploying all these integrations, we will maintain and host them for a period of 12 months.
We plan to put this proposal up for a temperature check offchain vote on Thursday, June 12th. After a successful offchain vote, we will move this proposal and publish an onchain vote on Monday, June 23rd, to start the voting period on Thursday, June 26th. After a successful onchain vote, we can kick off this work and start the timeline proposed above, as early as July 15th. This would mean that we could deliver all of the proposed scope, 1 month later, on August 15th.
We propose to build, maintain, and host these three feature integrations for Arbitrum for a minimum of 12 months. The total cost to the Arbitrum DAO, is $60,000 USD.
Here is the cost breakdown:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Maintenance 1 year (1 day of Design + 1 day of Development + 1 day of Testing, per month) | $48,000 USD |
| Hosting 1 year (3 Servers, DNS, and Emails) | $12,000 USD |
| Total | $60,000 USD |
The Maintenance fee includes 1 day per month of Design, 1 day per month of Development, and 1 day per month of Testing, to ensure we maintain these features with an up-to-date user experience and quality of service, and that we can incorporate the delegates’ future feedback on these proposals.app feature integrations.
The Hosting fee includes the monthly costs for all the infrastructure we use, which can be live-monitored on status.proposals.app.
We propose that the payment be done as a one-time payment of $60,000 USD.
After a successful onchain vote, the funds should be transferred either to the MSS or the Arbitrum Foundation (depending on the outcome of the current Wind Down the MSS proposal), which would certify the delivery of the three feature integrations and release the payment after a successful deployment.
Andrei and Paulo pledge to continually work towards a future where DAO governance tools are genuinely credibly neutral. Therefore, our work is public, fully open-source, and happens with transparent financials. Additionally, proposals.app will soon be established as a non-profit entity, and we pledge never to accept venture capital funding. Until now, proposals.app has only received a $43,000 USD grant from Arbitrum DAO via Season 2 of the Domain Allocator grants on Questbook, as well as $6,000 USD for the first-place prize in the Arbitrum GovHack at ETHcc Brussels. No other funding, from any other source, was received, as shown in our multisig.
Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal through to the end. Please provide us with your honest and most critical feedback. We know we need it, and we genuinely welcome it!
Also, a very special thanks to @Sinkas from L2BEAT, Denys from @lobbyfi, Tnorm from Gauntlet, Sam from @Entropy, @MinistroDolar from Seedgov, Yambette, @jameskbh, @pedrob, @Juanrah, @KlausBrave, @ana.vc from Farstar, and Raam and Patrick from the @Arbitrum Foundation, who were kind enough to make their time available to us, to try out and test the arbitrum.proposals.app and collectively gave us over 250 user insights and pieces of feedback. And also a huge thank you to everybody else who reached out to us with feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. We sincerely appreciate you and look forward to hearing more from you as we launch new features to serve you better and better.
proposals.app proposes a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to enhance the usability of this governance forum, so that delegates, tokenholders, and forum readers can have more context and information about our DAO proposals. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of one year, for a total of $60,000 USD.
Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders. We believe that one of the main reasons for this is the clear lack of foundational DAO tooling that prioritizes true composability and aggregates data from multiple (even competing) offchain and onchain sources, thereby providing a more comprehensive and enjoyable user experience for DAO delegates and tokenholders. We believe that to achieve this, DAO tools should be free and open-source, operate under a non-profit entity that ideally has public financial records of its operations. At proposals.app, we strive to uphold these beliefs.
Andrei and I have been building DAO tools since mid-2023, starting with Senate, where we previously piloted two forum integrations (one with Uniswap, and another with Aave), and more recently, we’ve been working on proposals.app, where we’ve developed dedicated tooling for Arbitrum DAO’s governance needs that was funded through a questbook grant last October. More specifically, we’ve designed and developed a unified governance aggregator that brings together, under the same platform, the discourse forum comments and both offchain and onchain votes, so that delegates can access the complete history of every proposal in Arbitrum DAO. We launched it publicly on April 5ᵗʰ at ETH Bucharest 2025, and you can check it out at arbitrum.proposals.app and share your thoughts about it with us in our telegram chat.
We’re now proposing a formal collaboration with Arbitrum DAO to bring some of the exclusive proposals.app features we have in our app, to this governance forum. We propose designing, developing, testing, and deploying three feature integrations in this governance forum, as well as maintaining and hosting them for a period of 12 months.
We believe that these three features will enhance usability and accessibility in this governance forum for all users, regardless of their level of maturity.
These three features, as demonstrated above, are:
With these three proposals.app feature integrations in this forum, we believe will see bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions, from a more diverse set of delegates and tokenholders, who will have more context about who is commenting on what, about when proposals are up to a vote and where and when to vote in each moment of the proposal lifecycle.
We shared a short demo of proposals.app and these three proposed feature integrations on the Open Governance Call on June 3rd, and you can see the recording of that demo and presentation, as well as some Q&A, in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MToHsWqQxs
Constantly improving and caring for the governance processes in Arbitrum DAO is essential to maintain a healthy, engaged, resilient, and decentralized DAO. In Arbitrum DAO’s case, where tokenholders and delegates actually have on-chain control over protocol upgrades and treasury spending, it becomes even more critical that they vote with as much context and information as possible in each and every vote.
Additionally, in token-weighted voting DAOs, not all voices carry the same weight. Powerful delegates commenting and giving feedback on proposals are crucial signals of support. On the other hand, newly created forum accounts with no voting power, which are becoming more prevalent in the age of AI, make way more noise than signal and disrupt the discussion flow. Proposers and readers should be able to distinguish between the two and everything in between, much more easily.
As stated in The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO, we should strive to follow our stated Community Values, and specifically:
Neutral and open: Arbitrum governance should not pick winners and losers, but should foster open innovation, interoperation, user choice, and healthy competition on Arbitrum chains.
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters, so that we can attract more and better delegates and voters by providing them with tools that suit their particular needs and help them engage in governance in an easier and clearer way.
We also strongly believe that at least one of those front-ends should be fully open-source. Regarding the obvious matter of the resilience of Arbitrum’s DAO governance, we believe there should be a fully open-source front-end for Arbitrum’s DAO governance that would allow delegates and voters to continue participating in governance permissionlessly. proposals.app is fully open source and will continue to be. proposals.app and its future developments can also be self-hosted by anyone (like we’re doing now) under a new domain name, at any time, by anybody in the world.
To implement these three forum feature integrations described above, we will create three distinct Discourse theme components, rather than Discourse plugins.
This way, admins of Discourse hosted instances (like the one for the Arbitrum DAO forum) can easily install each one of these feature integrations from a GitHub repo link (where the code will be fully open-source and auditable, of course) and manage the updates for each feature integration independently, as we evolve and maintain them after the initial deployment.
As mentioned above, this is how we previously integrated with the Uniswap and Aave governance forums, in the past.
We will design, develop, test, and deploy these 3 Discourse forum proposals.app feature integrations, in the following order:
Voting Power Tags – Showing discourse users’ voting power alongside their usernames in every topic and post in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum. To achieve this, we must retrieve all previous delegation data for the $ARB token and maintain a mapping between the top discourse users and voting wallets on Arbitrum DAO. This voting power tag will always display the current voting power of each delegate by default. Upon clicking on it, the delegate's voting power at the time the comment was posted will be displayed instead.
Live Votes – In every proposal posted in the Arbitrum DAO governance forum, which goes up for an offchain or onchain vote, we will display a component at the top of the forum proposal page, which shows that there is an active offchain or onchain vote, the current live results of that offchain or onchain vote, and a link to vote on it. To achieve this, we must map all forum proposals and their respective Snapshot votes and onchain votes, as well as index all voting data from either Snapshot’s API or the onchain Arbitrum DAO Governors (both the non-constitutional Arbitrum Treasury governor and the constitutional Arbitrum Core governor).
Proposal Notification Emails – In the Arbitrum DAO governance forum homepage, we will display a “Setup Proposal Notifications” button, which will open a modal for forum users to subscribe to email notifications, so that they can receive timely emails whenever a new proposal discussion is posted on the forum, when an offchain or onchain vote starts, and when an offchain or onchain vote is about to end. To achieve this, we need to maintain a GDPR-compliant list of emails and newsletters, as well as a dedicated subdomain and address to send email notifications from, ensuring optimal email deliverability for those email notifications.
Following the successful approval of this proposal and the initial onchain transfer, we will hold a project kickoff call and begin building the first integration, the Voting Power Tags, which we can deploy and deliver within one month. Then we will work on the Live Votes integration, which we can also deploy and deliver within one month. Finally, we will work on the Proposal Notification Emails integration, which we will also deploy and deliver within one month.
In total, it will take us 1 month to deliver these three feature integrations to the Arbitrum DAO after the project kickoff call, which should happen after a successful onchain vote. During this time, we will work with all Arbitrum DAO delegates to gather feedback on this functionality and improve it to meet your needs. After deploying all these integrations, we will maintain and host them for a period of 12 months.
We plan to put this proposal up for a temperature check offchain vote on Thursday, June 12th. After a successful offchain vote, we will move this proposal and publish an onchain vote on Monday, June 23rd, to start the voting period on Thursday, June 26th. After a successful onchain vote, we can kick off this work and start the timeline proposed above, as early as July 15th. This would mean that we could deliver all of the proposed scope, 1 month later, on August 15th.
We propose to build, maintain, and host these three feature integrations for Arbitrum for a minimum of 12 months. The total cost to the Arbitrum DAO, is $60,000 USD.
Here is the cost breakdown:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Maintenance 1 year (1 day of Design + 1 day of Development + 1 day of Testing, per month) | $48,000 USD |
| Hosting 1 year (3 Servers, DNS, and Emails) | $12,000 USD |
| Total | $60,000 USD |
The Maintenance fee includes 1 day per month of Design, 1 day per month of Development, and 1 day per month of Testing, to ensure we maintain these features with an up-to-date user experience and quality of service, and that we can incorporate the delegates’ future feedback on these proposals.app feature integrations.
The Hosting fee includes the monthly costs for all the infrastructure we use, which can be live-monitored on status.proposals.app.
We propose that the payment be done as a one-time payment of $60,000 USD.
After a successful onchain vote, the funds should be transferred either to the MSS or the Arbitrum Foundation (depending on the outcome of the current Wind Down the MSS proposal), which would certify the delivery of the three feature integrations and release the payment after a successful deployment.
Andrei and Paulo pledge to continually work towards a future where DAO governance tools are genuinely credibly neutral. Therefore, our work is public, fully open-source, and happens with transparent financials. Additionally, proposals.app will soon be established as a non-profit entity, and we pledge never to accept venture capital funding. Until now, proposals.app has only received a $43,000 USD grant from Arbitrum DAO via Season 2 of the Domain Allocator grants on Questbook, as well as $6,000 USD for the first-place prize in the Arbitrum GovHack at ETHcc Brussels. No other funding, from any other source, was received, as shown in our multisig.
Thank you for taking the time to read this proposal through to the end. Please provide us with your honest and most critical feedback. We know we need it, and we genuinely welcome it!
Also, a very special thanks to @Sinkas from L2BEAT, Denys from @lobbyfi, Tnorm from Gauntlet, Sam from @Entropy, @MinistroDolar from Seedgov, Yambette, @jameskbh, @pedrob, @Juanrah, @KlausBrave, @ana.vc from Farstar, and Raam and Patrick from the @Arbitrum Foundation, who were kind enough to make their time available to us, to try out and test the arbitrum.proposals.app and collectively gave us over 250 user insights and pieces of feedback. And also a huge thank you to everybody else who reached out to us with feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. We sincerely appreciate you and look forward to hearing more from you as we launch new features to serve you better and better.
We are not against the idea, we think it is a good product and a good team (nice-to-have, we would say), but there are issues that we share with other delegates (chosen sources of financing, cost-benefit of the initiative, among others) that lead us to vote against it. We will provide a more detailed rationale shortly.
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/82
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/gfx-labs-delegate-communication-thread/13794
We are not against the idea, we think it is a good product and a good team (nice-to-have, we would say), but there are issues that we share with other delegates (chosen sources of financing, cost-benefit of the initiative, among others) that lead us to vote against it. We will provide a more detailed rationale shortly.
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/82
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/gfx-labs-delegate-communication-thread/13794
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/81
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/79?u=griff
Democratising lobbyism, on-chain. Check out lobbyfi.xyz
Information already provided in Snapshot and Tally, scope of work is redundant with existing tools.
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/76
The Event Horizon Community voted on this proposal (ehARB-110): EventHorizon.vote/vote/arbitrum/ehARB-110
The Event Horizon Community voted FOR on this proposal (ehARB-110): EventHorizon.vote/vote/arbitrum/ehARB-110
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/51?u=zenithiaa. https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/75?u=zenithiaa
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/74?u=maxlomu
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/72?u=dragonawr
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/67?u=mcfly
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/tekr0x-eth-delegate-communication-thread/24804/19?u=tekr0x.eth
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/66
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/2939
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/45?u=castlecapital
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/56
3rd feature is highly required as i often miss voting on important decisions and discussions on important topics coz i am not getting notified in any way. Also my suggestion if everything can be consolidated in one single mobile app. Right now i am using multiple different websites and it is very much overwhelming for me. Please work on this as well. Thanks
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/52?u=0xalex
Really useful addition and at $5k a month is very cheap from an IT infra spend for this kind of complexity.
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/81
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/79?u=griff
Democratising lobbyism, on-chain. Check out lobbyfi.xyz
Information already provided in Snapshot and Tally, scope of work is redundant with existing tools.
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/76
The Event Horizon Community voted on this proposal (ehARB-110): EventHorizon.vote/vote/arbitrum/ehARB-110
The Event Horizon Community voted FOR on this proposal (ehARB-110): EventHorizon.vote/vote/arbitrum/ehARB-110
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/51?u=zenithiaa. https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/75?u=zenithiaa
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/74?u=maxlomu
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/72?u=dragonawr
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/67?u=mcfly
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/tekr0x-eth-delegate-communication-thread/24804/19?u=tekr0x.eth
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/66
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/2939
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/45?u=castlecapital
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/56
3rd feature is highly required as i often miss voting on important decisions and discussions on important topics coz i am not getting notified in any way. Also my suggestion if everything can be consolidated in one single mobile app. Right now i am using multiple different websites and it is very much overwhelming for me. Please work on this as well. Thanks
https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-let-s-improve-our-governance-forum-with-three-proposals-app-feature-integrations/29398/52?u=0xalex
Really useful addition and at $5k a month is very cheap from an IT infra spend for this kind of complexity.
Level K is voting against this proposal on Snapshot.
Having only been a delegate for ~9 months, we quite appreciate the arbitrum.proposals.app. However, as mentioned by other delegates, we don’t see these features as adding significant value overall. Even flow-wise, we still need to cast our vote on Snapshot and Tally, and all the information being provided in the scope of work can easily be found on these sites.
Level K is voting against this proposal on Snapshot.
Having only been a delegate for ~9 months, we quite appreciate the arbitrum.proposals.app. However, as mentioned by other delegates, we don’t see these features as adding significant value overall. Even flow-wise, we still need to cast our vote on Snapshot and Tally, and all the information being provided in the scope of work can easily be found on these sites.
Additionally, our favorite feature of arbitrum.proposals.app was the drop-down that allows you to easily track revisions, which was not included in the scope of work.
Ultimately, we do not see
bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions
Thank you for this proposal and arbitrum.proposals.app!
Level K is voting against this proposal on Snapshot.
Having only been a delegate for ~9 months, we quite appreciate the arbitrum.proposals.app. However, as mentioned by other delegates, we don’t see these features as adding significant value overall. Even flow-wise, we still need to cast our vote on Snapshot and Tally, and all the information being provided in the scope of work can easily be found on these sites.
Level K is voting against this proposal on Snapshot.
Having only been a delegate for ~9 months, we quite appreciate the arbitrum.proposals.app. However, as mentioned by other delegates, we don’t see these features as adding significant value overall. Even flow-wise, we still need to cast our vote on Snapshot and Tally, and all the information being provided in the scope of work can easily be found on these sites.
Additionally, our favorite feature of arbitrum.proposals.app was the drop-down that allows you to easily track revisions, which was not included in the scope of work.
Ultimately, we do not see
bigger governance participation and better engagement in discussions
Thank you for this proposal and arbitrum.proposals.app!
Hello and thank you for your support! I'll jump in on this question since it is a more technical one.
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports?
Hello and thank you for your support! I'll jump in on this question since it is a more technical one.
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports?
The simple answer to this question is our current uptime is 98.5%, as shown in our status page here - https://status.proposals.app.
We are not only self-hosting instead of using PaaS or cloud providers, but we choose to do it the hard way, on our own physical servers. This decision was part of our resiliency philosophy, and the main reason behind it is if we build it to run on a machine under a desk, and it is open source, then anyone will be able to run it on a machine under their desk if necessary. We are not fully there yet, but are committed to this goal. That comes with a cost though; getting four nines uptime with these constraints is incredibly difficult.
We had downtime in the past and we improved our infrastructure to mitigate it in the future by adding a VPS in the mix and changing the workloads orchestration. All the workloads can automatically migrate between any of the 3 servers we have in case one of them goes down. Our database cluster has replicas spread on all 3 servers and any of them can become a leader in case one of the servers goes down. We have hourly local backups of all VMs on fast storage, local archival backups in 2 locations, and daily database backups in an R2 bucket. There is always space to improve, but the problem with infrastructure resilience is you can only plan so much; there will be problems you didn't think of and you only figure it out when things go down.
When it comes to these specific forum integration features, as a fallback, we will make sure in case our APIs go down, they do not break anything in the forum and fail silently, in a way which is not visually impacting.
As for the response time, both Paulo and I are working full time on this, or more generally in the governance space, as is Paulo's case, also working as a delegate. If we are awake and have access to the internet, we will respond to any bug reports as soon as possible. Fun fact, we had a bug yesterday which sent a couple hundred duplicated emails, stopped it ASAP, and pushed a fix one hour later with guardrails to hopefully never have that problem again - https://github.com/proposals-app/proposalsapp/commit/895b712fd62e113de3eac33db959f5accfb73763#diff-17a65976a69947acdec081e3fd62cba38e4e73afe0c7db7d4200ce4c4571d759
If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
Absolutely, no questions asked.
I think this is a great potential contribution. Especially the plugin that shows the votes per forum poster. The $175 per hour charge is way too expensive as that equates to over a salary of $360k per year. Thats too expensive for the DAO.
Your proposals app however is very cool. I think if you applied for funding for that app it’d probably do much better than this proposal.
Paulo,
Thinking of the DAO as a source of inspiration for experimentation is one of the things I’m most interested in. With programmable money and now programmable, and even “gameable” voting, I believe our focus should be on making everything more programmatic, since that immediately enables scalability. That may sound blunt, but if humanity’s path is toward agentic governance and AI-powered societies, why are we still prioritizing purely visual features? I support the spirit of this proposal, but I’d suggest pivoting toward data: the forum needs to provide an SDK of data-driven analytics tools, and given the growing interest in agentic governance, also tools that let governance agents ingest data natively for this purpose. A few examples:
Paulo,
Thinking of the DAO as a source of inspiration for experimentation is one of the things I’m most interested in. With programmable money and now programmable, and even “gameable” voting, I believe our focus should be on making everything more programmatic, since that immediately enables scalability. That may sound blunt, but if humanity’s path is toward agentic governance and AI-powered societies, why are we still prioritizing purely visual features? I support the spirit of this proposal, but I’d suggest pivoting toward data: the forum needs to provide an SDK of data-driven analytics tools, and given the growing interest in agentic governance, also tools that let governance agents ingest data natively for this purpose. A few examples:
In conclusion, prioritizing data-driven tools over mere visual enhancements will better position the forum for a governance future grounded in data and deep analysis. I’d love to see more emphasis on this aspect in the proposal so that I can support it more openly.
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Hello and thank you for your support! I'll jump in on this question since it is a more technical one.
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports?
Hello and thank you for your support! I'll jump in on this question since it is a more technical one.
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports?
The simple answer to this question is our current uptime is 98.5%, as shown in our status page here - https://status.proposals.app.
We are not only self-hosting instead of using PaaS or cloud providers, but we choose to do it the hard way, on our own physical servers. This decision was part of our resiliency philosophy, and the main reason behind it is if we build it to run on a machine under a desk, and it is open source, then anyone will be able to run it on a machine under their desk if necessary. We are not fully there yet, but are committed to this goal. That comes with a cost though; getting four nines uptime with these constraints is incredibly difficult.
We had downtime in the past and we improved our infrastructure to mitigate it in the future by adding a VPS in the mix and changing the workloads orchestration. All the workloads can automatically migrate between any of the 3 servers we have in case one of them goes down. Our database cluster has replicas spread on all 3 servers and any of them can become a leader in case one of the servers goes down. We have hourly local backups of all VMs on fast storage, local archival backups in 2 locations, and daily database backups in an R2 bucket. There is always space to improve, but the problem with infrastructure resilience is you can only plan so much; there will be problems you didn't think of and you only figure it out when things go down.
When it comes to these specific forum integration features, as a fallback, we will make sure in case our APIs go down, they do not break anything in the forum and fail silently, in a way which is not visually impacting.
As for the response time, both Paulo and I are working full time on this, or more generally in the governance space, as is Paulo's case, also working as a delegate. If we are awake and have access to the internet, we will respond to any bug reports as soon as possible. Fun fact, we had a bug yesterday which sent a couple hundred duplicated emails, stopped it ASAP, and pushed a fix one hour later with guardrails to hopefully never have that problem again - https://github.com/proposals-app/proposalsapp/commit/895b712fd62e113de3eac33db959f5accfb73763#diff-17a65976a69947acdec081e3fd62cba38e4e73afe0c7db7d4200ce4c4571d759
If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
Absolutely, no questions asked.
I think this is a great potential contribution. Especially the plugin that shows the votes per forum poster. The $175 per hour charge is way too expensive as that equates to over a salary of $360k per year. Thats too expensive for the DAO.
Your proposals app however is very cool. I think if you applied for funding for that app it’d probably do much better than this proposal.
Paulo,
Thinking of the DAO as a source of inspiration for experimentation is one of the things I’m most interested in. With programmable money and now programmable, and even “gameable” voting, I believe our focus should be on making everything more programmatic, since that immediately enables scalability. That may sound blunt, but if humanity’s path is toward agentic governance and AI-powered societies, why are we still prioritizing purely visual features? I support the spirit of this proposal, but I’d suggest pivoting toward data: the forum needs to provide an SDK of data-driven analytics tools, and given the growing interest in agentic governance, also tools that let governance agents ingest data natively for this purpose. A few examples:
Paulo,
Thinking of the DAO as a source of inspiration for experimentation is one of the things I’m most interested in. With programmable money and now programmable, and even “gameable” voting, I believe our focus should be on making everything more programmatic, since that immediately enables scalability. That may sound blunt, but if humanity’s path is toward agentic governance and AI-powered societies, why are we still prioritizing purely visual features? I support the spirit of this proposal, but I’d suggest pivoting toward data: the forum needs to provide an SDK of data-driven analytics tools, and given the growing interest in agentic governance, also tools that let governance agents ingest data natively for this purpose. A few examples:
In conclusion, prioritizing data-driven tools over mere visual enhancements will better position the forum for a governance future grounded in data and deep analysis. I’d love to see more emphasis on this aspect in the proposal so that I can support it more openly.
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Also, we don't expect this number to go up, but quite the contrary.
Finally, I don't personally understand the comparison between a program that incentivizes +/- 25 contributors and a DAO tool, and while it can help create an argument for justifying funding, it seems like a nonsensical comparison.
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Also, we don't expect this number to go up, but quite the contrary.
Finally, I don't personally understand the comparison between a program that incentivizes +/- 25 contributors and a DAO tool, and while it can help create an argument for justifying funding, it seems like a nonsensical comparison.
This looks really cool and useful. It should be supported.
My 2 cents:
This looks really cool and useful. It should be supported.
My 2 cents:
Thanks for your proposal. It is obvious that the integration of the mentioned features into the forum will be very useful for delegates and tokenholders. Especially the proposal notification emails are really nice for tracking the proposals. However, there are some points that we are uncomfortable with. We think that most of the features are entry-level functionality and similar services can be provided at low costs. In addition, some of the mentioned features can already be controlled through other sites. (For example: Karma Dashboad for live voting, Snapshot and Tally for voting). We are aware that you want to create a better and more efficient user experience by integrating them into the forum and we appreciate your effort, but when the requested budget is compared to the suggested features, we think that this cost is too high. We think that especially the Maintenance and Hosting fee should be explained with a more detailed spending plan. We can say that we will approach the proposal positively if the requested budget is reduced to a more reasonable level.
ITU Governance, @harryvors
This looks really cool and useful. It should be supported.
My 2 cents:
This looks really cool and useful. It should be supported.
My 2 cents:
Thanks for your proposal. It is obvious that the integration of the mentioned features into the forum will be very useful for delegates and tokenholders. Especially the proposal notification emails are really nice for tracking the proposals. However, there are some points that we are uncomfortable with. We think that most of the features are entry-level functionality and similar services can be provided at low costs. In addition, some of the mentioned features can already be controlled through other sites. (For example: Karma Dashboad for live voting, Snapshot and Tally for voting). We are aware that you want to create a better and more efficient user experience by integrating them into the forum and we appreciate your effort, but when the requested budget is compared to the suggested features, we think that this cost is too high. We think that especially the Maintenance and Hosting fee should be explained with a more detailed spending plan. We can say that we will approach the proposal positively if the requested budget is reduced to a more reasonable level.
ITU Governance, @harryvors
Thank you for the proposal.
We agree that there should be more focus on supporting governance tooling. Disjointed governance is a pain point for a multitude of DAOs and is a significant barrier to entry for newcomers. Having said that, we'd recommend putting a pause on this proposal for now, for the following reasons:
Thank you for the proposal.
We agree that there should be more focus on supporting governance tooling. Disjointed governance is a pain point for a multitude of DAOs and is a significant barrier to entry for newcomers. Having said that, we'd recommend putting a pause on this proposal for now, for the following reasons:
Wider strategic proposal needed.
Proposed cost structure.
Technical implementation restrictions.
This proposal might be a good opportunity for the DAO, including the AF, to start thinking about how to improve governance UX as part of a wider strategy. Accordingly, we believe this conversation should be moved to the 'Technical Discussion' category. It is important that, we avoid vendor lock-in via the governance process, and believe OpCo might be in a good position to help navigate the evolution of governance.
I know i’ m not a delegate, but I love this thing. Price seems right too being it is a custom software integration.
I’d buy this in a flash based on the cost value ratio.
This is exactly the kind of upgrade DAO governance needs.
From live vote visibility to contextual delegate power and real-time email alerts, these integrations by @proposals.appcould be game-changers for Arbitrum’s governance forum.
This is exactly the kind of upgrade DAO governance needs.
From live vote visibility to contextual delegate power and real-time email alerts, these integrations by @proposals.appcould be game-changers for Arbitrum’s governance forum.
Too often, critical proposals are buried in comment threads, and delegates lack the signal-to-noise clarity needed for real participation. These tools directly address that, making it easier to vote, engage, and understand who’s saying what and why it matters.
Open-source, community-aligned, and transparently priced, this is a solid step toward more accessible, composable, and resilient DAO infrastructure.
Looking forward to seeing the adoption and even more excited to see the impact.
Thank you for the proposal.
We agree that there should be more focus on supporting governance tooling. Disjointed governance is a pain point for a multitude of DAOs and is a significant barrier to entry for newcomers. Having said that, we'd recommend putting a pause on this proposal for now, for the following reasons:
Thank you for the proposal.
We agree that there should be more focus on supporting governance tooling. Disjointed governance is a pain point for a multitude of DAOs and is a significant barrier to entry for newcomers. Having said that, we'd recommend putting a pause on this proposal for now, for the following reasons:
Wider strategic proposal needed.
Proposed cost structure.
Technical implementation restrictions.
This proposal might be a good opportunity for the DAO, including the AF, to start thinking about how to improve governance UX as part of a wider strategy. Accordingly, we believe this conversation should be moved to the 'Technical Discussion' category. It is important that, we avoid vendor lock-in via the governance process, and believe OpCo might be in a good position to help navigate the evolution of governance.
I know i’ m not a delegate, but I love this thing. Price seems right too being it is a custom software integration.
I’d buy this in a flash based on the cost value ratio.
This is exactly the kind of upgrade DAO governance needs.
From live vote visibility to contextual delegate power and real-time email alerts, these integrations by @proposals.appcould be game-changers for Arbitrum’s governance forum.
This is exactly the kind of upgrade DAO governance needs.
From live vote visibility to contextual delegate power and real-time email alerts, these integrations by @proposals.appcould be game-changers for Arbitrum’s governance forum.
Too often, critical proposals are buried in comment threads, and delegates lack the signal-to-noise clarity needed for real participation. These tools directly address that, making it easier to vote, engage, and understand who’s saying what and why it matters.
Open-source, community-aligned, and transparently priced, this is a solid step toward more accessible, composable, and resilient DAO infrastructure.
Looking forward to seeing the adoption and even more excited to see the impact.
I voted FOR on this proposal. The author was willing to adapt the financial terms following the delegates' feedback and the cost presented in the vote was something I was willing to support for what it delivers.
We keep asking, “How do we widen the delegate bench?” The answer starts with lowering the cognitive cost of showing up. Live results + inbox nudges + who-is-who nametags move us from information scavenger hunt to one-stop governance dashboard.
Impact snapshot
We keep asking, “How do we widen the delegate bench?” The answer starts with lowering the cognitive cost of showing up. Live results + inbox nudges + who-is-who nametags move us from information scavenger hunt to one-stop governance dashboard.
Impact snapshot
| Concern | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Sticker-shock on $120 k/2 yrs | Pay yearly; DAO can cancel if KPIs under-deliver. |
| Potential bias from power tags | Toggle visibility + display Karma score for nuance. |
Publish a public Trello (or similar) with sprint demos & feedback threads so non-tech delegates can follow progress.
One Other note: I know this proposal did not pass but I'd love to see another version of it with a decreased cost where we can run a smaller experiment.
After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation decided to vote AGAINST (refrain from implementing these three integrations) on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation decided to vote AGAINST (refrain from implementing these three integrations) on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
We’d like to recognize the work Paulo and Andrei have put into proposals.app. One of the features we value most is the ability to view and track every phase of a proposal in one place—this significantly improves transparency and makes it easier to evaluate changes over time.
Nevertheless, we agree with other delegates that this is a nice-to-have feature with a high maintenance cost due to the business model proposed. As @JoJo pointed out, expanding the adoption across multiple DAOs could help distribute those costs and make the tool more affordable.
While recognizing the commitment, transparency, and prior contributions of Paulo and Andrei to the Arbitrum ecosystem, including governance participation, I have chosen to abstain on this proposal. The primary concern is budget justification: although the integrations offer meaningful UI enhancements, they overlap with existing tools (tally, snapshot - both which already have email notifications, although they do not work great) and imo do not currently deliver the kind of critical infrastructure impact that would clearly warrant a 60,000 $/y spend. Offtopic, but I think 1K per month in server costs is too big according to my benchmark and services I use, happy to chat, Paulo, to suggest alternatives if it helps. I believe there is potential value here, but for it to be proportional to the cost, the tool needs to either gain broader adoption, deliver clear delegate added value in comparison with existing solutions, or adjust the pricing accordingly. Several other delegates expressed concerns around sustainability, which I found to be valid. That said, I appreciate the transparent budgeting, and the team's very noticeable work within the DAO, in general. Paulo's addition on the ARB DAO has been extremely net positive imo.
Thank you all for the attention, feedback, and for voting!
The offchain vote has ended with the following results:
We kindly appreciate your input and will be evaluating our next steps.
In the meantime, make sure to enjoy all the functionality that we were proposing to integrate in this forum, and much more, in arbitrum.proposals.app
Thank you all! :folded_hands:
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting AGAINST the proposal.
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting AGAINST the proposal.
First, we would like to express our deep respect for Paulo and Andrei as builders within the Arbitrum ecosystem. We greatly value their commitment to supporting builders through hackathons, meetups, workshops, and other initiatives. We hope to keep them building on Arbitrum and supporting other builders in the space, as well as participating in governance. We hope they will find support from Arbitrum in these activities. Unfortunately, however, we don't believe this proposal is an appropriate venue for that support.
We appreciate the effort put into proposals.app, and we understand the challenge of building governance tooling. It is worth noting that Arbitrum has already demonstrated significant support for the creation of this application through the GovHack contest and a Questbook grant.
That said, we view the entire app as a quality-of-life improvement at best. It’s not critical infrastructure or tooling for the DAO, nor does it replace any of the existing tools that we are already using (Discourse, Snapshot, Tally). We agree with the @Arbitrum Foundation’s opinion that any changes to our governance stack should be considered holistically, taking into account governance experience as a whole, rather than through separate DAO-approved initiatives. We are already facing issues with that approach. For example, the initiative led by Tally to change governance contracts was approved by the DAO, but it did not receive enough attention from other stakeholders. Therefore, it is still not finished due to management issues.
Lastly, and most importantly, we do not see a path to sustainability for the app that doesn’t lead back to the DAO funding it again down the line (together with inevitable change requests whenever we change the mechanics of the DAO). We recognise that this constitutes a bigger problem which most open-source projects face, especially when it comes to public goods, and even more so for a niche market such as governance tooling and infrastructure. That said, we cannot justify funding a non-critical app without a solid plan to sustain itself in the future, unless we make a strategic decision as a DAO to treat this app as a strategic investment.
On a brighter note, perhaps Proposals.app can secure funding without a direct DAO vote. After all, this is a tool designed to improve delegates’ governance experience. Perhaps those delegates who find this app useful could consider dedicating part of their DIP rewards to cover the maintenance fee. That way, we wouldn’t need to allocate additional money, the funding would come from the exact place where it is supposed to create impact, and if proven successful, it could be considered as a part of the Arbitrum Governance stack in the future.
Thank you for your vote @Griff
We’ve been in talks with the @Arbitrum Foundation since the beginning of April, and to no avail. That’s why we moved this proposal to a DAO vote.
I'm abstaining from this proposal.
I really want to support you guys and I like that you said on a call that you will get feedback to build more, but $60k proposals should not take the entire DAO's attention for a vote. I see the value of having someone adding love to the forum, that's why I'm abstaining instead of voting against. But I believe the proposal should be made directly to the Arbitrum Foundation (who I believe manages the forum) or some other Grant Program, and not to the DAO.
We vote against this proposal.
We acknowledge the efforts made to adjust the proposal from a $200k two-year commitment down to $60k for one year, which indeed appears more reasonable. However, our fundamental concern remains unchanged regarding whether the proposed features (voting power tags, live votes, email notifications) genuinely deliver sufficient value relative to the cost. To reiterate clearly, we don't dispute the appropriateness of the proposed costs in terms of hosting and technical execution per se, but we are unconvinced about the overall benefit to governance participation.
The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, consensus, and ideation of various committee members.
Our only request was to reduce the ask for the application, which has been acknowledged by the team. The Proposals app is a great tool, and all three features mentioned would be valuable additions to our governance.
The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, consensus, and ideation of various committee members.
Our only request was to reduce the ask for the application, which has been acknowledged by the team. The Proposals app is a great tool, and all three features mentioned would be valuable additions to our governance.
We have voted in favour of the proposal.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, @paulofonseca — really appreciate how engaged you are and how you’re taking the time to clarify things for everyone. Given the significant cost reduction and the general sentiment, I’ve decided to change my mind and support the idea. It has potential to genuinely improve governance, and that’s something I want to get behind.
Especially relieved to see this isn’t based on a subscription model, and I got the impression that you’re doing this for the greater good — which I truly value.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, @paulofonseca — really appreciate how engaged you are and how you’re taking the time to clarify things for everyone. Given the significant cost reduction and the general sentiment, I’ve decided to change my mind and support the idea. It has potential to genuinely improve governance, and that’s something I want to get behind.
Especially relieved to see this isn’t based on a subscription model, and I got the impression that you’re doing this for the greater good — which I truly value.
Thanks.
Thank you guys for the proposal. Every proposal, whether it passes or not, contributes to strengthening our team!
Αfter carefully reading through the proposal and the related discussion, I find that my perspective aligns closely with @Camelot's position.
Thank you guys for the proposal. Every proposal, whether it passes or not, contributes to strengthening our team!
Αfter carefully reading through the proposal and the related discussion, I find that my perspective aligns closely with @Camelot's position.
More specifically, as I’ve previously mentioned, it’s important to consider the actual impact a proposal will have on the DAO. This is a good idea in concept, but it consumes funds rather than generating any. At the same time, although it is a helpful proposal, it is not likely to increase member participation in the DAO or strengthen their commitment to it.
I’m making this point not to diminish the value of the idea, but simply to clarify that it doesn’t align with the reasoning that has guided my voting decisions from the very beginning.
Therefore, I am voting Against.
(I believe that if this had been offered freely, without operational cost, it would have been seen as a helpful contribution. However, I can understand that it might not be possible to offer this for free, and I don’t expect that to be the case.)
gm, as I mentioned before, while I respect the initiative, I personally haven’t found much utility in the tool, so hard to justify the current price tag.
I fully agree with Camelot's perspective on what our focus should be as a DAO.
Voting AGAINST
I will be voting FOR on Snapshot. Despite sharing the same initial concerns from the likes of @Oni or @Curia regarding its overblown cost structure, I find Paulo's revised proposal and reduced budget to be much more palatable, at least relative to what it offers.
While I understand these are mostly minor UI changes and many claim they use other tools for these purposes (as do I), or simply would not get much out of it, the forum's current form is mostly unwelcoming to new participants and people even somewhat foreign to Arbitrum.
I will be voting FOR on Snapshot. Despite sharing the same initial concerns from the likes of @Oni or @Curia regarding its overblown cost structure, I find Paulo's revised proposal and reduced budget to be much more palatable, at least relative to what it offers.
While I understand these are mostly minor UI changes and many claim they use other tools for these purposes (as do I), or simply would not get much out of it, the forum's current form is mostly unwelcoming to new participants and people even somewhat foreign to Arbitrum.
Given that during yesterday's call he confirmed the team would to forgo development costs and this is still an open source project, the final cost seems relatively modest for us to test it out and potentially keep it even if it's under a different model than the proposed yearly subscription.
Lastly, I think @maxlomu's suggestion to add a Reddit-like spin on the forum could be immensely useful, and arguably could encourage more people to support this proposal.
Voting "Against"
This would be a really great quality of life feature, but I don't see it being worth the spend. Voting power by delegate + a live update at the top would be really nice to have, but I don't see how paying $60,000 a year for this is worth it. I also have to point out the email feature is arguably pointless, as there is already an email alert feature provided by the website.
Voting "Against"
This would be a really great quality of life feature, but I don't see it being worth the spend. Voting power by delegate + a live update at the top would be really nice to have, but I don't see how paying $60,000 a year for this is worth it. I also have to point out the email feature is arguably pointless, as there is already an email alert feature provided by the website.
I've shared this before, but I recommend the proposers reach out to the Arbitrum Foundation. (It is aknoweldged and appreciated that there you've already reached out to other funding iniatives). The DAO has already given the Arbitrum Foundation 250m additional ARB token (https://www.tally.xyz/gov/arbitrum/proposal/78608365328815179822381240433375943106975722017227920505592824878237374730465?govId=eip155:42161:0x789fC99093B09aD01C34DC7251D0C89ce743e5a4) and while I understand this is a strick DAO enhancedment, the AF did include in this proposal that part of their mission is "All agreements are designed to support projects that can grow the Arbitrum ecosystem and provide value to the ArbitrumDAO."
If a solution can be reached that allows for the ARB voting power + live feed at the top to be significantly cheaper, or a one time cost, I'd be for this.
I voted FOR on this proposal. The author was willing to adapt the financial terms following the delegates' feedback and the cost presented in the vote was something I was willing to support for what it delivers.
We keep asking, “How do we widen the delegate bench?” The answer starts with lowering the cognitive cost of showing up. Live results + inbox nudges + who-is-who nametags move us from information scavenger hunt to one-stop governance dashboard.
Impact snapshot
We keep asking, “How do we widen the delegate bench?” The answer starts with lowering the cognitive cost of showing up. Live results + inbox nudges + who-is-who nametags move us from information scavenger hunt to one-stop governance dashboard.
Impact snapshot
| Concern | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Sticker-shock on $120 k/2 yrs | Pay yearly; DAO can cancel if KPIs under-deliver. |
| Potential bias from power tags | Toggle visibility + display Karma score for nuance. |
Publish a public Trello (or similar) with sprint demos & feedback threads so non-tech delegates can follow progress.
One Other note: I know this proposal did not pass but I'd love to see another version of it with a decreased cost where we can run a smaller experiment.
After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation decided to vote AGAINST (refrain from implementing these three integrations) on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
After consideration, the @SEEDgov delegation decided to vote AGAINST (refrain from implementing these three integrations) on this proposal at the Snapshot Vote.
We’d like to recognize the work Paulo and Andrei have put into proposals.app. One of the features we value most is the ability to view and track every phase of a proposal in one place—this significantly improves transparency and makes it easier to evaluate changes over time.
Nevertheless, we agree with other delegates that this is a nice-to-have feature with a high maintenance cost due to the business model proposed. As @JoJo pointed out, expanding the adoption across multiple DAOs could help distribute those costs and make the tool more affordable.
While recognizing the commitment, transparency, and prior contributions of Paulo and Andrei to the Arbitrum ecosystem, including governance participation, I have chosen to abstain on this proposal. The primary concern is budget justification: although the integrations offer meaningful UI enhancements, they overlap with existing tools (tally, snapshot - both which already have email notifications, although they do not work great) and imo do not currently deliver the kind of critical infrastructure impact that would clearly warrant a 60,000 $/y spend. Offtopic, but I think 1K per month in server costs is too big according to my benchmark and services I use, happy to chat, Paulo, to suggest alternatives if it helps. I believe there is potential value here, but for it to be proportional to the cost, the tool needs to either gain broader adoption, deliver clear delegate added value in comparison with existing solutions, or adjust the pricing accordingly. Several other delegates expressed concerns around sustainability, which I found to be valid. That said, I appreciate the transparent budgeting, and the team's very noticeable work within the DAO, in general. Paulo's addition on the ARB DAO has been extremely net positive imo.
Thank you all for the attention, feedback, and for voting!
The offchain vote has ended with the following results:
We kindly appreciate your input and will be evaluating our next steps.
In the meantime, make sure to enjoy all the functionality that we were proposing to integrate in this forum, and much more, in arbitrum.proposals.app
Thank you all! :folded_hands:
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting AGAINST the proposal.
The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting AGAINST the proposal.
First, we would like to express our deep respect for Paulo and Andrei as builders within the Arbitrum ecosystem. We greatly value their commitment to supporting builders through hackathons, meetups, workshops, and other initiatives. We hope to keep them building on Arbitrum and supporting other builders in the space, as well as participating in governance. We hope they will find support from Arbitrum in these activities. Unfortunately, however, we don't believe this proposal is an appropriate venue for that support.
We appreciate the effort put into proposals.app, and we understand the challenge of building governance tooling. It is worth noting that Arbitrum has already demonstrated significant support for the creation of this application through the GovHack contest and a Questbook grant.
That said, we view the entire app as a quality-of-life improvement at best. It’s not critical infrastructure or tooling for the DAO, nor does it replace any of the existing tools that we are already using (Discourse, Snapshot, Tally). We agree with the @Arbitrum Foundation’s opinion that any changes to our governance stack should be considered holistically, taking into account governance experience as a whole, rather than through separate DAO-approved initiatives. We are already facing issues with that approach. For example, the initiative led by Tally to change governance contracts was approved by the DAO, but it did not receive enough attention from other stakeholders. Therefore, it is still not finished due to management issues.
Lastly, and most importantly, we do not see a path to sustainability for the app that doesn’t lead back to the DAO funding it again down the line (together with inevitable change requests whenever we change the mechanics of the DAO). We recognise that this constitutes a bigger problem which most open-source projects face, especially when it comes to public goods, and even more so for a niche market such as governance tooling and infrastructure. That said, we cannot justify funding a non-critical app without a solid plan to sustain itself in the future, unless we make a strategic decision as a DAO to treat this app as a strategic investment.
On a brighter note, perhaps Proposals.app can secure funding without a direct DAO vote. After all, this is a tool designed to improve delegates’ governance experience. Perhaps those delegates who find this app useful could consider dedicating part of their DIP rewards to cover the maintenance fee. That way, we wouldn’t need to allocate additional money, the funding would come from the exact place where it is supposed to create impact, and if proven successful, it could be considered as a part of the Arbitrum Governance stack in the future.
Thank you for your vote @Griff
We’ve been in talks with the @Arbitrum Foundation since the beginning of April, and to no avail. That’s why we moved this proposal to a DAO vote.
I'm abstaining from this proposal.
I really want to support you guys and I like that you said on a call that you will get feedback to build more, but $60k proposals should not take the entire DAO's attention for a vote. I see the value of having someone adding love to the forum, that's why I'm abstaining instead of voting against. But I believe the proposal should be made directly to the Arbitrum Foundation (who I believe manages the forum) or some other Grant Program, and not to the DAO.
We vote against this proposal.
We acknowledge the efforts made to adjust the proposal from a $200k two-year commitment down to $60k for one year, which indeed appears more reasonable. However, our fundamental concern remains unchanged regarding whether the proposed features (voting power tags, live votes, email notifications) genuinely deliver sufficient value relative to the cost. To reiterate clearly, we don't dispute the appropriateness of the proposed costs in terms of hosting and technical execution per se, but we are unconvinced about the overall benefit to governance participation.
The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, consensus, and ideation of various committee members.
Our only request was to reduce the ask for the application, which has been acknowledged by the team. The Proposals app is a great tool, and all three features mentioned would be valuable additions to our governance.
The following reflects the views of GMX’s Governance Committee, and is based on the combined research, evaluation, consensus, and ideation of various committee members.
Our only request was to reduce the ask for the application, which has been acknowledged by the team. The Proposals app is a great tool, and all three features mentioned would be valuable additions to our governance.
We have voted in favour of the proposal.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, @paulofonseca — really appreciate how engaged you are and how you’re taking the time to clarify things for everyone. Given the significant cost reduction and the general sentiment, I’ve decided to change my mind and support the idea. It has potential to genuinely improve governance, and that’s something I want to get behind.
Especially relieved to see this isn’t based on a subscription model, and I got the impression that you’re doing this for the greater good — which I truly value.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, @paulofonseca — really appreciate how engaged you are and how you’re taking the time to clarify things for everyone. Given the significant cost reduction and the general sentiment, I’ve decided to change my mind and support the idea. It has potential to genuinely improve governance, and that’s something I want to get behind.
Especially relieved to see this isn’t based on a subscription model, and I got the impression that you’re doing this for the greater good — which I truly value.
Thanks.
Thank you guys for the proposal. Every proposal, whether it passes or not, contributes to strengthening our team!
Αfter carefully reading through the proposal and the related discussion, I find that my perspective aligns closely with @Camelot's position.
Thank you guys for the proposal. Every proposal, whether it passes or not, contributes to strengthening our team!
Αfter carefully reading through the proposal and the related discussion, I find that my perspective aligns closely with @Camelot's position.
More specifically, as I’ve previously mentioned, it’s important to consider the actual impact a proposal will have on the DAO. This is a good idea in concept, but it consumes funds rather than generating any. At the same time, although it is a helpful proposal, it is not likely to increase member participation in the DAO or strengthen their commitment to it.
I’m making this point not to diminish the value of the idea, but simply to clarify that it doesn’t align with the reasoning that has guided my voting decisions from the very beginning.
Therefore, I am voting Against.
(I believe that if this had been offered freely, without operational cost, it would have been seen as a helpful contribution. However, I can understand that it might not be possible to offer this for free, and I don’t expect that to be the case.)
gm, as I mentioned before, while I respect the initiative, I personally haven’t found much utility in the tool, so hard to justify the current price tag.
I fully agree with Camelot's perspective on what our focus should be as a DAO.
Voting AGAINST
I will be voting FOR on Snapshot. Despite sharing the same initial concerns from the likes of @Oni or @Curia regarding its overblown cost structure, I find Paulo's revised proposal and reduced budget to be much more palatable, at least relative to what it offers.
While I understand these are mostly minor UI changes and many claim they use other tools for these purposes (as do I), or simply would not get much out of it, the forum's current form is mostly unwelcoming to new participants and people even somewhat foreign to Arbitrum.
I will be voting FOR on Snapshot. Despite sharing the same initial concerns from the likes of @Oni or @Curia regarding its overblown cost structure, I find Paulo's revised proposal and reduced budget to be much more palatable, at least relative to what it offers.
While I understand these are mostly minor UI changes and many claim they use other tools for these purposes (as do I), or simply would not get much out of it, the forum's current form is mostly unwelcoming to new participants and people even somewhat foreign to Arbitrum.
Given that during yesterday's call he confirmed the team would to forgo development costs and this is still an open source project, the final cost seems relatively modest for us to test it out and potentially keep it even if it's under a different model than the proposed yearly subscription.
Lastly, I think @maxlomu's suggestion to add a Reddit-like spin on the forum could be immensely useful, and arguably could encourage more people to support this proposal.
Voting "Against"
This would be a really great quality of life feature, but I don't see it being worth the spend. Voting power by delegate + a live update at the top would be really nice to have, but I don't see how paying $60,000 a year for this is worth it. I also have to point out the email feature is arguably pointless, as there is already an email alert feature provided by the website.
Voting "Against"
This would be a really great quality of life feature, but I don't see it being worth the spend. Voting power by delegate + a live update at the top would be really nice to have, but I don't see how paying $60,000 a year for this is worth it. I also have to point out the email feature is arguably pointless, as there is already an email alert feature provided by the website.
I've shared this before, but I recommend the proposers reach out to the Arbitrum Foundation. (It is aknoweldged and appreciated that there you've already reached out to other funding iniatives). The DAO has already given the Arbitrum Foundation 250m additional ARB token (https://www.tally.xyz/gov/arbitrum/proposal/78608365328815179822381240433375943106975722017227920505592824878237374730465?govId=eip155:42161:0x789fC99093B09aD01C34DC7251D0C89ce743e5a4) and while I understand this is a strick DAO enhancedment, the AF did include in this proposal that part of their mission is "All agreements are designed to support projects that can grow the Arbitrum ecosystem and provide value to the ArbitrumDAO."
If a solution can be reached that allows for the ARB voting power + live feed at the top to be significantly cheaper, or a one time cost, I'd be for this.
We vote against this proposal.
We acknowledge the efforts made to adjust the proposal from a $200k two-year commitment down to $60k for one year, which indeed appears more reasonable. However, our fundamental concern remains unchanged regarding whether the proposed features (voting power tags, live votes, email notifications) genuinely deliver sufficient value relative to the cost. To reiterate clearly, we don't dispute the appropriateness of the proposed costs in terms of hosting and technical execution per se, but we are unconvinced about the overall benefit to governance participation.
Rather than suggesting the cost itself is unreasonable, we understand this as a type of problem where the benefits the DAO gains from solving the issue do not easily balance with the cost required for the solution.
Furthermore, echoing the @Arbitrum 's critical observation, it seems essential to approach these enhancements from a broader, strategic perspective of desired governance UX and functionality, rather than as isolated improvements. Without a clear, long-term vision and alignment on the ideal user experience for governance, we risk investing in incremental solutions that might not substantially contribute to that vision. If these features indeed form a foundational part of a strategic, long-term UX plan, the investment could be justified. However, if these improvements merely represent piecemeal enhancements, alternative, cost-effective approaches might be preferable.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into this proposal and their commitment to improving Arbitrum’s governance tools. The features they’re suggesting—live vote displays, voting power tags, and email notifications—could definitely make the forum more user-friendly. That said, we have some concerns about the approach and why we’re leaning toward not supporting it in its current form.
First, we recently voted to establish an operational company (opco) to manage service provider relationships. We believe it would be more practical to leverage that structure for this project. A service agreement through the opco could offer greater flexibility and ensure ongoing support, rather than relying on a one-time development with a limited maintenance period.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into this proposal and their commitment to improving Arbitrum’s governance tools. The features they’re suggesting—live vote displays, voting power tags, and email notifications—could definitely make the forum more user-friendly. That said, we have some concerns about the approach and why we’re leaning toward not supporting it in its current form.
First, we recently voted to establish an operational company (opco) to manage service provider relationships. We believe it would be more practical to leverage that structure for this project. A service agreement through the opco could offer greater flexibility and ensure ongoing support, rather than relying on a one-time development with a limited maintenance period.
Second, we question whether custom development is the most efficient path forward. A license-based model, where the provider builds a product usable by multiple DAOs, could reduce our costs and support the provider’s long-term viability. Under the current plan, we’d pay $60,000 for a custom solution that’s then open-sourced, allowing other DAOs to benefit without sharing the expense. This feels like an uneven burden on Arbitrum.
Finally, while we’re all for open-source tools, immediately open-sourcing the code might weaken the provider’s motivation to maintain or enhance it after the one-year period. A balanced approach—like licensing the core product and open-sourcing certain components—could better align community benefits with the provider’s incentives.
For these reasons, we’re not in favor of the proposal as it stands. We’d prefer exploring a service agreement via the opco or a license-based model that ensures sustainable support and fair cost distribution. Thanks again to the team for their work—we’re happy to discuss ways to refine this idea for everyone’s benefit.
I have been quite close through the year to the app made by Paulo and Andrei. I was one of the judges at govhack 2024 that awarded proposals.app with the first price, then during Questbook season 2 I approved a grant to continue the development.
Useless to say, I think that the application is well done and serves a value and a purpose. I was also quite impressed by the milestone's videos that Paulo released over time, very detailed.
I have been quite close through the year to the app made by Paulo and Andrei. I was one of the judges at govhack 2024 that awarded proposals.app with the first price, then during Questbook season 2 I approved a grant to continue the development.
Useless to say, I think that the application is well done and serves a value and a purpose. I was also quite impressed by the milestone's videos that Paulo released over time, very detailed.
That said, I am voting "abstain" from this proposal. The reason is simple: to me, the cost proposed even after the reduction is wrong because the proposed model is wrong. Governance is not something we only have in Arbitrum but in several DAOs, which would all benefit from this integration. This would be, in my opinion, the right way to scale down costs: a $20k integration fee per year on five different daos would bring the team to the price tag initially proposed, and would be potentially easier to obtain. Understanding that, before upselling, you want to have a functioning product, it could have made sense to start here, in Arbitrum (likely at a loss initially) and then expand over time. I do understand both the attachment and the desire from Paulo to stay exclusive here and I can also appreciate that; but unfortunately this feeling is in my opinion not compatible with the product. As a side note, I don't think we are currently in a point of the life cycle of the DAO in which we want to necessarily focus on further governance tooling, but this point is currently secondary compared to the evaluation above.
Camelot has voted “against” this proposal. We are builders first and foremost, so we want to be mindful of the efforts of Andrej and Paulo. We do appreciate experiments in Arbitrum and we do appreciate the effort of moving from an early stage to a full-fledged product. That said, we don’t currently see enough value in the deliverables proposed nor in the price tag associated. All the updates are “nice to have” updates, that can surely improve the life of delegates, but are not meaningful enough to justify an initiative financed by the DAO. At the same time, we do believe that even the new cost, $60k for one year compared to the previous $100k a year for a total of $200k over two years, is still excessive, despite the 40% reduction. Finally, we think the DAO currently should be focused not on governance matters or governance tooling, but on approaching a competitive landscape that is slowly eating away the advantage Arbitrum has built over time. The focus of the DAO should be on increasing activity on the chain, volume, and daily active users.
After rereading past comments from Paulo, we guess that going through the OpCo won't be considered, and that's understandable. We maintain the 2nd and 3th points though.
We’re supporting this proposal because the updated version presents a more reasonable cost structure, making the value it offers clearer and better aligned with the scope of work. The proposed features may not be essential, but they can improve accessibility, transparency, and engagement for delegates and tokenholders using the forum. While we still have some concerns about the voting power tags, we appreciate @paulofonseca openness to feedback and his willingness to consider alternative ways of providing context. With a clearer plan and more thoughtful pricing, this revised proposal feels like a worthwhile and low-risk step toward enhancing Arbitrum’s governance tooling.
Thank you for your feedback @Chris_Areta
We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords.
This is something on our roadmap and that we even already prototyped a few months ago. =)
Thank you for your feedback @Chris_Areta
We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords.
This is something on our roadmap and that we even already prototyped a few months ago. =)
Regarding the cost of the proposal, we changed the proposal to be quite cheaper than before, from $206K USD to $60K USD as detailed here.
Thank you for your feedback @karpatkey
We just reduced the cost quite significantly, from $206K USD to $60K USD as detailed here.
Thank you for pointing this out @Gianluca
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Thank you for pointing this out @Gianluca
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
But I don't think this is correct. We need to include the fixed costs being paid to SeedGov and Karma for operating and building tooling for the DIP. Also, picking a 3 months time frame for the average is cherry picking data, since the DIP was spending above $200K USD a month for its first 3 months, and before the Voting Power penalization rule was put into place.
I don’t personally understand the comparison between a program that incentivizes +/- 25 contributors and a DAO tool, and while it can help create an argument for justifying funding, it seems like a nonsensical comparison.
To be fair, Entropy used the DIP as an example of a current DAO expenditure that should cater for this problem, not us. I was just pointing out that the discrepancy in price between what we were proposing and what the DAO is currently spending is quite big.
Either way, we reduced the cost of this proposal quite significantly from $206K USD to $60K USD for 1 year of maintenance, as detailed here.
Thank you for your feedback @Curia
Thank you for your feedback @Curia
We've received contradictory feedback from delegates on this point, which is usually a sign that it should exist and we should experiment launching it and get real user feedback from real usage.
We also think that, as you suggest, that feature could have other tags, that bring even more context about each delegate. So thank you for this suggestion, we will maybe implement it as part of the maintenance plan we are proposing.
Will the banner automatically update to show the final result once voting closes? Currently, if we were to do this, it would required the forum admin to manually tag proposals as “Passed” or “Failed” in Discourse. If we could automate this process, that would help improve each proposal’s forum status clarity.
Also, as detailed here, we've reduced the cost of this proposal significantly, from $206K USD to $60K USD.
Thank you for you vote @danielo !
delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units
Thank you for you vote @danielo !
delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units
You might have a point here, but let's hope that doesn't happen. Or at least not at the expense of decentralization, transparency, and delegate engagement and participation. As I pointed out previously here.
We are building proposals.app so that it is easier for delegates to get more involved and participate even more, not less. We believe this is crucial to bring more experimentation into DAO governance, and ultimately, for decentralized governance and DAOs to succeed.
Thank you for this feedback @Jose_StableLab I think you really hit the main issue in here
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team’s long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
Thank you @Federico for your feedback!
I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
I often struggle with basics like finding out which proposals are live, when voting starts or ends, and which ones have already closed.
We indeed reduced the cost significantly, from $206k USD to $60k USD, and now we are only charging for maintenance to evolve these features according to Arbitrum DAO delegates needs, over the course of 1 year.
I'm voting AGAINST
The new price point is reasonable and the features could be useful for delegates. That being said, delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units. As such, I believe now is not the right time to invest in delegate tooling.
Thanks team for putting this proposal forward and for the effort to improve the governance experience.
I agree that jumping between Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally isn’t ideal. That said, I actually like that they’re separate, as it helps keep each stage of governance clear, and don't see myself wasting much time because of it. I played around with the current proposals.app product and found the UX a bit confusing, especially as someone already familiar with the existing setup. I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
Thanks team for putting this proposal forward and for the effort to improve the governance experience.
I agree that jumping between Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally isn’t ideal. That said, I actually like that they’re separate, as it helps keep each stage of governance clear, and don't see myself wasting much time because of it. I played around with the current proposals.app product and found the UX a bit confusing, especially as someone already familiar with the existing setup. I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
I also appreciate the open-source, non-profit approach. But in my experience, open-source tools run by non-profits often struggle to match the quality of those run by for-profit ones – mostly because they can’t pay top engineers and don’t face the same market-driven pressure to iterate, ship fast, stay reliable. Over time, that usually leads to lower usage and eventual shutdown, which makes me cautious about funding this initiative.
This raises the question: is proposals.app aiming to replace existing tools, or simply serve as a fallback in case they go down? I do see some value in the latter, especially after incidents like the recent Safe outage. But if that’s the goal, the focus should be on core reliability, not on extra features like email notifications (which delegates already get from other tools).
Lastly, proposals.app already got a $43K grant from the DAO via Questbook Season 2. Why isn’t this follow-on work going through the same grants process instead of a governance vote?
Thank you Paulo for putting up this proposal.
We have voted Abstain in Snapshot to reflect our dual stance on this proposal:
In favour:
Thank you Paulo for putting up this proposal.
We have voted Abstain in Snapshot to reflect our dual stance on this proposal:
In favour:
Against:
While we believe the scope of this proposal is valuable, we also recognize that it remains narrow in comparison to the wider set of governance infrastructure needs facing Arbitrum DAO. Recently, the Arbitrum Foundation has outlined a broader vision where high-level governance infrastructure, such as governance tooling, would eventually fall under the oversight and coordination of Arbitrum Aligned Entities (AAEs). We fully support this direction, and encourage that proposals like this one be considered as part of a more comprehensive governance tooling initiative. This would allow the DAO to better assess interdependencies, ensure long-term maintenance and alignment, and avoid fragmented tooling developments across isolated efforts.
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team's long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
I just voted FOR this proposal. As crypto goes mainstream it's critical to make DAO participation accessible. For newcomers unfamiliar with crypto, like an RWA player for instance, navigating the Arbitrum DAO is challenging due to fragmented information across platforms like the Forum, Snapshot, and Tally.
This proposal effectively streamlines the process, consolidates resources, and significantly enhances the user experience for anyone looking to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb) and @Euphoria, based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb) and @Euphoria, based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
First, we want to thank @paulofonseca and the team for putting forward this thoughtful proposal and for always working to improve the user and delegate experience in Arbitrum DAO.
As stated in the proposal:
Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders.
Most of us who have been active in the DAO for some time are already used to switching between different platforms, the forum for discussion, Snapshot for off-chain voting, and Tally for on-chain voting. While this works for experienced delegates, for new users and delegates joining governance in the future, having key information like live voting status visible directly in the forum could make participation smoother and timelier. We believe this can help grow voter participation over time.
however we still believe that displaying raw voting weight could unintentionally cause smaller delegates to be ignored, even when they share valuable ideas.
Regarding the Voting Power Tags, we echo the point raised by @Curia. We agree that exploring alternative indicators, like badges, to show a delegate’s activity might be more balanced and avoid unintentional bias.
On the Proposal Notification Emails, we note the proposal says:
Provide a way for forum visitors to subscribe to email notifications, receiving an email every time a new discussion is started, when an offchain or onchain vote begins, and when its voting period is nearing completion.
Personally, I use the existing notifications on Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally, and they have been working well for me. It would be helpful to know if the team has done any surveys or has data on how many delegates feel this additional email feature is needed. If the usage is likely to be low, the DAO should reconsider funding this part at the proposed cost.
For the budget, while we appreciate the cost revision and the open-source commitment, we would be happy to see the payment structured in milestones instead of a single upfront amount. Each feature could be delivered as a milestone with payment on completion, and the 12-month maintenance could be split into quarterly payments. This helps the DAO track progress easily and keeps delivery transparent.
Overall, we believe in the team and trust they will deliver at their best. Our vote is in favour because we see these improvements helping new contributors and delegates by lowering barriers and encouraging wider participation. We encourage the team to work on milestone-based payments rather than upfront payments and to revisit the voter tag feature and proposal notification emails with clear data on delegate demand to justify its cost before the tally voting.
I will be voting FOR this proposal after the costs adjustment. I believe the overall costs of ~$60k are extremely small compared to the total amounts of funds that were waisted by the STIP, LTIPP and other efforts that have not amounted in anything of value for Arbitrum overall.
PS. Paulo and Andrei have proved multiple times they are value aligned and have done many things for Arbitrum.
We vote against this proposal.
We acknowledge the efforts made to adjust the proposal from a $200k two-year commitment down to $60k for one year, which indeed appears more reasonable. However, our fundamental concern remains unchanged regarding whether the proposed features (voting power tags, live votes, email notifications) genuinely deliver sufficient value relative to the cost. To reiterate clearly, we don't dispute the appropriateness of the proposed costs in terms of hosting and technical execution per se, but we are unconvinced about the overall benefit to governance participation.
Rather than suggesting the cost itself is unreasonable, we understand this as a type of problem where the benefits the DAO gains from solving the issue do not easily balance with the cost required for the solution.
Furthermore, echoing the @Arbitrum 's critical observation, it seems essential to approach these enhancements from a broader, strategic perspective of desired governance UX and functionality, rather than as isolated improvements. Without a clear, long-term vision and alignment on the ideal user experience for governance, we risk investing in incremental solutions that might not substantially contribute to that vision. If these features indeed form a foundational part of a strategic, long-term UX plan, the investment could be justified. However, if these improvements merely represent piecemeal enhancements, alternative, cost-effective approaches might be preferable.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into this proposal and their commitment to improving Arbitrum’s governance tools. The features they’re suggesting—live vote displays, voting power tags, and email notifications—could definitely make the forum more user-friendly. That said, we have some concerns about the approach and why we’re leaning toward not supporting it in its current form.
First, we recently voted to establish an operational company (opco) to manage service provider relationships. We believe it would be more practical to leverage that structure for this project. A service agreement through the opco could offer greater flexibility and ensure ongoing support, rather than relying on a one-time development with a limited maintenance period.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into this proposal and their commitment to improving Arbitrum’s governance tools. The features they’re suggesting—live vote displays, voting power tags, and email notifications—could definitely make the forum more user-friendly. That said, we have some concerns about the approach and why we’re leaning toward not supporting it in its current form.
First, we recently voted to establish an operational company (opco) to manage service provider relationships. We believe it would be more practical to leverage that structure for this project. A service agreement through the opco could offer greater flexibility and ensure ongoing support, rather than relying on a one-time development with a limited maintenance period.
Second, we question whether custom development is the most efficient path forward. A license-based model, where the provider builds a product usable by multiple DAOs, could reduce our costs and support the provider’s long-term viability. Under the current plan, we’d pay $60,000 for a custom solution that’s then open-sourced, allowing other DAOs to benefit without sharing the expense. This feels like an uneven burden on Arbitrum.
Finally, while we’re all for open-source tools, immediately open-sourcing the code might weaken the provider’s motivation to maintain or enhance it after the one-year period. A balanced approach—like licensing the core product and open-sourcing certain components—could better align community benefits with the provider’s incentives.
For these reasons, we’re not in favor of the proposal as it stands. We’d prefer exploring a service agreement via the opco or a license-based model that ensures sustainable support and fair cost distribution. Thanks again to the team for their work—we’re happy to discuss ways to refine this idea for everyone’s benefit.
I have been quite close through the year to the app made by Paulo and Andrei. I was one of the judges at govhack 2024 that awarded proposals.app with the first price, then during Questbook season 2 I approved a grant to continue the development.
Useless to say, I think that the application is well done and serves a value and a purpose. I was also quite impressed by the milestone's videos that Paulo released over time, very detailed.
I have been quite close through the year to the app made by Paulo and Andrei. I was one of the judges at govhack 2024 that awarded proposals.app with the first price, then during Questbook season 2 I approved a grant to continue the development.
Useless to say, I think that the application is well done and serves a value and a purpose. I was also quite impressed by the milestone's videos that Paulo released over time, very detailed.
That said, I am voting "abstain" from this proposal. The reason is simple: to me, the cost proposed even after the reduction is wrong because the proposed model is wrong. Governance is not something we only have in Arbitrum but in several DAOs, which would all benefit from this integration. This would be, in my opinion, the right way to scale down costs: a $20k integration fee per year on five different daos would bring the team to the price tag initially proposed, and would be potentially easier to obtain. Understanding that, before upselling, you want to have a functioning product, it could have made sense to start here, in Arbitrum (likely at a loss initially) and then expand over time. I do understand both the attachment and the desire from Paulo to stay exclusive here and I can also appreciate that; but unfortunately this feeling is in my opinion not compatible with the product. As a side note, I don't think we are currently in a point of the life cycle of the DAO in which we want to necessarily focus on further governance tooling, but this point is currently secondary compared to the evaluation above.
Camelot has voted “against” this proposal. We are builders first and foremost, so we want to be mindful of the efforts of Andrej and Paulo. We do appreciate experiments in Arbitrum and we do appreciate the effort of moving from an early stage to a full-fledged product. That said, we don’t currently see enough value in the deliverables proposed nor in the price tag associated. All the updates are “nice to have” updates, that can surely improve the life of delegates, but are not meaningful enough to justify an initiative financed by the DAO. At the same time, we do believe that even the new cost, $60k for one year compared to the previous $100k a year for a total of $200k over two years, is still excessive, despite the 40% reduction. Finally, we think the DAO currently should be focused not on governance matters or governance tooling, but on approaching a competitive landscape that is slowly eating away the advantage Arbitrum has built over time. The focus of the DAO should be on increasing activity on the chain, volume, and daily active users.
After rereading past comments from Paulo, we guess that going through the OpCo won't be considered, and that's understandable. We maintain the 2nd and 3th points though.
We’re supporting this proposal because the updated version presents a more reasonable cost structure, making the value it offers clearer and better aligned with the scope of work. The proposed features may not be essential, but they can improve accessibility, transparency, and engagement for delegates and tokenholders using the forum. While we still have some concerns about the voting power tags, we appreciate @paulofonseca openness to feedback and his willingness to consider alternative ways of providing context. With a clearer plan and more thoughtful pricing, this revised proposal feels like a worthwhile and low-risk step toward enhancing Arbitrum’s governance tooling.
Thank you for your feedback @Chris_Areta
We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords.
This is something on our roadmap and that we even already prototyped a few months ago. =)
Thank you for your feedback @Chris_Areta
We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords.
This is something on our roadmap and that we even already prototyped a few months ago. =)
Regarding the cost of the proposal, we changed the proposal to be quite cheaper than before, from $206K USD to $60K USD as detailed here.
Thank you for your feedback @karpatkey
We just reduced the cost quite significantly, from $206K USD to $60K USD as detailed here.
Thank you for pointing this out @Gianluca
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Thank you for pointing this out @Gianluca
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
But I don't think this is correct. We need to include the fixed costs being paid to SeedGov and Karma for operating and building tooling for the DIP. Also, picking a 3 months time frame for the average is cherry picking data, since the DIP was spending above $200K USD a month for its first 3 months, and before the Voting Power penalization rule was put into place.
I don’t personally understand the comparison between a program that incentivizes +/- 25 contributors and a DAO tool, and while it can help create an argument for justifying funding, it seems like a nonsensical comparison.
To be fair, Entropy used the DIP as an example of a current DAO expenditure that should cater for this problem, not us. I was just pointing out that the discrepancy in price between what we were proposing and what the DAO is currently spending is quite big.
Either way, we reduced the cost of this proposal quite significantly from $206K USD to $60K USD for 1 year of maintenance, as detailed here.
Thank you for your feedback @Curia
Thank you for your feedback @Curia
We've received contradictory feedback from delegates on this point, which is usually a sign that it should exist and we should experiment launching it and get real user feedback from real usage.
We also think that, as you suggest, that feature could have other tags, that bring even more context about each delegate. So thank you for this suggestion, we will maybe implement it as part of the maintenance plan we are proposing.
Will the banner automatically update to show the final result once voting closes? Currently, if we were to do this, it would required the forum admin to manually tag proposals as “Passed” or “Failed” in Discourse. If we could automate this process, that would help improve each proposal’s forum status clarity.
Also, as detailed here, we've reduced the cost of this proposal significantly, from $206K USD to $60K USD.
Thank you for you vote @danielo !
delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units
Thank you for you vote @danielo !
delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units
You might have a point here, but let's hope that doesn't happen. Or at least not at the expense of decentralization, transparency, and delegate engagement and participation. As I pointed out previously here.
We are building proposals.app so that it is easier for delegates to get more involved and participate even more, not less. We believe this is crucial to bring more experimentation into DAO governance, and ultimately, for decentralized governance and DAOs to succeed.
Thank you for this feedback @Jose_StableLab I think you really hit the main issue in here
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team’s long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
Thank you @Federico for your feedback!
I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
I often struggle with basics like finding out which proposals are live, when voting starts or ends, and which ones have already closed.
We indeed reduced the cost significantly, from $206k USD to $60k USD, and now we are only charging for maintenance to evolve these features according to Arbitrum DAO delegates needs, over the course of 1 year.
I'm voting AGAINST
The new price point is reasonable and the features could be useful for delegates. That being said, delegates voting is likely to become a lot less significant as more and more decisions move to operational units. As such, I believe now is not the right time to invest in delegate tooling.
Thanks team for putting this proposal forward and for the effort to improve the governance experience.
I agree that jumping between Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally isn’t ideal. That said, I actually like that they’re separate, as it helps keep each stage of governance clear, and don't see myself wasting much time because of it. I played around with the current proposals.app product and found the UX a bit confusing, especially as someone already familiar with the existing setup. I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
Thanks team for putting this proposal forward and for the effort to improve the governance experience.
I agree that jumping between Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally isn’t ideal. That said, I actually like that they’re separate, as it helps keep each stage of governance clear, and don't see myself wasting much time because of it. I played around with the current proposals.app product and found the UX a bit confusing, especially as someone already familiar with the existing setup. I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
I also appreciate the open-source, non-profit approach. But in my experience, open-source tools run by non-profits often struggle to match the quality of those run by for-profit ones – mostly because they can’t pay top engineers and don’t face the same market-driven pressure to iterate, ship fast, stay reliable. Over time, that usually leads to lower usage and eventual shutdown, which makes me cautious about funding this initiative.
This raises the question: is proposals.app aiming to replace existing tools, or simply serve as a fallback in case they go down? I do see some value in the latter, especially after incidents like the recent Safe outage. But if that’s the goal, the focus should be on core reliability, not on extra features like email notifications (which delegates already get from other tools).
Lastly, proposals.app already got a $43K grant from the DAO via Questbook Season 2. Why isn’t this follow-on work going through the same grants process instead of a governance vote?
Thank you Paulo for putting up this proposal.
We have voted Abstain in Snapshot to reflect our dual stance on this proposal:
In favour:
Thank you Paulo for putting up this proposal.
We have voted Abstain in Snapshot to reflect our dual stance on this proposal:
In favour:
Against:
While we believe the scope of this proposal is valuable, we also recognize that it remains narrow in comparison to the wider set of governance infrastructure needs facing Arbitrum DAO. Recently, the Arbitrum Foundation has outlined a broader vision where high-level governance infrastructure, such as governance tooling, would eventually fall under the oversight and coordination of Arbitrum Aligned Entities (AAEs). We fully support this direction, and encourage that proposals like this one be considered as part of a more comprehensive governance tooling initiative. This would allow the DAO to better assess interdependencies, ensure long-term maintenance and alignment, and avoid fragmented tooling developments across isolated efforts.
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team's long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
I just voted FOR this proposal. As crypto goes mainstream it's critical to make DAO participation accessible. For newcomers unfamiliar with crypto, like an RWA player for instance, navigating the Arbitrum DAO is challenging due to fragmented information across platforms like the Forum, Snapshot, and Tally.
This proposal effectively streamlines the process, consolidates resources, and significantly enhances the user experience for anyone looking to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb) and @Euphoria, based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb) and @Euphoria, based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.
We are voting FOR this proposal in the Snapshot voting.
First, we want to thank @paulofonseca and the team for putting forward this thoughtful proposal and for always working to improve the user and delegate experience in Arbitrum DAO.
As stated in the proposal:
Currently, DAO governance remains a disjointed, messy, and confusing experience for delegates and tokenholders.
Most of us who have been active in the DAO for some time are already used to switching between different platforms, the forum for discussion, Snapshot for off-chain voting, and Tally for on-chain voting. While this works for experienced delegates, for new users and delegates joining governance in the future, having key information like live voting status visible directly in the forum could make participation smoother and timelier. We believe this can help grow voter participation over time.
however we still believe that displaying raw voting weight could unintentionally cause smaller delegates to be ignored, even when they share valuable ideas.
Regarding the Voting Power Tags, we echo the point raised by @Curia. We agree that exploring alternative indicators, like badges, to show a delegate’s activity might be more balanced and avoid unintentional bias.
On the Proposal Notification Emails, we note the proposal says:
Provide a way for forum visitors to subscribe to email notifications, receiving an email every time a new discussion is started, when an offchain or onchain vote begins, and when its voting period is nearing completion.
Personally, I use the existing notifications on Discourse, Snapshot, and Tally, and they have been working well for me. It would be helpful to know if the team has done any surveys or has data on how many delegates feel this additional email feature is needed. If the usage is likely to be low, the DAO should reconsider funding this part at the proposed cost.
For the budget, while we appreciate the cost revision and the open-source commitment, we would be happy to see the payment structured in milestones instead of a single upfront amount. Each feature could be delivered as a milestone with payment on completion, and the 12-month maintenance could be split into quarterly payments. This helps the DAO track progress easily and keeps delivery transparent.
Overall, we believe in the team and trust they will deliver at their best. Our vote is in favour because we see these improvements helping new contributors and delegates by lowering barriers and encouraging wider participation. We encourage the team to work on milestone-based payments rather than upfront payments and to revisit the voter tag feature and proposal notification emails with clear data on delegate demand to justify its cost before the tally voting.
I will be voting FOR this proposal after the costs adjustment. I believe the overall costs of ~$60k are extremely small compared to the total amounts of funds that were waisted by the STIP, LTIPP and other efforts that have not amounted in anything of value for Arbitrum overall.
PS. Paulo and Andrei have proved multiple times they are value aligned and have done many things for Arbitrum.
Thank you for this feedback @Jose_StableLab I think you really hit the main issue in here
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team’s long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
As we've said before, in our opinion, governance tooling has no viable and sustainable business model by itself. So the best way to ensure governance tools are resilient and will be here for the long term, is to make them fuly open-source, so that if and when a particular team stops maintaining those tools for any reason, any other team can swoop in and continue the work.
This forces governance tooling projects to either raise VC money and burn it without giving their investor the returns they were expecting, or go towards the open-source, charge for maintenance path of sustainability.
proposals.app will continue to exist, and evolve, and add more and more features that help delegates and tokenholders lives. we aim to become the first fully open-source, all-in-one governance tool for DAOs. and to be the only app delegates need to use to do their jobs.
Thank you @Federico for your feedback!
I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
this is good feedback and we will be improving this soon. We also got this feedback from other delegates. thank you!
open-source tools run by non-profits often struggle to match the quality of those run by for-profit ones – mostly because they can’t pay top engineers and don’t face the same market-driven pressure to iterate, ship fast, stay reliable. Over time, that usually leads to lower usage and eventual shutdown, which makes me cautious about funding this initiative.
I often struggle with basics like finding out which proposals are live, when voting starts or ends, and which ones have already closed.
Agree! Our email notifications solve this issue without users even needing to come to the forum. We will also propose some forum customizations to improve the forum accessibility, design and findability. Also, our proposed Live Votes feature helps with this issue.
I also want to flag some discomfort with comments suggesting that voting power tags will help filter out “noise” from low-VP delegates.
Also, just wanted to point out that our proposal doesn't include any kind of filtering or censoring or comments. Just adding more contextual information to each comment, by showing the Voting Power of each delegate in the forum.
This also feels like a subscription model, which I’m not a big fan of — especially for a forum that’s already lagging behind. Personally, I’d prefer one-off investments that give the DAO/Arbitrum long-term control and ownership.
I just voted FOR this proposal. As crypto goes mainstream it's critical to make DAO participation accessible. For newcomers unfamiliar with crypto, like an RWA player for instance, navigating the Arbitrum DAO is challenging due to fragmented information across platforms like the Forum, Snapshot, and Tally.
This proposal effectively streamlines the process, consolidates resources, and significantly enhances the user experience for anyone looking to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
@paulofonseca is a dedicated Arbitrum builder focused on the DAO's long-term success. I appreciate how the proposal's timeline and budget were adjusted based on delegate feedback. With fierce competition among L2 DAOs, Arbitrum cannot afford to miss this opportunity to improve its governance flow.
We believe that anything that improves how people engage on the forums until an OpCo is fully established is a net positive for the ecosystem. All three proposed features are valuable live voting, voting power tags, and proposal notification emails.
Paulo has been a long-time contributor to the DAO and previously received a Questbook grant for the Proposals app.
We believe that anything that improves how people engage on the forums until an OpCo is fully established is a net positive for the ecosystem. All three proposed features are valuable live voting, voting power tags, and proposal notification emails.
Paulo has been a long-time contributor to the DAO and previously received a Questbook grant for the Proposals app.
That said, while these features would be very helpful, we have a few concerns. The email notifications could become a bit noisy over time, and the overall cost for building and maintaining these features feels too high. We agree with AF’s suggestion that payments should be made in stages not all upfront to ensure accountability.
We also see Paulo has reduced down the cost significantly which is a positive signal!
Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for putting this proposal together and for all the effort behind it. Sharing some thoughts after going through it:
Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for putting this proposal together and for all the effort behind it. Sharing some thoughts after going through it:
Thanks again for the effort.
Voted FOR.
I believe in paying good people — they tend to exceed expectations. Paulo and his team are exactly that. Also think that these tools, while simple, add great context and accessibility.
for the onchain vote, yes. just as the Arbitrum Treasury governor smart contract specifies.
I voted yes on the snapshot. Its really not that much money for the amount of dev work involved and if it increases coordination a bit its worth it. It's kind of nice to have multiple backup interfaces for voting and tracking data. worth it IMO.
…with more than 3% quorum, right?
:upside_down_face:
Voted FOR.
Really useful additions and at $5k a month is very cheap from an IT infra spend for this kind of complexity. This is a no-brainer.
Andrei and Paulo are master craftsmen with their work, Arbitrum would do well to back them, keep them in the Arbitrum tent iterating and further innovating govtech over the coming years.
Please vote here: https://snapshot.box/#/s:arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x38663c36b26252acff6c6ca43663167858f51f960235dc0441bd2ad4a8f66fb1
And thank you to fellow builder @limes for the support in posting this offchain vote on snapshot!
EDIT: I've obviously voted Abstain in this proposal.
Hey there, everybody! Thank you all for your feedback!
We have significantly updated the proposal, and now the cost is only ~29% of what was initially proposed — just a simple subscription-like fee of $60,000 USD for 1 year of maintenance and hosting for the three proposed feature integrations.
Hey there, everybody! Thank you all for your feedback!
We have significantly updated the proposal, and now the cost is only ~29% of what was initially proposed — just a simple subscription-like fee of $60,000 USD for 1 year of maintenance and hosting for the three proposed feature integrations.
We decided to reduce the term of this proposal to just one year, as a few delegates recommended, and to charge only the maintenance and hosting fees, as this model aligns better with our open-source ethos and addresses the most common type of feedback we received regarding the initially proposed $206,400 USD total cost being too high.
proposals.app is, first and foremost, an open-source project. So it makes sense that we follow a traditional open-source business model where maintenance subscriptions are the primary source of funding for contributors. This way, we can ensure a consistent revenue stream to sustain the product's development and make it available to as many people as possible.
We also gathered, from the diverse feedback we received, that all three feature integrations are seen as useful by the collective set of delegates. As we all know, here in Arbitrum DAO, we have delegates of all “shapes and sizes” who come with a diverse set of preferences for which of these features are the most useful. Since we had very specific feedback highlighting the usefulness of all three feature integrations, we decided to keep the same scope that was initially proposed, in this new version of the proposal. This also shows that this specific set of feature integrations we proposed is based on the user research efforts we’ve conducted with a diverse set of delegates, to guarantee a good product fit between what delegates need and what we can offer with proposals.app.
Additionally, we would like to highlight that, during the past week of discussion and deliberation in this forum, we’ve already made significant progress in building most of the proposed features, as evident from the commits on our open-source GitHub repository here.
Therefore, we invite you to test our initial prototypes in a test forum, which is hosted by Discourse, just like this Arbitrum DAO forum, where you can see the Voting Power Tags fully working and interactive. Try it out for yourself at https://proposalapp-test.discourse.group/t/this-is-a-test-topic/8/2
You can also view the initial prototype of the Live Votes feature component, which will be integrated into the Discourse forum in the same way as the Voting Power Tags example above.
We will be putting this proposal up for an offchain vote on Snapshot today, using the basic vote type of 🟢 For / 🟡 Abstain / 🔴 Against. If the offchain vote passes, we will then proceed to a non-constitutional onchain vote.
Thank you!
Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
However, the “Voting Power Tags” feature doesn’t seem to address a critical need or provide a clear benefit to the user experience. In my opinion, such tags could unintentionally introduce bias into discussions by conditioning the perception of comments based on the voting power, rather than the content itself.
Several delegates have flagged a risk of bias here.
Voting power tags: Useful. Filtering voices based on voting power would help highlight key contributors and reduce noise from less relevant comments.
We do think this is a nice-to-have feature, having real-time result within each thread. However, we have a few suggestions:
We’d also like to better understand the core problem this feature aims to solve. Is it primarily meant as a reminder for voters? If so, what kind of impact does it have and is that impact worth the cost, especially considering we can just look directly from Tally and Snapshot?
Don’t get us wrong, this feature is definitely useful. We’re just trying to understand its value and potential trade-offs.
We already find Discourse’s built-in email and digest system quite useful, so the $28.8K price tag feels high for what seems like an incremental benefit.
If many delegates continue relying on native Discourse notifications, would the DAO still be expected to pay the full amount? At this stage, it is difficult to justify the cost, especially since there is no clear evidence that these features will see widespread adoption among delegates. Much of this functionality already exists within Discourse, and Tally also provide notification feature as well.
That said, this solution does offer some advantages. Centralized notifications for Snapshot and Tally are helpful, and features like community call reminders could be useful. These improvements would enhance the user experience. However, at $28.8K, the cost still feels high compared to the value it creates, especially if usage remains low.
Pricing has been a key concern raised by other delegates as well as ourselves. Given the proposed budget of $206K USD over two years, we have a few questions we’d like to better understand first:
We did some preliminary research on market rates, particularly for Web3 project managers and designers. While we fully recognize that rates can vary based on expertise and scope and that our data might not be perfectly accurate, we came across an average rate of approximately $63/hour for Web3 project managers, with a high end around $96/hour. In comparison, the proposed rate appears to be about 1.56x higher than the maximum we found.
We’d like to learn more about the reasoning behind these rate differences, whether it's due to the specific expertise required, the scope of responsibilities, or other considerations that might not be immediately apparent.
The same question applies to the designer role as well. If you could share a bit more context, that would be very helpful for us to understand the full picture.
AranaDigital supports this proposals.app integration bundle because the new Live-Vote banner will pin real-time quorum and deadline data to every proposal thread, guiding delegates straight from discussion to Snapshot or on-chain ballots and sharply reducing missed quorums; the Voting-Power tags give instant context on each commenter’s ARB weight, enabling readers to distinguish substantive delegate contributions from less-relevant commentary; opt-in proposal-notification emails pull busy or new delegates back whenever a thread opens, a vote launches, or 24 hours remain, trimming late votes; every feature ships as a self-hostable, open-source Discourse component backed by an AGPL-licensed GitHub repo and a publicly monitored uptime dashboard, keeping our governance stack forkable and resilient, and the team has already demoed the stack at ETH Belgrade to positive delegate interest. The ask is $206 k over two years, including $120 k for maintenance and hosting, and while a detailed cost sheet is available, we argue that this looks higher than comparable builds and would be better tested under a shorter contract. Would the team would consider trimming the commitment to a one-year pilot that ships some features first before the DAO locks in the full spend?
Thanks @paulofonseca for this proposal and for leading this initiative. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a lot of discussions / proposals around DAO tooling for enabling efficient delegate participation via forums and other comms channels and we welcome all efforts geared at solving this challenge.
We appreciate the intention behind this proposal to streamline and enhance the Arbitrum governance process. Improving how delegates and community members interact with proposals and voting mechanisms is a worthwhile goal.
We see clear value in the proposed features, particularly:
We appreciate the intention behind this proposal to streamline and enhance the Arbitrum governance process. Improving how delegates and community members interact with proposals and voting mechanisms is a worthwhile goal.
We see clear value in the proposed features, particularly:
Overall, we are supportive of this proposal. Our one concern is around the cost structure. The development costs for the three features appear reasonable. However, the maintenance and hosting budget, at $120,000 over two years, seems disproportionately high and could benefit from more detail or a cost-efficiency review.
Hey @maxlomu thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Just to clarify that our email notifications are not about every single forum post, but only when a new proposal is posted on this forum, aka. a new topic is posted on the proposals category of this forum, and every time there is a new offchain or onchain vote starting and 24 hours before they end.
Hey @maxlomu thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Just to clarify that our email notifications are not about every single forum post, but only when a new proposal is posted on this forum, aka. a new topic is posted on the proposals category of this forum, and every time there is a new offchain or onchain vote starting and 24 hours before they end.
It would also be valuable to highlight the most upvoted comments, ideally weighted by voting power, to surface the most influential and relevant feedback.
This is a cool suggestion, thank you! I will take note of it for future proposals.app functionality.
Hey @Entropy thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
We're supportive of this proposal with the cost revisions and agree that these integrations can meaningfully improve forum usability.
We’d just like to clarify a few points on ongoing support:
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports? – If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
We're supportive of this proposal with the cost revisions and agree that these integrations can meaningfully improve forum usability.
We’d just like to clarify a few points on ongoing support:
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports? – If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
Looking forward to your response.
gm and thank you for the proposal.
Based on my usage of the current tools (forum, Snapshot, Tally), here’s my perspective:
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters to attract more and better delegates and voters by providing tools that suit their needs and facilitate easier, clearer governance engagement.
We support this proposal, and believe each of the 3 integrations are necessary. However, the extent to which they are necessary varies. For instance, email reminders are a convenient way to encourage DAO participation, while voting power tags are necessary for continued DAO functionality.
If we can sequence integration, beginning with voting power tags as a minimally viable implementation, it may reduce costs or at least focus initial development on the most impactful feature. We understand that much of the cost arises from back-end indexing, so front-end trade-offs may not significantly affect the budget. Still, a phased approach could be worth exploring.
Hey @cp0x you're not being too picky! I actually appreciate delegates being picky about proposals! I'm usually the picky one in here! =)
So let's breakdown the $1,000 USD per month Hosting cost.
It includes:
Hey @cp0x you're not being too picky! I actually appreciate delegates being picky about proposals! I'm usually the picky one in here! =)
So let's breakdown the $1,000 USD per month Hosting cost.
It includes:
You can see the live monitoring of all these 3 servers on our public status.proposals.app page.
As you can see, the biggest cost is in sib-03, the AI server, that we will use to summarize proposals and comment discussions and offer that in the email notifications, and in proposals.app of course.
For example, in OVH Cloud, the provider you used as an example, their cheapest AI server, which is roughly 50% better than ours, costs $2,336.22 USD with a 24 month commitment. Which is way more than $500 USD a month
We have 3 servers for redundancy and resilience but also because it forces us to run in a decentralized and more scalable setup. By running a cluster of machines, we can easily scale our setup to handle more user traffic and data indexing.
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month for maintenance, yes, it averages out to $166.67 USD per hour. To be more specific, it's $500 USD a month for that cost with $175 USD per hour for Design and Developmentm and $150 USD per hour for Testing and QA, as can be seen in our detailed breakdown spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.
Members of the Entropy Advisors team have provided brief feedback to Paulo as he built out proposals.app as a grant recipient, and appreciate the time, effort, and passion that has gone into the project.
With that being said, this proposal doesn’t represent a prudent use of resources when weighed against its expected impact on the DAO. We admit that Entropy may be biased in this response considering the fact that we are a large delegate and a very high-context company when it comes to the Arbitrum DAO. Our team already checks the forum every day, knows the voting power of relevant commentators, and feels as though the social contract for posting proposals on Thursdays has made the timing of offchain and onchain votes highly predictable. As such, we do not see $206,400 worth of value coming from this proposal’s implementation.
Thank you for this feedback @Jose_StableLab I think you really hit the main issue in here
We would like to request Paulo with further clarity on the team’s long-term vision for governance tooling in order to decide on a final decision for the eventual onchain proposal.
As we've said before, in our opinion, governance tooling has no viable and sustainable business model by itself. So the best way to ensure governance tools are resilient and will be here for the long term, is to make them fuly open-source, so that if and when a particular team stops maintaining those tools for any reason, any other team can swoop in and continue the work.
This forces governance tooling projects to either raise VC money and burn it without giving their investor the returns they were expecting, or go towards the open-source, charge for maintenance path of sustainability.
proposals.app will continue to exist, and evolve, and add more and more features that help delegates and tokenholders lives. we aim to become the first fully open-source, all-in-one governance tool for DAOs. and to be the only app delegates need to use to do their jobs.
Thank you @Federico for your feedback!
I’d be more likely to use it if there were clearer distinctions between forum discussions, offchain voting, and onchain voting.
this is good feedback and we will be improving this soon. We also got this feedback from other delegates. thank you!
open-source tools run by non-profits often struggle to match the quality of those run by for-profit ones – mostly because they can’t pay top engineers and don’t face the same market-driven pressure to iterate, ship fast, stay reliable. Over time, that usually leads to lower usage and eventual shutdown, which makes me cautious about funding this initiative.
I often struggle with basics like finding out which proposals are live, when voting starts or ends, and which ones have already closed.
Agree! Our email notifications solve this issue without users even needing to come to the forum. We will also propose some forum customizations to improve the forum accessibility, design and findability. Also, our proposed Live Votes feature helps with this issue.
I also want to flag some discomfort with comments suggesting that voting power tags will help filter out “noise” from low-VP delegates.
Also, just wanted to point out that our proposal doesn't include any kind of filtering or censoring or comments. Just adding more contextual information to each comment, by showing the Voting Power of each delegate in the forum.
This also feels like a subscription model, which I’m not a big fan of — especially for a forum that’s already lagging behind. Personally, I’d prefer one-off investments that give the DAO/Arbitrum long-term control and ownership.
I just voted FOR this proposal. As crypto goes mainstream it's critical to make DAO participation accessible. For newcomers unfamiliar with crypto, like an RWA player for instance, navigating the Arbitrum DAO is challenging due to fragmented information across platforms like the Forum, Snapshot, and Tally.
This proposal effectively streamlines the process, consolidates resources, and significantly enhances the user experience for anyone looking to engage with the Arbitrum DAO.
@paulofonseca is a dedicated Arbitrum builder focused on the DAO's long-term success. I appreciate how the proposal's timeline and budget were adjusted based on delegate feedback. With fierce competition among L2 DAOs, Arbitrum cannot afford to miss this opportunity to improve its governance flow.
We believe that anything that improves how people engage on the forums until an OpCo is fully established is a net positive for the ecosystem. All three proposed features are valuable live voting, voting power tags, and proposal notification emails.
Paulo has been a long-time contributor to the DAO and previously received a Questbook grant for the Proposals app.
We believe that anything that improves how people engage on the forums until an OpCo is fully established is a net positive for the ecosystem. All three proposed features are valuable live voting, voting power tags, and proposal notification emails.
Paulo has been a long-time contributor to the DAO and previously received a Questbook grant for the Proposals app.
That said, while these features would be very helpful, we have a few concerns. The email notifications could become a bit noisy over time, and the overall cost for building and maintaining these features feels too high. We agree with AF’s suggestion that payments should be made in stages not all upfront to ensure accountability.
We also see Paulo has reduced down the cost significantly which is a positive signal!
Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for putting this proposal together and for all the effort behind it. Sharing some thoughts after going through it:
Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for putting this proposal together and for all the effort behind it. Sharing some thoughts after going through it:
Thanks again for the effort.
Voted FOR.
I believe in paying good people — they tend to exceed expectations. Paulo and his team are exactly that. Also think that these tools, while simple, add great context and accessibility.
for the onchain vote, yes. just as the Arbitrum Treasury governor smart contract specifies.
I voted yes on the snapshot. Its really not that much money for the amount of dev work involved and if it increases coordination a bit its worth it. It's kind of nice to have multiple backup interfaces for voting and tracking data. worth it IMO.
…with more than 3% quorum, right?
:upside_down_face:
Voted FOR.
Really useful additions and at $5k a month is very cheap from an IT infra spend for this kind of complexity. This is a no-brainer.
Andrei and Paulo are master craftsmen with their work, Arbitrum would do well to back them, keep them in the Arbitrum tent iterating and further innovating govtech over the coming years.
Please vote here: https://snapshot.box/#/s:arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0x38663c36b26252acff6c6ca43663167858f51f960235dc0441bd2ad4a8f66fb1
And thank you to fellow builder @limes for the support in posting this offchain vote on snapshot!
EDIT: I've obviously voted Abstain in this proposal.
Hey there, everybody! Thank you all for your feedback!
We have significantly updated the proposal, and now the cost is only ~29% of what was initially proposed — just a simple subscription-like fee of $60,000 USD for 1 year of maintenance and hosting for the three proposed feature integrations.
Hey there, everybody! Thank you all for your feedback!
We have significantly updated the proposal, and now the cost is only ~29% of what was initially proposed — just a simple subscription-like fee of $60,000 USD for 1 year of maintenance and hosting for the three proposed feature integrations.
We decided to reduce the term of this proposal to just one year, as a few delegates recommended, and to charge only the maintenance and hosting fees, as this model aligns better with our open-source ethos and addresses the most common type of feedback we received regarding the initially proposed $206,400 USD total cost being too high.
proposals.app is, first and foremost, an open-source project. So it makes sense that we follow a traditional open-source business model where maintenance subscriptions are the primary source of funding for contributors. This way, we can ensure a consistent revenue stream to sustain the product's development and make it available to as many people as possible.
We also gathered, from the diverse feedback we received, that all three feature integrations are seen as useful by the collective set of delegates. As we all know, here in Arbitrum DAO, we have delegates of all “shapes and sizes” who come with a diverse set of preferences for which of these features are the most useful. Since we had very specific feedback highlighting the usefulness of all three feature integrations, we decided to keep the same scope that was initially proposed, in this new version of the proposal. This also shows that this specific set of feature integrations we proposed is based on the user research efforts we’ve conducted with a diverse set of delegates, to guarantee a good product fit between what delegates need and what we can offer with proposals.app.
Additionally, we would like to highlight that, during the past week of discussion and deliberation in this forum, we’ve already made significant progress in building most of the proposed features, as evident from the commits on our open-source GitHub repository here.
Therefore, we invite you to test our initial prototypes in a test forum, which is hosted by Discourse, just like this Arbitrum DAO forum, where you can see the Voting Power Tags fully working and interactive. Try it out for yourself at https://proposalapp-test.discourse.group/t/this-is-a-test-topic/8/2
You can also view the initial prototype of the Live Votes feature component, which will be integrated into the Discourse forum in the same way as the Voting Power Tags example above.
We will be putting this proposal up for an offchain vote on Snapshot today, using the basic vote type of 🟢 For / 🟡 Abstain / 🔴 Against. If the offchain vote passes, we will then proceed to a non-constitutional onchain vote.
Thank you!
Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
However, the “Voting Power Tags” feature doesn’t seem to address a critical need or provide a clear benefit to the user experience. In my opinion, such tags could unintentionally introduce bias into discussions by conditioning the perception of comments based on the voting power, rather than the content itself.
Several delegates have flagged a risk of bias here.
Voting power tags: Useful. Filtering voices based on voting power would help highlight key contributors and reduce noise from less relevant comments.
We do think this is a nice-to-have feature, having real-time result within each thread. However, we have a few suggestions:
We’d also like to better understand the core problem this feature aims to solve. Is it primarily meant as a reminder for voters? If so, what kind of impact does it have and is that impact worth the cost, especially considering we can just look directly from Tally and Snapshot?
Don’t get us wrong, this feature is definitely useful. We’re just trying to understand its value and potential trade-offs.
We already find Discourse’s built-in email and digest system quite useful, so the $28.8K price tag feels high for what seems like an incremental benefit.
If many delegates continue relying on native Discourse notifications, would the DAO still be expected to pay the full amount? At this stage, it is difficult to justify the cost, especially since there is no clear evidence that these features will see widespread adoption among delegates. Much of this functionality already exists within Discourse, and Tally also provide notification feature as well.
That said, this solution does offer some advantages. Centralized notifications for Snapshot and Tally are helpful, and features like community call reminders could be useful. These improvements would enhance the user experience. However, at $28.8K, the cost still feels high compared to the value it creates, especially if usage remains low.
Pricing has been a key concern raised by other delegates as well as ourselves. Given the proposed budget of $206K USD over two years, we have a few questions we’d like to better understand first:
We did some preliminary research on market rates, particularly for Web3 project managers and designers. While we fully recognize that rates can vary based on expertise and scope and that our data might not be perfectly accurate, we came across an average rate of approximately $63/hour for Web3 project managers, with a high end around $96/hour. In comparison, the proposed rate appears to be about 1.56x higher than the maximum we found.
We’d like to learn more about the reasoning behind these rate differences, whether it's due to the specific expertise required, the scope of responsibilities, or other considerations that might not be immediately apparent.
The same question applies to the designer role as well. If you could share a bit more context, that would be very helpful for us to understand the full picture.
AranaDigital supports this proposals.app integration bundle because the new Live-Vote banner will pin real-time quorum and deadline data to every proposal thread, guiding delegates straight from discussion to Snapshot or on-chain ballots and sharply reducing missed quorums; the Voting-Power tags give instant context on each commenter’s ARB weight, enabling readers to distinguish substantive delegate contributions from less-relevant commentary; opt-in proposal-notification emails pull busy or new delegates back whenever a thread opens, a vote launches, or 24 hours remain, trimming late votes; every feature ships as a self-hostable, open-source Discourse component backed by an AGPL-licensed GitHub repo and a publicly monitored uptime dashboard, keeping our governance stack forkable and resilient, and the team has already demoed the stack at ETH Belgrade to positive delegate interest. The ask is $206 k over two years, including $120 k for maintenance and hosting, and while a detailed cost sheet is available, we argue that this looks higher than comparable builds and would be better tested under a shorter contract. Would the team would consider trimming the commitment to a one-year pilot that ships some features first before the DAO locks in the full spend?
Thanks @paulofonseca for this proposal and for leading this initiative. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a lot of discussions / proposals around DAO tooling for enabling efficient delegate participation via forums and other comms channels and we welcome all efforts geared at solving this challenge.
We appreciate the intention behind this proposal to streamline and enhance the Arbitrum governance process. Improving how delegates and community members interact with proposals and voting mechanisms is a worthwhile goal.
We see clear value in the proposed features, particularly:
We appreciate the intention behind this proposal to streamline and enhance the Arbitrum governance process. Improving how delegates and community members interact with proposals and voting mechanisms is a worthwhile goal.
We see clear value in the proposed features, particularly:
Overall, we are supportive of this proposal. Our one concern is around the cost structure. The development costs for the three features appear reasonable. However, the maintenance and hosting budget, at $120,000 over two years, seems disproportionately high and could benefit from more detail or a cost-efficiency review.
Hey @maxlomu thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Just to clarify that our email notifications are not about every single forum post, but only when a new proposal is posted on this forum, aka. a new topic is posted on the proposals category of this forum, and every time there is a new offchain or onchain vote starting and 24 hours before they end.
Hey @maxlomu thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Just to clarify that our email notifications are not about every single forum post, but only when a new proposal is posted on this forum, aka. a new topic is posted on the proposals category of this forum, and every time there is a new offchain or onchain vote starting and 24 hours before they end.
It would also be valuable to highlight the most upvoted comments, ideally weighted by voting power, to surface the most influential and relevant feedback.
This is a cool suggestion, thank you! I will take note of it for future proposals.app functionality.
Hey @Entropy thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
We're supportive of this proposal with the cost revisions and agree that these integrations can meaningfully improve forum usability.
We’d just like to clarify a few points on ongoing support:
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports? – If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
We're supportive of this proposal with the cost revisions and agree that these integrations can meaningfully improve forum usability.
We’d just like to clarify a few points on ongoing support:
– What’s the expected SLA in terms of uptime and response time for bug reports? – If Discourse rolls out breaking changes, are patches to restore functionality included as part of the 12-month maintenance?
Looking forward to your response.
gm and thank you for the proposal.
Based on my usage of the current tools (forum, Snapshot, Tally), here’s my perspective:
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters to attract more and better delegates and voters by providing tools that suit their needs and facilitate easier, clearer governance engagement.
We support this proposal, and believe each of the 3 integrations are necessary. However, the extent to which they are necessary varies. For instance, email reminders are a convenient way to encourage DAO participation, while voting power tags are necessary for continued DAO functionality.
If we can sequence integration, beginning with voting power tags as a minimally viable implementation, it may reduce costs or at least focus initial development on the most impactful feature. We understand that much of the cost arises from back-end indexing, so front-end trade-offs may not significantly affect the budget. Still, a phased approach could be worth exploring.
Hey @cp0x you're not being too picky! I actually appreciate delegates being picky about proposals! I'm usually the picky one in here! =)
So let's breakdown the $1,000 USD per month Hosting cost.
It includes:
Hey @cp0x you're not being too picky! I actually appreciate delegates being picky about proposals! I'm usually the picky one in here! =)
So let's breakdown the $1,000 USD per month Hosting cost.
It includes:
You can see the live monitoring of all these 3 servers on our public status.proposals.app page.
As you can see, the biggest cost is in sib-03, the AI server, that we will use to summarize proposals and comment discussions and offer that in the email notifications, and in proposals.app of course.
For example, in OVH Cloud, the provider you used as an example, their cheapest AI server, which is roughly 50% better than ours, costs $2,336.22 USD with a 24 month commitment. Which is way more than $500 USD a month
We have 3 servers for redundancy and resilience but also because it forces us to run in a decentralized and more scalable setup. By running a cluster of machines, we can easily scale our setup to handle more user traffic and data indexing.
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month for maintenance, yes, it averages out to $166.67 USD per hour. To be more specific, it's $500 USD a month for that cost with $175 USD per hour for Design and Developmentm and $150 USD per hour for Testing and QA, as can be seen in our detailed breakdown spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.
Members of the Entropy Advisors team have provided brief feedback to Paulo as he built out proposals.app as a grant recipient, and appreciate the time, effort, and passion that has gone into the project.
With that being said, this proposal doesn’t represent a prudent use of resources when weighed against its expected impact on the DAO. We admit that Entropy may be biased in this response considering the fact that we are a large delegate and a very high-context company when it comes to the Arbitrum DAO. Our team already checks the forum every day, knows the voting power of relevant commentators, and feels as though the social contract for posting proposals on Thursdays has made the timing of offchain and onchain votes highly predictable. As such, we do not see $206,400 worth of value coming from this proposal’s implementation.
Thanks @paulofonseca for this proposal and for leading this initiative. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a lot of discussions / proposals around DAO tooling for enabling efficient delegate participation via forums and other comms channels and we welcome all efforts geared at solving this challenge.
Even for a two-year period, on a surface level, it’s hard to justify why this would require a budget of $200k. Could you provide at least high-level details on what it will take to build and maintain these forum integrations, so we can both assess and get a clearer sense of how much capacity is required to pull this off?
In line with the previous point on costs, I believe this feature (email notifications) has already been implemented on the app (I signed up and subscribed to the feature), meaning the functionality has already been built and is already accessible anyways? In my understanding, the only thing to be done here is allowing users to access the (already existing) feature via the forum rather than building a new feature from scratch? Please let me know if my understanding is correct.
Otherwise, I believe the email notifications feature is perhaps the most important one here. From a delegate standpoint, this would be very helpful. Discourse has a native feature that allows you to track *existing discussions/threads, but being able to be notified about newly created discussions will be incredibly helpful.
In my view, features centred around forum notifications are the most valuable for delegates. There is a lot to keep track of in terms of updates, discussions, etc. For instance (and perhaps as a suggestion), enabling highly customizable notifications is something we would 100% get behind. We don’t just want to be notified of all posts, which, in itself, is not very different from manually checking the “New” tab on the forum every now and then. We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords. This will massively improve the experience for us as delegates and truly help us stay in the weeds of what’s being discussed at every point in time.
Hey @Entropy thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
I agree we should evaluate proposals like this in the broader scope and context of the DAO.
Regarding this proposal being a prudent spending of DAO resources or not, I would point out that the DAO is currently spending approximately $200k USD per month on delegate incentives, on average. The DAO is also paying Entropy Advisors $200k USD per month for their services.
We believe a fairer framing through which delegates should evaluate this proposal is not one where they argue from their own particular bias and point of view, but a more holistic one that prioritizes the quality of life improvements for all delegates and users of this forum.
A framing like this one that David described previously in this thread:
I therefore urge delegates to evaluate this proposal based on its perceived impact over the next two years, during which we will enhance this set of features and deliver ongoing quality of life and user experience improvements for delegates in Arbitrum DAO.
gm and thank you for the proposal.
Based on my usage of the current tools (forum, Snapshot, Tally), here’s my perspective:
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters to attract more and better delegates and voters by providing tools that suit their needs and facilitate easier, clearer governance engagement.
Regarding the proposed features, my thoughts are:
Voting power tags: Useful. Filtering voices based on voting power would help highlight key contributors and reduce noise from less relevant comments.
Live voting: Not needed. I prefer to form my own opinion by reading all comments before heading to Snapshot to vote.
Email notifications: would not use. Snapshot already has similar functionality, and I wouldn’t want notifications for every forum post.
Personally, I’d like to see features that address overly long or verbose responses, such as a way to summarize or collapse them. It would also be valuable to highlight the most upvoted comments, ideally weighted by voting power, to surface the most influential and relevant feedback.
Thanks
We support this proposal, and believe each of the 3 integrations are necessary. However, the extent to which they are necessary varies. For instance, email reminders are a convenient way to encourage DAO participation, while voting power tags are necessary for continued DAO functionality.
If we can sequence integration, beginning with voting power tags as a minimally viable implementation, it may reduce costs or at least focus initial development on the most impactful feature. We understand that much of the cost arises from back-end indexing, so front-end trade-offs may not significantly affect the budget. Still, a phased approach could be worth exploring.
Regarding voting power tags, this is absolutely necessary. There needs to be a mechanism for sorting through AI-generated slop, and while imperfect, filtering for voting power is a start. This is also a launchpad for a vital conversation on what we want forum discussions to be in the age of AI –– what is the extent of AI involvement that should be tolerated? At the risk of becoming too speculative, will voting power tags be a segway to on-chain verification of forum contributors? There is no clear answer, but definitely something to think about as we consider how to improve the governance forum.
Also, the idea that voting power tags will rig the forum in favor of larger delegates has merit, but neglects to mention the fact that larger delegates are typically greater contributors to the forum in the first place. As mentioned, forum contributions do carry more weight if they are backed by greater voting power. By no means does this mean we should disregard those with little voting power, and we trust the DAO will not disregard posts simply due to that fact.
Overall, we love the idea of improving the governance forum. Thanks to all those involved in making this forum as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Michigan Blockchain | Jack Verrill | TG @JackVerrill
Members of the Entropy Advisors team have provided brief feedback to Paulo as he built out proposals.app as a grant recipient, and appreciate the time, effort, and passion that has gone into the project.
With that being said, this proposal doesn’t represent a prudent use of resources when weighed against its expected impact on the DAO. We admit that Entropy may be biased in this response considering the fact that we are a large delegate and a very high-context company when it comes to the Arbitrum DAO. Our team already checks the forum every day, knows the voting power of relevant commentators, and feels as though the social contract for posting proposals on Thursdays has made the timing of offchain and onchain votes highly predictable. As such, we do not see $206,400 worth of value coming from this proposal’s implementation.
The proposed feature additions to the forum are “nice-to-have” marginal updates. As mentioned by previous comments, Discourse already has a built-in email notification feature, and, as first mentioned by @tane, Entropy has an in-house tool that sends Telegram notifications for forum posts that only costs $20/month. Similarly, it is not overly cumbersome to check Tally/Snapshot for live votes either, thus making the live tracking on the forum a minimal improvement. In terms of the voting power tags, it would be a nice-to-have novelty, but, again, there is already a plethora of sources to identify delegates’ voting power (e.g., we regularly leverage Dune for deeper analysis of active proposals and the delegate base).
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
While we appreciate all the work that Paulo has put into proposals.app, we do not view this proposal as offering sufficient value to justify the $206,400 cost. We do not see this as a tool that our team would rely on or that would be a significant quality-of-life improvement for dedicated delegates. As such, this wouldn’t be a prudent resource allocation opportunity in our view, even at a fraction of the budget.
Hey @Ignas thank you for reading, for the kind words, and the feedback!
You do bring a very valid point about the continuation of service with this proposal and what happened with our previous VC-backed startup, Senate.
Hey @Ignas thank you for reading, for the kind words, and the feedback!
You do bring a very valid point about the continuation of service with this proposal and what happened with our previous VC-backed startup, Senate.
For context, Senate mostly started at the end of 2022, with three co-founders, @andreiv, me, and another co-founder. We launched the first version of the product in March 2023, and then after that launch and a good reception of that product, we started to raise a seed round that we closed in August 2023 (apparently the worst month to raise money in crypto in the previous 8 years =) of around $800K USD total. We had an impressive roster of angels and investors, one that I'm very proud of, and that is highly respected in the DAO community. Shortly after, we realized that we couldn't figure out a way to come up with a business model, in the DAO governance space, that would bring a sizable return to our investors, and amid some other co-founder misalignment issues, we decided to shut down the company and return the remaining of the funds to our investors (after all was said and done, the investors got most of their money back). Additionally, and most importantly, we returned the small symbolic payment we received from Aave for the email notification forum integration, immediately after we decided to shut down the company, as can be seen here.
So, needless to say, when Andrei and I decided to double down and build something similar with proposals.app, we took a very different approach to it. =)
So nowadays... proposals.app is fully open-source and can be self-hosted by anyone. Just like we do right now. If we literally die, and the servers go down, it should take a not-so-technically-minded person aided by a coding LLM, and some beefy servers, just a couple of hours, to spin up a full instance of proposals.app back-end, front-end, and forum integrations, and restore the level of service and functionality promised in this proposal.
First of all, Paulo is a trusted member of the Arbitrum DAO community, so this proposal already has a positive feel to me :). Thanks @paulofonseca and the team for continuing to invest in improving governance infra!
I like the three features mentioned, they’re practical and thoughtful and definitely have a yes from me:
First of all, Paulo is a trusted member of the Arbitrum DAO community, so this proposal already has a positive feel to me :). Thanks @paulofonseca and the team for continuing to invest in improving governance infra!
I like the three features mentioned, they’re practical and thoughtful and definitely have a yes from me:
Voting Power Tags help readers see who the big delegates are in discussions, and adds clarity and accountability.
Live Votes make it easier to follow and vote directly from the forum, super helpful for busy delegates and newcomers.
Email notifications are a great way to keep community members in the loop, especially those not active on the forum.
That said, I do have one concern. After seeing what happened with the Senate tool in Aave DAO passed in Sept 2023, stopped by Dec. I worry about what happens if things don’t go as planned here.
The payment is done in 3 months, but the work is supposed to last 2 years. I think we should add backup plan in case the team can’t continue midway. While I trust the team’s intent, the DAO must safeguard itself.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into mapping the fragmented governance journey and trying to stitch the experience together in one place. As active delegates we constantly bounce between the forum, Snapshot, Tally, block explorers, and a swarm of dashboards; that cognitive overhead is real, so a unified front-end that lowers the “where do I click next?” friction is directionally attractive.
It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into mapping the fragmented governance journey and trying to stitch the experience together in one place. As active delegates we constantly bounce between the forum, Snapshot, Tally, block explorers, and a swarm of dashboards; that cognitive overhead is real, so a unified front-end that lowers the “where do I click next?” friction is directionally attractive.
It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
However, in line with @Oni’s observation, the quoted $200 k over two years feels steep for three stand-alone features. Live vote surfacing is the clear standout: it connects the conversation layer to the decision layer, giving readers an at-a-glance pulse of what actually matters right now. By contrast, voting-power tags and extended email alerts strike us as nice-to-have embellishments whose marginal utility is harder to price at six figures. Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.
Because we do see value in credibly neutral, open-source tooling, we would prefer a structure that lowers the cost for the DAO while still supporting the experiment. One concrete suggestion would be Cost-sharing with other DAOs. If these integrations are broadly applicable, splitting hosting and maintenance across multiple communities would drop Arbitrum’s share to a level that better matches the incremental benefit.
There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.
We could also narrow the scope and shorten the period to start smaller.
I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing. :saluting_face:
With tighter scope, shorter runway, and shared overhead, we believe Arbitrum can support this initiative without over-committing treasury resources. We look forward to seeing a revised proposal that balances ambition with fiscal prudence and provides objective success metrics up front.
Hey @Tane thank you for reading, for the kind words, and for giving your feedback!
Addressing your feedback:
Hey @Tane thank you for reading, for the kind words, and for giving your feedback!
Addressing your feedback:
Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.
We don’t believe this is a fair comparison. Building an one-off widget or an internal tool requires a way lower level of commitment and maintenance that is totally different than what we are proposing here. The bulk of the cost in our proposal, pertains to the Maintenance + Hosting line item because it is actually the most valuable service we are proposing to offer to Arbitrum DAO.
On the other hand, with this proposal, we are guaranteeing that whatever happens, Arbitrum DAO will have these feature integrations up to date and reliably working on its governance forum. And everybody that has built quality reliable software before, especially in the DAO governance space, knows this is quite hard to pull off.
Especially when it comes to have reliable governance data. And specifically delegates voting power, which is a really hard thing to get constantly reliable data of.
For example, and I just checked this right now, you can see that @Plutus(0xbbe98d590d7eb99f4a236587f2441826396053d3) voting power is being reported as 954.28K ARB on Tally, but as 954.37K ARB on Karma.
The correct voting power, as per the ARB token contract, at 12:19pm today, aka. at the 22666976 ethereum block is 954.33K ARB (or 954328.938917807101820975 ARB to be more precise) and that's what we have on the proposals.app back-end, as you can see in the screenshot below where it shows 954328.94 ARB at June 9, 2025, 12:18 PM (UTC)
And look, I’m not trying to put down other governance tools in this space with the example above, I’m just trying to highlight, that once you look close enough (and we’ve been doing that for quite a while) it is actually quite hard to index governance data reliably.
Our open-source, non-profit, public goods funded approach at proposals.app is the best way we can think of, of having a reliable, long-term infrastructure for this kind of thing, that can serve DAOs for the long run. That’s why we believe that relying on DAOs like Arbitrum to fund these development efforts instead of pursuing a VC backed approach, is the right strategy.
And that’s why we put up this proposal for Arbitrum DAO to fund these forum integrations and align the future of proposals.app with the Arbitrum DAO.
Hey @jameskbh thank you for reading, for the continued interest and support, and for that suggestion!
And yes, we are aiming of putting this up for a vote, as a whole package, with a basic voting type of :green_square: For / :yellow_square: Abstain / :red_square: Against for the offchain vote on Snapshot and with the proposed whole-package price.
Hey @jameskbh thank you for reading, for the continued interest and support, and for that suggestion!
And yes, we are aiming of putting this up for a vote, as a whole package, with a basic voting type of :green_square: For / :yellow_square: Abstain / :red_square: Against for the offchain vote on Snapshot and with the proposed whole-package price.
We could maybe use an approval vote type of vote, to gauge which features would be more popular among delegates, and then go to the onchain vote with a proposal that includes the features that had more than the 3% quorum of voting weight in the offchain vote, with a package price for that selection of features. To be honest, the final price tag wouldn't be that much cheaper, proportionally per item, if we were to do just 1 or 2 of the 3 proposed features. So right now, this 3 feature package is probably the best deal we can offer to Arbitrum DAO.
In the opposite direction, we've got some feedback, in private, of some other additional features we could also do (not now, but in the near future) and if we would add a 4th feature, the whole package would become cheaper, in a per item basis.
And regarding this issue, we would also like to highlight and echo what fellow builder @daveytea says above:
We believe these three usability and accessibility improvements, in tandem, will bring a better experience to delegates in Arbitrum DAO. They will make delegates lives easier, minimize mistakes (there have been cases of delegates voting in one proposal with the reason for another proposal for example), improve voter participation (since delegates will get timely emails reminding them to vote), and bring more clarity overall about who is who in Arbitrum DAO (since everybody will be able to see the voting power of commenters in this forum).
This is a strong step forward for improving governance UX. The integrations are practical, composable, and well-scoped. LFG :fire:
Thanks for this proposal!
As one able to test some of those features in your app, I must say I find them useful. Some more, and some, not so much. Each person has their own flow, and that reflects how they value the features proposed here. I have a question/suggestion:
Thanks for this proposal!
As one able to test some of those features in your app, I must say I find them useful. Some more, and some, not so much. Each person has their own flow, and that reflects how they value the features proposed here. I have a question/suggestion:
How are you planning to put this up for a vote? Yes/No/Abstain for the whole package? Is it possible to breakdown the costs so we can have a modular approach to it and have the voting options to reflect that?
Thanks in advance!
Hey @itugov thank you for reading and giving your feedback!
In the comment above I just detailed the costs for the Maintenance + Hosting cost a bit further.
Hey @itugov thank you for reading and giving your feedback!
In the comment above I just detailed the costs for the Maintenance + Hosting cost a bit further.
The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.
Let me know if that brings more clarity into it.
Also, I would like to point out that proposals.app is not VC backed, and will be operating as a public goods funded, non-profit entity. Meaning that the costs are not being subsidized by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. As we say in the proposal above, we deeply believe that DAO tooling should be fully open-source, credibly neutral and funded in a public goods fashion. That usually implies that open-source driven organizations need to rely on maintenance subscriptions to maintain their products up to par and to offer the best possible experience to their users.
Hey @danielo thank you for reading our proposal and for the positive words about the features we proposed.
Addressing your concerns:
Hey @danielo thank you for reading our proposal and for the positive words about the features we proposed.
Addressing your concerns:
Regarding the contract length, I agree with you that maybe the proposal flow in Arbitrum DAO will decrease given the proposed new vision (I pointed that out myself last month here) but we still don't know for sure what is going to happen regarding that. The fact is that in April we had less proposals and votes than the last 6 months, but it feels to me like it picked up a little bit more in May. Also, the reason we proposed a 2 year contract for Arbitrum DAO is so that Arbitrum can lock down this $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting price, for the next 2 years. One year from now, the price for these features will most likely be higher than what we are proposing now, so by committing to a 2 year contract, Arbitrum DAO would actually be getting a better deal than committing to a 1 year contract only.
Regarding the overall cost, it is very reductive to evaluate the cost for these features based solely on the 3 actual features we propose. The reality is that these features only work, and are only reliable, if there is a back-end platform that correctly indexes data and processes this data. This back-end needs to be constantly improved and is actually quite costly to run. We've spent the last 9 months developing that back-end under the scope of proposals.app and the last 3 years if we include the scope of Senate as well. This back-end is what powers the currently available arbitrum.proposals.app platform launched in April, and it will power all of these proposed features.
Having worked in user research, ux design, and software development myself for the last 15 years, while running companies that provide these services, and having designed and delivered dozens of apps for different industries all over the world, I feel these costs are actually very reasonable for a quality and reliable product.
I appreciate the intention to improve the forum environment, but I have concerns about the proportionality between the proposed features and the budget requested. I would also like to comment on the features.
I appreciate the intention to improve the forum environment, but I have concerns about the proportionality between the proposed features and the budget requested. I would also like to comment on the features.
As someone with a UX/UI perspective, I recognize that displaying “Live Votes” results could add real functional value by making it easier to track proposals and better understand the governance process. On the other hand, while "Proposal Notification Emails" aren’t essential, they could still be helpful for certain users (myself included) as reminders to stay updated on new proposals and key voting stages.
However, the "Voting Power Tags" feature doesn’t seem to address a critical need or provide a clear benefit to the user experience. In my opinion, such tags could unintentionally introduce bias into discussions by conditioning the perception of comments based on the voting power, rather than the content itself.
Therefore, the total budget of $206,400 USD should be considered, with $120,000 for maintenance and hosting only, as I consider this to be a little high given the scope of the improvements. It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
I think a more reasonable alternative would be to prioritize the visibility of the most impactful feature, “Live Votes” and evaluate its adoption before moving forward with the others. This would allow for a more data-driven and cost-effective approach.
I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing. :saluting_face:
Hey @cp0x thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Just to clarify that the third feature, of Proposal Emails Notifications notifies not just when new forum proposals are available but also, when new offchain (snapshot) and onchain votes start and are about to end.
Hey @cp0x thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Just to clarify that the third feature, of Proposal Emails Notifications notifies not just when new forum proposals are available but also, when new offchain (snapshot) and onchain votes start and are about to end.
The email notification currently look like this, and you can go to arbitrum.proposals.app/profile to subscribe to them. What we are offering here is an easier way for users of these forum to subscribe to these email notifications.
Regarding the cost concerns, especially regarding the maintenance + hosting cost, allow me to offer a bit more context for those amounts.
The hosting cost is $1,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes all server costs, and software to run the whole infrastructure of proposals.app that is dedicated to Arbitrum DAO. This includes 2 hosting servers, 1 AI server, the email deliverability service, DNS service, and the DevOps cost to maintain all of the infrastructure working properly and reliably. You can see an overview of all our back-end services and servers uptime in status.proposals.app.
The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.
You can see the details of the cost breakdown in this spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.
Hi, Paolo!|
Sorry if I sound too picky, but to me, $1,000/month for server costs seems excessive — especially considering the actual workload.
Hi, Paolo!|
Sorry if I sound too picky, but to me, $1,000/month for server costs seems excessive — especially considering the actual workload.
For comparison: one of the top-tier hosting providers offers insanely powerful machines for $1,000/month — enough to run multiple Solana or Hyperliquid nodes simultaneously. https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/prices/?display=list&range=high_grade For the tasks described here, such infrastructure is clearly overkill.
Could you please share the server specifications? What exactly justifies this level of hardware?
Also, I genuinely don’t understand why two separate servers are needed (especially when hosting implies 24/7 availability) — and third for for AI. Why not consolidate into a single, high-performance machine?
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years:
That’s 24 max hours total per month, which breaks down to $166/hour and more/
Isn’t that a bit steep for such a limited scope of work?
Thanks for the offer
I have used this application and I want to say that the first two functions are very convenient and would definitely be useful for Arbitrum. The third function for mailing seems to me to duplicate the existing mailings from the forum a little, although in a more convenient format
Thanks for the offer
I have used this application and I want to say that the first two functions are very convenient and would definitely be useful for Arbitrum. The third function for mailing seems to me to duplicate the existing mailings from the forum a little, although in a more convenient format
Among the disadvantages, I see the cost. For crypto, any amount can be presented as small lately. However, for each item of the estimate, I have a feeling that the cost is too high, especially for Maintenance + Hosting (2 years) $120,000 USD (for example, I rent a server for my site, which costs me $5-10 per month, I don’t understand where this cost comes from)
There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.
Hey @Oni Thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Please really do reach out to me on telegram to share those ideas that came up!
Addressing your feedback:
These features feel useful and I can see myself using them. But I have concerns with the proposal:
I haven’t reviewed deeply enough to comment on budget one way or another.
But, what I can say is the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO. Builders (such as Paulo) who have shown extreme commitment to the ecosystem and have delivered quality products do deserve to be respected as a service provider, not a bounty shop.
I haven’t reviewed deeply enough to comment on budget one way or another.
But, what I can say is the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO. Builders (such as Paulo) who have shown extreme commitment to the ecosystem and have delivered quality products do deserve to be respected as a service provider, not a bounty shop.
I’d be completely comfortable with some built in premium as it retains good builders and, good builders in turn reinvest their efforts back into the ecosystem. This is superior to a bargain basement race to the bottom of grant bounty hunters just to undercut ten thousand here or there off total cost. Especially when they then take the money and leave. It’s not always about pm’ing grants for the cheapest solution
Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.
Thank you, Paulo for this proposal!
GFX believes these features would be incredibly useful and well worth the spend.
Voting power tags will help delegates know quickly when a commenter is entrusted with significant voting power, is a minor delegate, or is an outside observer.
Thank you, Paulo for this proposal!
GFX believes these features would be incredibly useful and well worth the spend.
Voting power tags will help delegates know quickly when a commenter is entrusted with significant voting power, is a minor delegate, or is an outside observer.
Live voting with a quick link to the appropriate voting venue should hopefully increase the timeliness and participation for votes. As it stands now, a casual observer may have difficulty knowing when a vote has begun and tracking its outcome. Having an easy user flow from the parent forum thread to the vote is an upgrade with no down side.
We want to simultaneously highlight the email notifications as well as disclose that PaperImperium, who is the governance lead at GFX Labs, did previously have a small investment in Senate (which wound down), which this development team were part of. The email notifications in particular are a simple thing that makes for a lot of time savings and improved response time, which we can attest to from the days that Senate was operating similar notifications. We felt the loss of that, and our daily routine to get up to speed on forum discussions and proposals is longer than it was when those notifications were available.
Overall, these are all pure quality-of-life upgrades for delegates and forum observers (like reporters and academic researchers). $100k/year will easily pay for itself in time saved, and hopefully increased and more timely participation as well.
We support this proposal.
You can also reach to me on Telegram, where my handle is @paulofonseca1987, if you prefer to give us private feedback about this proposal. Thank you!
Thanks @paulofonseca for this proposal and for leading this initiative. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a lot of discussions / proposals around DAO tooling for enabling efficient delegate participation via forums and other comms channels and we welcome all efforts geared at solving this challenge.
Even for a two-year period, on a surface level, it’s hard to justify why this would require a budget of $200k. Could you provide at least high-level details on what it will take to build and maintain these forum integrations, so we can both assess and get a clearer sense of how much capacity is required to pull this off?
In line with the previous point on costs, I believe this feature (email notifications) has already been implemented on the app (I signed up and subscribed to the feature), meaning the functionality has already been built and is already accessible anyways? In my understanding, the only thing to be done here is allowing users to access the (already existing) feature via the forum rather than building a new feature from scratch? Please let me know if my understanding is correct.
Otherwise, I believe the email notifications feature is perhaps the most important one here. From a delegate standpoint, this would be very helpful. Discourse has a native feature that allows you to track *existing discussions/threads, but being able to be notified about newly created discussions will be incredibly helpful.
In my view, features centred around forum notifications are the most valuable for delegates. There is a lot to keep track of in terms of updates, discussions, etc. For instance (and perhaps as a suggestion), enabling highly customizable notifications is something we would 100% get behind. We don’t just want to be notified of all posts, which, in itself, is not very different from manually checking the “New” tab on the forum every now and then. We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords. This will massively improve the experience for us as delegates and truly help us stay in the weeds of what’s being discussed at every point in time.
Hey @Entropy thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
I agree we should evaluate proposals like this in the broader scope and context of the DAO.
Regarding this proposal being a prudent spending of DAO resources or not, I would point out that the DAO is currently spending approximately $200k USD per month on delegate incentives, on average. The DAO is also paying Entropy Advisors $200k USD per month for their services.
We believe a fairer framing through which delegates should evaluate this proposal is not one where they argue from their own particular bias and point of view, but a more holistic one that prioritizes the quality of life improvements for all delegates and users of this forum.
A framing like this one that David described previously in this thread:
I therefore urge delegates to evaluate this proposal based on its perceived impact over the next two years, during which we will enhance this set of features and deliver ongoing quality of life and user experience improvements for delegates in Arbitrum DAO.
gm and thank you for the proposal.
Based on my usage of the current tools (forum, Snapshot, Tally), here’s my perspective:
We believe it’s essential for Arbitrum DAO to have multiple governance platforms available to its tokenholders, delegates, and voters to attract more and better delegates and voters by providing tools that suit their needs and facilitate easier, clearer governance engagement.
Regarding the proposed features, my thoughts are:
Voting power tags: Useful. Filtering voices based on voting power would help highlight key contributors and reduce noise from less relevant comments.
Live voting: Not needed. I prefer to form my own opinion by reading all comments before heading to Snapshot to vote.
Email notifications: would not use. Snapshot already has similar functionality, and I wouldn’t want notifications for every forum post.
Personally, I’d like to see features that address overly long or verbose responses, such as a way to summarize or collapse them. It would also be valuable to highlight the most upvoted comments, ideally weighted by voting power, to surface the most influential and relevant feedback.
Thanks
We support this proposal, and believe each of the 3 integrations are necessary. However, the extent to which they are necessary varies. For instance, email reminders are a convenient way to encourage DAO participation, while voting power tags are necessary for continued DAO functionality.
If we can sequence integration, beginning with voting power tags as a minimally viable implementation, it may reduce costs or at least focus initial development on the most impactful feature. We understand that much of the cost arises from back-end indexing, so front-end trade-offs may not significantly affect the budget. Still, a phased approach could be worth exploring.
Regarding voting power tags, this is absolutely necessary. There needs to be a mechanism for sorting through AI-generated slop, and while imperfect, filtering for voting power is a start. This is also a launchpad for a vital conversation on what we want forum discussions to be in the age of AI –– what is the extent of AI involvement that should be tolerated? At the risk of becoming too speculative, will voting power tags be a segway to on-chain verification of forum contributors? There is no clear answer, but definitely something to think about as we consider how to improve the governance forum.
Also, the idea that voting power tags will rig the forum in favor of larger delegates has merit, but neglects to mention the fact that larger delegates are typically greater contributors to the forum in the first place. As mentioned, forum contributions do carry more weight if they are backed by greater voting power. By no means does this mean we should disregard those with little voting power, and we trust the DAO will not disregard posts simply due to that fact.
Overall, we love the idea of improving the governance forum. Thanks to all those involved in making this forum as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Michigan Blockchain | Jack Verrill | TG @JackVerrill
Members of the Entropy Advisors team have provided brief feedback to Paulo as he built out proposals.app as a grant recipient, and appreciate the time, effort, and passion that has gone into the project.
With that being said, this proposal doesn’t represent a prudent use of resources when weighed against its expected impact on the DAO. We admit that Entropy may be biased in this response considering the fact that we are a large delegate and a very high-context company when it comes to the Arbitrum DAO. Our team already checks the forum every day, knows the voting power of relevant commentators, and feels as though the social contract for posting proposals on Thursdays has made the timing of offchain and onchain votes highly predictable. As such, we do not see $206,400 worth of value coming from this proposal’s implementation.
The proposed feature additions to the forum are “nice-to-have” marginal updates. As mentioned by previous comments, Discourse already has a built-in email notification feature, and, as first mentioned by @tane, Entropy has an in-house tool that sends Telegram notifications for forum posts that only costs $20/month. Similarly, it is not overly cumbersome to check Tally/Snapshot for live votes either, thus making the live tracking on the forum a minimal improvement. In terms of the voting power tags, it would be a nice-to-have novelty, but, again, there is already a plethora of sources to identify delegates’ voting power (e.g., we regularly leverage Dune for deeper analysis of active proposals and the delegate base).
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
While we appreciate all the work that Paulo has put into proposals.app, we do not view this proposal as offering sufficient value to justify the $206,400 cost. We do not see this as a tool that our team would rely on or that would be a significant quality-of-life improvement for dedicated delegates. As such, this wouldn’t be a prudent resource allocation opportunity in our view, even at a fraction of the budget.
Hey @Ignas thank you for reading, for the kind words, and the feedback!
You do bring a very valid point about the continuation of service with this proposal and what happened with our previous VC-backed startup, Senate.
Hey @Ignas thank you for reading, for the kind words, and the feedback!
You do bring a very valid point about the continuation of service with this proposal and what happened with our previous VC-backed startup, Senate.
For context, Senate mostly started at the end of 2022, with three co-founders, @andreiv, me, and another co-founder. We launched the first version of the product in March 2023, and then after that launch and a good reception of that product, we started to raise a seed round that we closed in August 2023 (apparently the worst month to raise money in crypto in the previous 8 years =) of around $800K USD total. We had an impressive roster of angels and investors, one that I'm very proud of, and that is highly respected in the DAO community. Shortly after, we realized that we couldn't figure out a way to come up with a business model, in the DAO governance space, that would bring a sizable return to our investors, and amid some other co-founder misalignment issues, we decided to shut down the company and return the remaining of the funds to our investors (after all was said and done, the investors got most of their money back). Additionally, and most importantly, we returned the small symbolic payment we received from Aave for the email notification forum integration, immediately after we decided to shut down the company, as can be seen here.
So, needless to say, when Andrei and I decided to double down and build something similar with proposals.app, we took a very different approach to it. =)
So nowadays... proposals.app is fully open-source and can be self-hosted by anyone. Just like we do right now. If we literally die, and the servers go down, it should take a not-so-technically-minded person aided by a coding LLM, and some beefy servers, just a couple of hours, to spin up a full instance of proposals.app back-end, front-end, and forum integrations, and restore the level of service and functionality promised in this proposal.
First of all, Paulo is a trusted member of the Arbitrum DAO community, so this proposal already has a positive feel to me :). Thanks @paulofonseca and the team for continuing to invest in improving governance infra!
I like the three features mentioned, they’re practical and thoughtful and definitely have a yes from me:
First of all, Paulo is a trusted member of the Arbitrum DAO community, so this proposal already has a positive feel to me :). Thanks @paulofonseca and the team for continuing to invest in improving governance infra!
I like the three features mentioned, they’re practical and thoughtful and definitely have a yes from me:
Voting Power Tags help readers see who the big delegates are in discussions, and adds clarity and accountability.
Live Votes make it easier to follow and vote directly from the forum, super helpful for busy delegates and newcomers.
Email notifications are a great way to keep community members in the loop, especially those not active on the forum.
That said, I do have one concern. After seeing what happened with the Senate tool in Aave DAO passed in Sept 2023, stopped by Dec. I worry about what happens if things don’t go as planned here.
The payment is done in 3 months, but the work is supposed to last 2 years. I think we should add backup plan in case the team can’t continue midway. While I trust the team’s intent, the DAO must safeguard itself.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into mapping the fragmented governance journey and trying to stitch the experience together in one place. As active delegates we constantly bounce between the forum, Snapshot, Tally, block explorers, and a swarm of dashboards; that cognitive overhead is real, so a unified front-end that lowers the “where do I click next?” friction is directionally attractive.
It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
We appreciate the effort that the proposals.app team has put into mapping the fragmented governance journey and trying to stitch the experience together in one place. As active delegates we constantly bounce between the forum, Snapshot, Tally, block explorers, and a swarm of dashboards; that cognitive overhead is real, so a unified front-end that lowers the “where do I click next?” friction is directionally attractive.
It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
However, in line with @Oni’s observation, the quoted $200 k over two years feels steep for three stand-alone features. Live vote surfacing is the clear standout: it connects the conversation layer to the decision layer, giving readers an at-a-glance pulse of what actually matters right now. By contrast, voting-power tags and extended email alerts strike us as nice-to-have embellishments whose marginal utility is harder to price at six figures. Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.
Because we do see value in credibly neutral, open-source tooling, we would prefer a structure that lowers the cost for the DAO while still supporting the experiment. One concrete suggestion would be Cost-sharing with other DAOs. If these integrations are broadly applicable, splitting hosting and maintenance across multiple communities would drop Arbitrum’s share to a level that better matches the incremental benefit.
There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.
We could also narrow the scope and shorten the period to start smaller.
I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing. :saluting_face:
With tighter scope, shorter runway, and shared overhead, we believe Arbitrum can support this initiative without over-committing treasury resources. We look forward to seeing a revised proposal that balances ambition with fiscal prudence and provides objective success metrics up front.
Hey @Tane thank you for reading, for the kind words, and for giving your feedback!
Addressing your feedback:
Hey @Tane thank you for reading, for the kind words, and for giving your feedback!
Addressing your feedback:
Several community members have already built comparable widgets at a fraction of the proposed cost, or even ourselves for internal purpose as well, so the premium needs stronger justification than we have seen so far.
We don’t believe this is a fair comparison. Building an one-off widget or an internal tool requires a way lower level of commitment and maintenance that is totally different than what we are proposing here. The bulk of the cost in our proposal, pertains to the Maintenance + Hosting line item because it is actually the most valuable service we are proposing to offer to Arbitrum DAO.
On the other hand, with this proposal, we are guaranteeing that whatever happens, Arbitrum DAO will have these feature integrations up to date and reliably working on its governance forum. And everybody that has built quality reliable software before, especially in the DAO governance space, knows this is quite hard to pull off.
Especially when it comes to have reliable governance data. And specifically delegates voting power, which is a really hard thing to get constantly reliable data of.
For example, and I just checked this right now, you can see that @Plutus(0xbbe98d590d7eb99f4a236587f2441826396053d3) voting power is being reported as 954.28K ARB on Tally, but as 954.37K ARB on Karma.
The correct voting power, as per the ARB token contract, at 12:19pm today, aka. at the 22666976 ethereum block is 954.33K ARB (or 954328.938917807101820975 ARB to be more precise) and that's what we have on the proposals.app back-end, as you can see in the screenshot below where it shows 954328.94 ARB at June 9, 2025, 12:18 PM (UTC)
And look, I’m not trying to put down other governance tools in this space with the example above, I’m just trying to highlight, that once you look close enough (and we’ve been doing that for quite a while) it is actually quite hard to index governance data reliably.
Our open-source, non-profit, public goods funded approach at proposals.app is the best way we can think of, of having a reliable, long-term infrastructure for this kind of thing, that can serve DAOs for the long run. That’s why we believe that relying on DAOs like Arbitrum to fund these development efforts instead of pursuing a VC backed approach, is the right strategy.
And that’s why we put up this proposal for Arbitrum DAO to fund these forum integrations and align the future of proposals.app with the Arbitrum DAO.
Hey @jameskbh thank you for reading, for the continued interest and support, and for that suggestion!
And yes, we are aiming of putting this up for a vote, as a whole package, with a basic voting type of :green_square: For / :yellow_square: Abstain / :red_square: Against for the offchain vote on Snapshot and with the proposed whole-package price.
Hey @jameskbh thank you for reading, for the continued interest and support, and for that suggestion!
And yes, we are aiming of putting this up for a vote, as a whole package, with a basic voting type of :green_square: For / :yellow_square: Abstain / :red_square: Against for the offchain vote on Snapshot and with the proposed whole-package price.
We could maybe use an approval vote type of vote, to gauge which features would be more popular among delegates, and then go to the onchain vote with a proposal that includes the features that had more than the 3% quorum of voting weight in the offchain vote, with a package price for that selection of features. To be honest, the final price tag wouldn't be that much cheaper, proportionally per item, if we were to do just 1 or 2 of the 3 proposed features. So right now, this 3 feature package is probably the best deal we can offer to Arbitrum DAO.
In the opposite direction, we've got some feedback, in private, of some other additional features we could also do (not now, but in the near future) and if we would add a 4th feature, the whole package would become cheaper, in a per item basis.
And regarding this issue, we would also like to highlight and echo what fellow builder @daveytea says above:
We believe these three usability and accessibility improvements, in tandem, will bring a better experience to delegates in Arbitrum DAO. They will make delegates lives easier, minimize mistakes (there have been cases of delegates voting in one proposal with the reason for another proposal for example), improve voter participation (since delegates will get timely emails reminding them to vote), and bring more clarity overall about who is who in Arbitrum DAO (since everybody will be able to see the voting power of commenters in this forum).
This is a strong step forward for improving governance UX. The integrations are practical, composable, and well-scoped. LFG :fire:
Thanks for this proposal!
As one able to test some of those features in your app, I must say I find them useful. Some more, and some, not so much. Each person has their own flow, and that reflects how they value the features proposed here. I have a question/suggestion:
Thanks for this proposal!
As one able to test some of those features in your app, I must say I find them useful. Some more, and some, not so much. Each person has their own flow, and that reflects how they value the features proposed here. I have a question/suggestion:
How are you planning to put this up for a vote? Yes/No/Abstain for the whole package? Is it possible to breakdown the costs so we can have a modular approach to it and have the voting options to reflect that?
Thanks in advance!
Hey @itugov thank you for reading and giving your feedback!
In the comment above I just detailed the costs for the Maintenance + Hosting cost a bit further.
Hey @itugov thank you for reading and giving your feedback!
In the comment above I just detailed the costs for the Maintenance + Hosting cost a bit further.
The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.
Let me know if that brings more clarity into it.
Also, I would like to point out that proposals.app is not VC backed, and will be operating as a public goods funded, non-profit entity. Meaning that the costs are not being subsidized by investors hoping to get a return on their investment. As we say in the proposal above, we deeply believe that DAO tooling should be fully open-source, credibly neutral and funded in a public goods fashion. That usually implies that open-source driven organizations need to rely on maintenance subscriptions to maintain their products up to par and to offer the best possible experience to their users.
Hey @danielo thank you for reading our proposal and for the positive words about the features we proposed.
Addressing your concerns:
Hey @danielo thank you for reading our proposal and for the positive words about the features we proposed.
Addressing your concerns:
Regarding the contract length, I agree with you that maybe the proposal flow in Arbitrum DAO will decrease given the proposed new vision (I pointed that out myself last month here) but we still don't know for sure what is going to happen regarding that. The fact is that in April we had less proposals and votes than the last 6 months, but it feels to me like it picked up a little bit more in May. Also, the reason we proposed a 2 year contract for Arbitrum DAO is so that Arbitrum can lock down this $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting price, for the next 2 years. One year from now, the price for these features will most likely be higher than what we are proposing now, so by committing to a 2 year contract, Arbitrum DAO would actually be getting a better deal than committing to a 1 year contract only.
Regarding the overall cost, it is very reductive to evaluate the cost for these features based solely on the 3 actual features we propose. The reality is that these features only work, and are only reliable, if there is a back-end platform that correctly indexes data and processes this data. This back-end needs to be constantly improved and is actually quite costly to run. We've spent the last 9 months developing that back-end under the scope of proposals.app and the last 3 years if we include the scope of Senate as well. This back-end is what powers the currently available arbitrum.proposals.app platform launched in April, and it will power all of these proposed features.
Having worked in user research, ux design, and software development myself for the last 15 years, while running companies that provide these services, and having designed and delivered dozens of apps for different industries all over the world, I feel these costs are actually very reasonable for a quality and reliable product.
I appreciate the intention to improve the forum environment, but I have concerns about the proportionality between the proposed features and the budget requested. I would also like to comment on the features.
I appreciate the intention to improve the forum environment, but I have concerns about the proportionality between the proposed features and the budget requested. I would also like to comment on the features.
As someone with a UX/UI perspective, I recognize that displaying “Live Votes” results could add real functional value by making it easier to track proposals and better understand the governance process. On the other hand, while "Proposal Notification Emails" aren’t essential, they could still be helpful for certain users (myself included) as reminders to stay updated on new proposals and key voting stages.
However, the "Voting Power Tags" feature doesn’t seem to address a critical need or provide a clear benefit to the user experience. In my opinion, such tags could unintentionally introduce bias into discussions by conditioning the perception of comments based on the voting power, rather than the content itself.
Therefore, the total budget of $206,400 USD should be considered, with $120,000 for maintenance and hosting only, as I consider this to be a little high given the scope of the improvements. It is not that these features do not add value, but the proposed cost is high for a change that does not fundamentally transform participation or address urgent problems in the system.
I think a more reasonable alternative would be to prioritize the visibility of the most impactful feature, “Live Votes” and evaluate its adoption before moving forward with the others. This would allow for a more data-driven and cost-effective approach.
I value you effort to improve the DAO, but in this case, moving forward with the full proposal doesn’t seem like the most efficient path. A more gradual, focused rollout with a leaner budget might deliver better results. In addition, @paulofonseca I would like to share some ideas that came to me while I was writing. :saluting_face:
Hey @cp0x thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Just to clarify that the third feature, of Proposal Emails Notifications notifies not just when new forum proposals are available but also, when new offchain (snapshot) and onchain votes start and are about to end.
Hey @cp0x thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Just to clarify that the third feature, of Proposal Emails Notifications notifies not just when new forum proposals are available but also, when new offchain (snapshot) and onchain votes start and are about to end.
The email notification currently look like this, and you can go to arbitrum.proposals.app/profile to subscribe to them. What we are offering here is an easier way for users of these forum to subscribe to these email notifications.
Regarding the cost concerns, especially regarding the maintenance + hosting cost, allow me to offer a bit more context for those amounts.
The hosting cost is $1,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes all server costs, and software to run the whole infrastructure of proposals.app that is dedicated to Arbitrum DAO. This includes 2 hosting servers, 1 AI server, the email deliverability service, DNS service, and the DevOps cost to maintain all of the infrastructure working properly and reliably. You can see an overview of all our back-end services and servers uptime in status.proposals.app.
The maintenance cost is $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years. This includes 1 day of Design, 1 day of Development and 1 day of Testing per month. This allows us to offer a dedicated support to Arbitrum DAO, to fix any bugs that are found, as soon as possible and to even improve the features we are offering here with more functionality. As we keep building the core product of proposals.app with more features, these 3 feature integrations in the forum will become better and richer over time. We already got some feedback in private of how these feature integrations could evolve and offer an even better experience for delegates, tokenholders, and users in this forum.
You can see the details of the cost breakdown in this spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.
Hi, Paolo!|
Sorry if I sound too picky, but to me, $1,000/month for server costs seems excessive — especially considering the actual workload.
Hi, Paolo!|
Sorry if I sound too picky, but to me, $1,000/month for server costs seems excessive — especially considering the actual workload.
For comparison: one of the top-tier hosting providers offers insanely powerful machines for $1,000/month — enough to run multiple Solana or Hyperliquid nodes simultaneously. https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/prices/?display=list&range=high_grade For the tasks described here, such infrastructure is clearly overkill.
Could you please share the server specifications? What exactly justifies this level of hardware?
Also, I genuinely don’t understand why two separate servers are needed (especially when hosting implies 24/7 availability) — and third for for AI. Why not consolidate into a single, high-performance machine?
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years:
That’s 24 max hours total per month, which breaks down to $166/hour and more/
Isn’t that a bit steep for such a limited scope of work?
Thanks for the offer
I have used this application and I want to say that the first two functions are very convenient and would definitely be useful for Arbitrum. The third function for mailing seems to me to duplicate the existing mailings from the forum a little, although in a more convenient format
Thanks for the offer
I have used this application and I want to say that the first two functions are very convenient and would definitely be useful for Arbitrum. The third function for mailing seems to me to duplicate the existing mailings from the forum a little, although in a more convenient format
Among the disadvantages, I see the cost. For crypto, any amount can be presented as small lately. However, for each item of the estimate, I have a feeling that the cost is too high, especially for Maintenance + Hosting (2 years) $120,000 USD (for example, I rent a server for my site, which costs me $5-10 per month, I don’t understand where this cost comes from)
There is probably more than one solution here, but if Paulo considers this a fair price for all items, then he has the opportunity to distribute this cost between different forums of other projects. Due to this, we will get improvements for reasonable money.
Hey @Oni Thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Please really do reach out to me on telegram to share those ideas that came up!
Addressing your feedback:
These features feel useful and I can see myself using them. But I have concerns with the proposal:
I haven’t reviewed deeply enough to comment on budget one way or another.
But, what I can say is the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO. Builders (such as Paulo) who have shown extreme commitment to the ecosystem and have delivered quality products do deserve to be respected as a service provider, not a bounty shop.
I haven’t reviewed deeply enough to comment on budget one way or another.
But, what I can say is the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO. Builders (such as Paulo) who have shown extreme commitment to the ecosystem and have delivered quality products do deserve to be respected as a service provider, not a bounty shop.
I’d be completely comfortable with some built in premium as it retains good builders and, good builders in turn reinvest their efforts back into the ecosystem. This is superior to a bargain basement race to the bottom of grant bounty hunters just to undercut ten thousand here or there off total cost. Especially when they then take the money and leave. It’s not always about pm’ing grants for the cheapest solution
Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.
Thank you, Paulo for this proposal!
GFX believes these features would be incredibly useful and well worth the spend.
Voting power tags will help delegates know quickly when a commenter is entrusted with significant voting power, is a minor delegate, or is an outside observer.
Thank you, Paulo for this proposal!
GFX believes these features would be incredibly useful and well worth the spend.
Voting power tags will help delegates know quickly when a commenter is entrusted with significant voting power, is a minor delegate, or is an outside observer.
Live voting with a quick link to the appropriate voting venue should hopefully increase the timeliness and participation for votes. As it stands now, a casual observer may have difficulty knowing when a vote has begun and tracking its outcome. Having an easy user flow from the parent forum thread to the vote is an upgrade with no down side.
We want to simultaneously highlight the email notifications as well as disclose that PaperImperium, who is the governance lead at GFX Labs, did previously have a small investment in Senate (which wound down), which this development team were part of. The email notifications in particular are a simple thing that makes for a lot of time savings and improved response time, which we can attest to from the days that Senate was operating similar notifications. We felt the loss of that, and our daily routine to get up to speed on forum discussions and proposals is longer than it was when those notifications were available.
Overall, these are all pure quality-of-life upgrades for delegates and forum observers (like reporters and academic researchers). $100k/year will easily pay for itself in time saved, and hopefully increased and more timely participation as well.
We support this proposal.
You can also reach to me on Telegram, where my handle is @paulofonseca1987, if you prefer to give us private feedback about this proposal. Thank you!
Hey @Oni Thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Please really do reach out to me on telegram to share those ideas that came up!
Addressing your feedback:
Regarding the features, we actually feel like the Voting Power Tags is the more interesting feature of the 3, in the sense that it is the most novel, experimental, and therefore the one from which we could learn the most. As an anecdote for context, I gave a talk yesterday at ETH Belgrade where I talked about DAO governance and how proposals.app aims to help with our typical messy governance in DAOs, and I showed the demo of these features in the talk as examples of something that could help untangle the mess a little bit. One of the attendees (who works at the Ethereum Foundation) asked a question precisely about the bias that these Voting Power tags could introduce in the discourse and deliberation phase of proposals in a DAO and we then talked at length after the talk about the pros and cons of it. We came to the conclusion that there is more downside to not knowing who is commenting on a forum, then the potential bias it introduces by showing the voting power. Another feedback we had from some other delegates in private about this feature, is that it could show more info other than the voting power, like the delegate karma score, number of proposals published, etc.
Regarding the cost concerns, as replied above, we think the total $206,400 USD cost should be evaluated from a point of view that the $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting cost is also required for the whole back-end platform that powers these features, not just the actual three proposed features themselves.
Also, as a general note, and echoing what fellow builder @DonOfDAOs says above, we believe Arbitrum DAO should invest in builders and products that are aligned with the DAO, not from a at-cost perspective, but from an empowering and future proofing perspective.
the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO
Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.
The Arbitrum DAO should not expect to pay dedicated service providers with track record and commitment to the DAO, in feature by feature fashion, and get a good quality result out of it.
Hey @Oni Thank you for reading and giving feedback!
Please really do reach out to me on telegram to share those ideas that came up!
Addressing your feedback:
Regarding the features, we actually feel like the Voting Power Tags is the more interesting feature of the 3, in the sense that it is the most novel, experimental, and therefore the one from which we could learn the most. As an anecdote for context, I gave a talk yesterday at ETH Belgrade where I talked about DAO governance and how proposals.app aims to help with our typical messy governance in DAOs, and I showed the demo of these features in the talk as examples of something that could help untangle the mess a little bit. One of the attendees (who works at the Ethereum Foundation) asked a question precisely about the bias that these Voting Power tags could introduce in the discourse and deliberation phase of proposals in a DAO and we then talked at length after the talk about the pros and cons of it. We came to the conclusion that there is more downside to not knowing who is commenting on a forum, then the potential bias it introduces by showing the voting power. Another feedback we had from some other delegates in private about this feature, is that it could show more info other than the voting power, like the delegate karma score, number of proposals published, etc.
Regarding the cost concerns, as replied above, we think the total $206,400 USD cost should be evaluated from a point of view that the $60,000 USD a year maintenance + hosting cost is also required for the whole back-end platform that powers these features, not just the actual three proposed features themselves.
Also, as a general note, and echoing what fellow builder @DonOfDAOs says above, we believe Arbitrum DAO should invest in builders and products that are aligned with the DAO, not from a at-cost perspective, but from an empowering and future proofing perspective.
the notion of completely at-cost build is reductionist to the advancement of the DAO
Investing in builders, (especially for non-exorbitant amounts) is worth the extra bit.
The Arbitrum DAO should not expect to pay dedicated service providers with track record and commitment to the DAO, in feature by feature fashion, and get a good quality result out of it.
