Thank ARB by Plurality Labs - Milestone 2: Scaling Value Creation in the DAO
This proposal is currently on Snapshot. 1/26/24 - 2/2/24
EDIT 1/25/24
6 months ago, Arbitrum DAO voted to fund the first of three Milestones to build and deploy a best-in-class grants framework for Arbitrum (AIP-3). We are approaching the end of Milestone 1. (Review Milestone 1 here). This proposal is to fund Milestone 2.
In Milestone 1, our primary objective was to establish the rails for a scalable Pluralistic Grants Framework. Now, with Milestone 2, our primary objective is to show that we can scale our framework to support a truly decentralized and sustainable future.
To do this, as planned, we will be increasing the funds we are allocating. In Milestone 1, we made an annualized request of 6.4M ARB. Our recommendation with Milestone 2 is to increase the allocation fund size to $30 million in ARB annualized, which enables us to optimize for scale and value creation.
In this proposal, we will outline the use of funds and the importance of leveraging these funds immediately. Additionally, we have included a soft voting mechanism in Snapshot to ensure that the amount for Milestone 2 is aligned with the needs and desires of ArbitrumDAO.
We want to see a world where no matter who you are or where you're from, you can be compensated fairly for the value you create. We want to see an open contribution economy built on digital public infrastructure. It’s who we are. It’s why we’re here.
We want to help create enormous value for everyone in Arbitrum. We can do that by ensuring that capture-resistant governance scales and drives efficiencies across the DAO. If we succeed in this goal, the whole ecosystem wins - including us.
Our discovery process during Milestone 1 generated the following vision and mission which further excites us about the potential and capability of the Arbitrum community: Fueling financial sovereignty by spearheading the evolution of decentralized technologies and governance.
We must, in the words of CoinFlip, address “pressing demands dictated by the rapidly evolving landscape”. A Pluralistic Grants Framework must be in place now. We must not wait, we must not be slow, we must not tread lightly.
We must be willing to take big bets and make big experiments now. Doing so will attract the top talent, it’ll signal to the ecosystem that we are here to create enormous value, and it’ll allow us, together, to continue to lead this market.
We believe DAOs can better align incentives than our centralized counterparts. But to date, DAOs haven’t generally shown strong alignment: top talent is sitting on the sidelines; value opportunities are sitting on the table; and spending is not strategic.
We believe DAOs have not had the tools and capabilities – a Pluralistic Grants Framework – to support strong incentives alignment. Without those capabilities, DAOs tend to centralize to become more efficient or to suboptimally allocate their treasuries.
We believe in a world in which all Arbitrum citizens are rewarded for the value they create – a world based on open contribution rather than gatekeeping; a world where Arbitrum benefits from the value creation of all its citizens.
For a distributed, decentralized community to truly scale and sustain, it must embrace a Pluralistic Grants Framework accessible to all community members. One size does not fit all.
We believe, based on enormous experience across ecosystems – and borne out in our work throughout Milestone 1 – that for pluralistic grants to drive optimal impact, they must embody three components:
A requirement for scaling Ethereum is the ability for decentralized contributors to feel secure that the system will not be “captured” by a centralized actor; that it will realize the potential of truly neutral digital public infrastructure by staying credibly neutral.
“Credible neutrality” unlocks enormous value because builders will make more and bigger investments when they know their investments won’t be lost as a result of corruption, bots, or bad actors.
Scaling with speed is a requirement for winning the L2 race. Yet scalability is an enormous problem for all web3 ecosystems. From the culture of airdrop farming to the difficulty of aligning decentralized and autonomous participants, there remain numerous reasons to slow down or centralize – but this is not the goal of Arbitrum.
Arbitrum must credibly scale grants funding to maintain its role as the leading L2. A well-structured Pluralistic Grants Framework can leverage and fund many methodologies for sourcing and funding the best tools and capabilities to the unique needs of scaling decentralized systems.
Web3 ecosystems must allocate funds in ways that drive optimal utility, efficiency, and value. Unfortunately, while ecosystems can quickly allocate out tokens, those allocations have often fallen short on delivering the desired value.
Frameworks tend to optimize for fairness over quality. Many choose poor approximations of value like TVL in the first place, thus setting themselves up to pay for acquisition rather than engagement.
A winning framework must understand what communities value, validate their assumptions, elevate high performers, cut low performers, and support broad marketplace adoption. Our Pluralistic Grants Framework – and the technology that supports it – optimizes for the above.
In Milestone 1, Thank ARB built the rails for and rolled out the three components of our Pluralistic Grants Frameworks.
Sense: We began a continuous “complexity aware” sensing process by polling over 17,000 Arbitrum users, validating those needs in further questioning and workshops, and emerging four strategies for funding aligned with the needs of the DAO.
Respond: We quickly allocated 3 million ARB to 12 grant programs which funded almost 200 grantees aligned with the needs of the DAO. These brought top talent into the ecosystem like Open Block Labs STIP data monitoring which will continue to drive value. This one grant alone is likely to save the DAO millions.
Evolve: We’ve used the Thrive Protocol and Karma to power community-led review of every grant the DAO has funded. We’ve gathered additional data through various feedback modalities and one-on-one conversations. All of this is already informing and improving our work in preparation for Milestone 2.
For an in-depth analysis of our Milestone 1 allocations, experiments, and key learnings, please review this forum post.
While the value of the work we did in Milestone I will continue to emerge over the course of the coming months and years, these are the some of the big wins we are particularly proud of:
The Plurality Labs initial proposal to Delegates:
Plurality Labs has built out the start of a best-in-class pluralist grants framework for the Arbitrum ecosystem - and, based on feedback and learning, here is how we are preparing for scale:
It is hard to maintain context and awareness of DAO contributions. To be a good DAO citizen people must know:
Provide aggregated communications on ThankARB.com segmented to personas. Build on Milestone 1 efforts:
Improving communication to mobilize the DAO will have a profound impact on our ability to find top talent and generate innovation.
Passing an AIP in our DAO is hard. It requires a builder to be a diplomat, a salesperson, and to not being paid for months. Top builders can better fund themselves elsewhere. Building pathways and structures for participation will minimize starting friction. To do this we need:
Design and test accountability structures. Put the successful ones onchain and under direct control of DAO voters. Fund efforts to:
Workstreams will support continuous impact. Providing pathways will attract top-tier talent to Arbitrum
DAOs struggle to maintain a collective memory which allows successful builders more opportunity and cuts out underperformers. We are currently lacking:
Build user profiles via survey techniques, data analysis, and testing to enable the DAO to identify expertise, double down on winners, and cut off poor performers. Plurality Labs will deliver:
Community-led review will allow us to fairly automate grant pre-processing, criteria selection, eligibility reviews, dispute resolution and appeals, post-grant evaluation of builder success and funding decision success:
This will be posted on Snapshot on 1/25/24. If approved, it will move to Tally on 2/1.
PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig
Funding sent to multi sig: arb1:0xC158b555F0B1ddd7F4D4f97Fd2a9acd144f8e0D4
After many discussions with delegates and the results of the forum poll on this post, we have decided to go with one straight forward offer on Snapshot. This amount takes the price volatility of ARB into consideration as well.
Allocation Fund Size = $30 million in ARB using the 30 day moving average price of ARB on the day it is posted to Tally.
Plurality Labs Fee = $3.75 million
This makes $2.75 million subject to clawback by DAO vote.
Funding thoughts:
During Milestone 2 we intend to split our service fee between the dedicated Plurality Labs team and the ThriveCoin team to reflect the services provided. We intend to continuously upgrade the Thank ARB application in line with the needs of the DAO..
Sample allocation schedule for 2024 below:
The dedicated team which worked full time on Arbitrum during Milestone 1. We have earned trust in the Arbitrum community, and have an immense amount of experience at the forefront of grants & governance frameworks.
We are working ourselves out of a job through success in our building of a best-in-class pluralist grants framework which provides capture-resistance, scalability, and enormous value creation.
The Plurality Labs team currently has 4 FTE and is looking to hire 3-4 FTE immediately and another 3-4 FTE throughout the year.
Current:
To Hire:
ThriveCoin and the Thrive Protocol provides the underlying architecture supporting scale and decentralization for our Pluralistic Grants Framework. Without them, we could not have reached the number of followers on Thank ARB on Twitter, mobilized the community to participate in surveys & evaluations, or provided an increase in donation amounts during Gitcoin rounds, among other things.
As a subsidiary of ThriveCoin, Plurality Labs has used ThriveCoin’s tech and capabilities, and 16 team members, throughout Milestone 1. The ThriveCoin team will continue to be an enormous asset to us as we drive to scale. We hope the community appreciates the immense amount of additional resources allocated without any additional cost throughout Milestone 1.
Currently servicing Arbitrum:
To Hire:
Option 2 below is what we stated we would do in the proposal for Milestone 1. Compare it to this request for the Uniswap grants program allocating $46.2 million USD.
[poll type=regular results=always public=true chartType=bar]
Now is the time. Arbitrum is poised to win. We cannot afford to be slowed down when we are ahead. We are committed to increasing Arbitrum's lead while building interoperable systems which the DAO can take over before the end of our Milestone 3.
We are in a technological race to provide truly neutral digital public infrastructure. Let’s keep our foot on the gas. We want to prove that DAOs will be the future and that DAOs will be the killer app that onboards the next 3 billion crypto users.
On behalf of the whole Plurality Labs and Thrive teams, we are excited to continue building the Pluralistic Grants Framework that this ecosystem has embraced. It is something we own as a community. Together, we are spearheading the evolution of decentralized technologies & governance.
We are Fueling Financial Sovereignty.
Thank ARB by Plurality Labs - Milestone 2: Scaling Value Creation in the DAO
This proposal is currently on Snapshot. 1/26/24 - 2/2/24
EDIT 1/25/24
6 months ago, Arbitrum DAO voted to fund the first of three Milestones to build and deploy a best-in-class grants framework for Arbitrum (AIP-3). We are approaching the end of Milestone 1. (Review Milestone 1 here). This proposal is to fund Milestone 2.
In Milestone 1, our primary objective was to establish the rails for a scalable Pluralistic Grants Framework. Now, with Milestone 2, our primary objective is to show that we can scale our framework to support a truly decentralized and sustainable future.
To do this, as planned, we will be increasing the funds we are allocating. In Milestone 1, we made an annualized request of 6.4M ARB. Our recommendation with Milestone 2 is to increase the allocation fund size to $30 million in ARB annualized, which enables us to optimize for scale and value creation.
In this proposal, we will outline the use of funds and the importance of leveraging these funds immediately. Additionally, we have included a soft voting mechanism in Snapshot to ensure that the amount for Milestone 2 is aligned with the needs and desires of ArbitrumDAO.
We want to see a world where no matter who you are or where you're from, you can be compensated fairly for the value you create. We want to see an open contribution economy built on digital public infrastructure. It’s who we are. It’s why we’re here.
We want to help create enormous value for everyone in Arbitrum. We can do that by ensuring that capture-resistant governance scales and drives efficiencies across the DAO. If we succeed in this goal, the whole ecosystem wins - including us.
Our discovery process during Milestone 1 generated the following vision and mission which further excites us about the potential and capability of the Arbitrum community: Fueling financial sovereignty by spearheading the evolution of decentralized technologies and governance.
We must, in the words of CoinFlip, address “pressing demands dictated by the rapidly evolving landscape”. A Pluralistic Grants Framework must be in place now. We must not wait, we must not be slow, we must not tread lightly.
We must be willing to take big bets and make big experiments now. Doing so will attract the top talent, it’ll signal to the ecosystem that we are here to create enormous value, and it’ll allow us, together, to continue to lead this market.
We believe DAOs can better align incentives than our centralized counterparts. But to date, DAOs haven’t generally shown strong alignment: top talent is sitting on the sidelines; value opportunities are sitting on the table; and spending is not strategic.
We believe DAOs have not had the tools and capabilities – a Pluralistic Grants Framework – to support strong incentives alignment. Without those capabilities, DAOs tend to centralize to become more efficient or to suboptimally allocate their treasuries.
We believe in a world in which all Arbitrum citizens are rewarded for the value they create – a world based on open contribution rather than gatekeeping; a world where Arbitrum benefits from the value creation of all its citizens.
For a distributed, decentralized community to truly scale and sustain, it must embrace a Pluralistic Grants Framework accessible to all community members. One size does not fit all.
We believe, based on enormous experience across ecosystems – and borne out in our work throughout Milestone 1 – that for pluralistic grants to drive optimal impact, they must embody three components:
A requirement for scaling Ethereum is the ability for decentralized contributors to feel secure that the system will not be “captured” by a centralized actor; that it will realize the potential of truly neutral digital public infrastructure by staying credibly neutral.
“Credible neutrality” unlocks enormous value because builders will make more and bigger investments when they know their investments won’t be lost as a result of corruption, bots, or bad actors.
Scaling with speed is a requirement for winning the L2 race. Yet scalability is an enormous problem for all web3 ecosystems. From the culture of airdrop farming to the difficulty of aligning decentralized and autonomous participants, there remain numerous reasons to slow down or centralize – but this is not the goal of Arbitrum.
Arbitrum must credibly scale grants funding to maintain its role as the leading L2. A well-structured Pluralistic Grants Framework can leverage and fund many methodologies for sourcing and funding the best tools and capabilities to the unique needs of scaling decentralized systems.
Web3 ecosystems must allocate funds in ways that drive optimal utility, efficiency, and value. Unfortunately, while ecosystems can quickly allocate out tokens, those allocations have often fallen short on delivering the desired value.
Frameworks tend to optimize for fairness over quality. Many choose poor approximations of value like TVL in the first place, thus setting themselves up to pay for acquisition rather than engagement.
A winning framework must understand what communities value, validate their assumptions, elevate high performers, cut low performers, and support broad marketplace adoption. Our Pluralistic Grants Framework – and the technology that supports it – optimizes for the above.
In Milestone 1, Thank ARB built the rails for and rolled out the three components of our Pluralistic Grants Frameworks.
Sense: We began a continuous “complexity aware” sensing process by polling over 17,000 Arbitrum users, validating those needs in further questioning and workshops, and emerging four strategies for funding aligned with the needs of the DAO.
Respond: We quickly allocated 3 million ARB to 12 grant programs which funded almost 200 grantees aligned with the needs of the DAO. These brought top talent into the ecosystem like Open Block Labs STIP data monitoring which will continue to drive value. This one grant alone is likely to save the DAO millions.
Evolve: We’ve used the Thrive Protocol and Karma to power community-led review of every grant the DAO has funded. We’ve gathered additional data through various feedback modalities and one-on-one conversations. All of this is already informing and improving our work in preparation for Milestone 2.
For an in-depth analysis of our Milestone 1 allocations, experiments, and key learnings, please review this forum post.
While the value of the work we did in Milestone I will continue to emerge over the course of the coming months and years, these are the some of the big wins we are particularly proud of:
The Plurality Labs initial proposal to Delegates:
Plurality Labs has built out the start of a best-in-class pluralist grants framework for the Arbitrum ecosystem - and, based on feedback and learning, here is how we are preparing for scale:
It is hard to maintain context and awareness of DAO contributions. To be a good DAO citizen people must know:
Provide aggregated communications on ThankARB.com segmented to personas. Build on Milestone 1 efforts:
Improving communication to mobilize the DAO will have a profound impact on our ability to find top talent and generate innovation.
Passing an AIP in our DAO is hard. It requires a builder to be a diplomat, a salesperson, and to not being paid for months. Top builders can better fund themselves elsewhere. Building pathways and structures for participation will minimize starting friction. To do this we need:
Design and test accountability structures. Put the successful ones onchain and under direct control of DAO voters. Fund efforts to:
Workstreams will support continuous impact. Providing pathways will attract top-tier talent to Arbitrum
DAOs struggle to maintain a collective memory which allows successful builders more opportunity and cuts out underperformers. We are currently lacking:
Build user profiles via survey techniques, data analysis, and testing to enable the DAO to identify expertise, double down on winners, and cut off poor performers. Plurality Labs will deliver:
Community-led review will allow us to fairly automate grant pre-processing, criteria selection, eligibility reviews, dispute resolution and appeals, post-grant evaluation of builder success and funding decision success:
This will be posted on Snapshot on 1/25/24. If approved, it will move to Tally on 2/1.
PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig
Funding sent to multi sig: arb1:0xC158b555F0B1ddd7F4D4f97Fd2a9acd144f8e0D4
After many discussions with delegates and the results of the forum poll on this post, we have decided to go with one straight forward offer on Snapshot. This amount takes the price volatility of ARB into consideration as well.
Allocation Fund Size = $30 million in ARB using the 30 day moving average price of ARB on the day it is posted to Tally.
Plurality Labs Fee = $3.75 million
This makes $2.75 million subject to clawback by DAO vote.
Funding thoughts:
During Milestone 2 we intend to split our service fee between the dedicated Plurality Labs team and the ThriveCoin team to reflect the services provided. We intend to continuously upgrade the Thank ARB application in line with the needs of the DAO..
Sample allocation schedule for 2024 below:
The dedicated team which worked full time on Arbitrum during Milestone 1. We have earned trust in the Arbitrum community, and have an immense amount of experience at the forefront of grants & governance frameworks.
We are working ourselves out of a job through success in our building of a best-in-class pluralist grants framework which provides capture-resistance, scalability, and enormous value creation.
The Plurality Labs team currently has 4 FTE and is looking to hire 3-4 FTE immediately and another 3-4 FTE throughout the year.
Current:
To Hire:
ThriveCoin and the Thrive Protocol provides the underlying architecture supporting scale and decentralization for our Pluralistic Grants Framework. Without them, we could not have reached the number of followers on Thank ARB on Twitter, mobilized the community to participate in surveys & evaluations, or provided an increase in donation amounts during Gitcoin rounds, among other things.
As a subsidiary of ThriveCoin, Plurality Labs has used ThriveCoin’s tech and capabilities, and 16 team members, throughout Milestone 1. The ThriveCoin team will continue to be an enormous asset to us as we drive to scale. We hope the community appreciates the immense amount of additional resources allocated without any additional cost throughout Milestone 1.
Currently servicing Arbitrum:
To Hire:
Option 2 below is what we stated we would do in the proposal for Milestone 1. Compare it to this request for the Uniswap grants program allocating $46.2 million USD.
[poll type=regular results=always public=true chartType=bar]
Now is the time. Arbitrum is poised to win. We cannot afford to be slowed down when we are ahead. We are committed to increasing Arbitrum's lead while building interoperable systems which the DAO can take over before the end of our Milestone 3.
We are in a technological race to provide truly neutral digital public infrastructure. Let’s keep our foot on the gas. We want to prove that DAOs will be the future and that DAOs will be the killer app that onboards the next 3 billion crypto users.
On behalf of the whole Plurality Labs and Thrive teams, we are excited to continue building the Pluralistic Grants Framework that this ecosystem has embraced. It is something we own as a community. Together, we are spearheading the evolution of decentralized technologies & governance.
We are Fueling Financial Sovereignty.
you could've also just let the voting run until the end date and not delete all the data of the 24261 votes that were already submitted.
it's pretty ironic that we complain so much that people don't participate in DAO governance, and then when they do, we just delete the records of their participation.
you could've also just let the voting run until the end date and not delete all the data of the 24261 votes that were already submitted.
it's pretty ironic that we complain so much that people don't participate in DAO governance, and then when they do, we just delete the records of their participation.
for those that are curious about it, here is the dataset of all submitted votes on this snapshot proposal, until January 31, 2024 at 19:12:08 GMT, which I assume was moments before the proposal was deleted from snapshot by @Griff.
at that time, the proposal results were: 25,474,939 ARB – Do Not Fund PL's 2nd Milestone 23,832,630 ARB – Fund PL's 2nd Milestone 20,514,270 ARB – Abstain
also here is a plot of the decision flipping over time:
you could've also just let the voting run until the end date and not delete all the data of the 24261 votes that were already submitted.
it's pretty ironic that we complain so much that people don't participate in DAO governance, and then when they do, we just delete the records of their participation.
you could've also just let the voting run until the end date and not delete all the data of the 24261 votes that were already submitted.
it's pretty ironic that we complain so much that people don't participate in DAO governance, and then when they do, we just delete the records of their participation.
for those that are curious about it, here is the dataset of all submitted votes on this snapshot proposal, until January 31, 2024 at 19:12:08 GMT, which I assume was moments before the proposal was deleted from snapshot by @Griff.
at that time, the proposal results were: 25,474,939 ARB – Do Not Fund PL's 2nd Milestone 23,832,630 ARB – Fund PL's 2nd Milestone 20,514,270 ARB – Abstain
also here is a plot of the decision flipping over time:
Hey all! Don't have full context on this proposal, but I see mention of using Hats protocol to facilitate roles and accountability onchain, and figured this might be worth sharing.
The Hats team made a auxiliary contract they call Signergate, which is a zodiac expansion module for Safe multisigs, and enables you to have multisigs dynamically assigned to hats, such that a community can elect their multisig signers (plus a variety of other functionalities enabled by hats).
Hey all! Don't have full context on this proposal, but I see mention of using Hats protocol to facilitate roles and accountability onchain, and figured this might be worth sharing.
The Hats team made a auxiliary contract they call Signergate, which is a zodiac expansion module for Safe multisigs, and enables you to have multisigs dynamically assigned to hats, such that a community can elect their multisig signers (plus a variety of other functionalities enabled by hats).
I made this diagram to illustrate how a number of Signergate multisigs can function as committees which a larger community can oversee. The committees (depending on which chain/network you use) can also run grants rounds via grants stack, and maybe even other grants tooling.
I also wrote these brief articles explaining some of the mechanisms here:
What Are Onchain Organizations?
Anyway, happy to talk more about any of this if folks are interested, e.g. how to implement Hats signergate (a moloch DAO can summon a hat tree and then summon a signergate multisig within it!), but in any case, I wish you all the best in continuing to innovate upon public goods funding models.
<TLDR: Plurality gave our little dev DAO a shot, and now we're making big things happen for Arbitrum.>
Last year, DAO Masons was a newly formed DAO dev and design team hoping to make a positive impact within the Web3 DAO movement. We were working through the bear market as best we could, trying to make ends meet.
<TLDR: Plurality gave our little dev DAO a shot, and now we're making big things happen for Arbitrum.>
Last year, DAO Masons was a newly formed DAO dev and design team hoping to make a positive impact within the Web3 DAO movement. We were working through the bear market as best we could, trying to make ends meet.
It was Joe’s 500ARB Jokerace contest to design a pluralistic grants program that got us engaged with Arbitrum. We saw that Arbitrum was making a genuine effort to become a community-run DAO with solid governance processes, so we poured ourselves into designing something meaningful for them.
What we came up with is Grant Ships - the ‘evolutionary grants meta-framework.’ We won the contest, got some decent interest and feedback, and 500 ARB (see the original '2 minute read' submission for Grant Ships)
After that, we moved on to other projects with MakerDAO, Builder Nouns and some artist NFT drops, but we kept an eye on Arbitrum after that. What impressed us most was the way the delegate community stepped up to navigate the struggle around AIP-1.
When Plurality received the funding for their milestone 1, we applied to build Grant Ships for real.
We weren’t sure if we’d get it, but we took feedback, made some changes to Grant Ships. Finally we got approved for a grant that would fund us for a few months of building.
Not only that, we get to run a mini-grants program through thisnew system to fund other teams. This was a big win for our little DAO, and the timing was perfect because we were struggling to stay in the web3 game at all.
We’re now getting a lot of positive attention on our model and a lot of helpful feedback on how to make it better. We’re building a product that we hope can help make the web3 grants scene better overall.
Plurality is looking for teams that can build high impact projects, and every time they find and fund one, Arbitrum becomes a little healthier, a little stronger, a little more versatile.
We’re now able to stay involved solving challenging problems for DAOs and we hope to be a beacon for other teams and developers who are looking for an ecosystem to call home. If Milestone 2 gets funded, we can tell our network and there will be more stories like ours. This gives Arbitrum a better shot at meeting its full potential.
To us it’s a no-brainer. Plurality is doing it right, so they have our support.
We held a recent twitter spaces focused on Milestone 2 and a look back - https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1748831734802636930?s=20
Joe and Feems also spoke about measuring impact on green pill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJWZzeScz7M
Hey all! Don't have full context on this proposal, but I see mention of using Hats protocol to facilitate roles and accountability onchain, and figured this might be worth sharing.
The Hats team made a auxiliary contract they call Signergate, which is a zodiac expansion module for Safe multisigs, and enables you to have multisigs dynamically assigned to hats, such that a community can elect their multisig signers (plus a variety of other functionalities enabled by hats).
Hey all! Don't have full context on this proposal, but I see mention of using Hats protocol to facilitate roles and accountability onchain, and figured this might be worth sharing.
The Hats team made a auxiliary contract they call Signergate, which is a zodiac expansion module for Safe multisigs, and enables you to have multisigs dynamically assigned to hats, such that a community can elect their multisig signers (plus a variety of other functionalities enabled by hats).
I made this diagram to illustrate how a number of Signergate multisigs can function as committees which a larger community can oversee. The committees (depending on which chain/network you use) can also run grants rounds via grants stack, and maybe even other grants tooling.
I also wrote these brief articles explaining some of the mechanisms here:
What Are Onchain Organizations?
Anyway, happy to talk more about any of this if folks are interested, e.g. how to implement Hats signergate (a moloch DAO can summon a hat tree and then summon a signergate multisig within it!), but in any case, I wish you all the best in continuing to innovate upon public goods funding models.
<TLDR: Plurality gave our little dev DAO a shot, and now we're making big things happen for Arbitrum.>
Last year, DAO Masons was a newly formed DAO dev and design team hoping to make a positive impact within the Web3 DAO movement. We were working through the bear market as best we could, trying to make ends meet.
<TLDR: Plurality gave our little dev DAO a shot, and now we're making big things happen for Arbitrum.>
Last year, DAO Masons was a newly formed DAO dev and design team hoping to make a positive impact within the Web3 DAO movement. We were working through the bear market as best we could, trying to make ends meet.
It was Joe’s 500ARB Jokerace contest to design a pluralistic grants program that got us engaged with Arbitrum. We saw that Arbitrum was making a genuine effort to become a community-run DAO with solid governance processes, so we poured ourselves into designing something meaningful for them.
What we came up with is Grant Ships - the ‘evolutionary grants meta-framework.’ We won the contest, got some decent interest and feedback, and 500 ARB (see the original '2 minute read' submission for Grant Ships)
After that, we moved on to other projects with MakerDAO, Builder Nouns and some artist NFT drops, but we kept an eye on Arbitrum after that. What impressed us most was the way the delegate community stepped up to navigate the struggle around AIP-1.
When Plurality received the funding for their milestone 1, we applied to build Grant Ships for real.
We weren’t sure if we’d get it, but we took feedback, made some changes to Grant Ships. Finally we got approved for a grant that would fund us for a few months of building.
Not only that, we get to run a mini-grants program through thisnew system to fund other teams. This was a big win for our little DAO, and the timing was perfect because we were struggling to stay in the web3 game at all.
We’re now getting a lot of positive attention on our model and a lot of helpful feedback on how to make it better. We’re building a product that we hope can help make the web3 grants scene better overall.
Plurality is looking for teams that can build high impact projects, and every time they find and fund one, Arbitrum becomes a little healthier, a little stronger, a little more versatile.
We’re now able to stay involved solving challenging problems for DAOs and we hope to be a beacon for other teams and developers who are looking for an ecosystem to call home. If Milestone 2 gets funded, we can tell our network and there will be more stories like ours. This gives Arbitrum a better shot at meeting its full potential.
To us it’s a no-brainer. Plurality is doing it right, so they have our support.
We held a recent twitter spaces focused on Milestone 2 and a look back - https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1748831734802636930?s=20
Joe and Feems also spoke about measuring impact on green pill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJWZzeScz7M
As a representative of Gitcoin I support this proposal.
We have been very happy with the work of Plurality Labs and the impact they have had not only on the Arbitrum Ecosystem but Web3 OSS as a whole.
Great work to the team. We are excited to continue on this journey with you.
We are another recipient of Plurality Labs support (see here) and have only good things to say about working with this team. Standing up a grants program is not easy. It needs to be properly resourced in order to be effective. As we move into the next market cycle, a grants engine isn't just a "nice to have" it's a core differentiator.
I hope delegates provide constructive feedback to improve any gaps or concerns they have this proposal. It was impressive to watch how this played out in the forum last year for Milestone 1.
As a representative of Gitcoin I support this proposal.
We have been very happy with the work of Plurality Labs and the impact they have had not only on the Arbitrum Ecosystem but Web3 OSS as a whole.
Great work to the team. We are excited to continue on this journey with you.
We are another recipient of Plurality Labs support (see here) and have only good things to say about working with this team. Standing up a grants program is not easy. It needs to be properly resourced in order to be effective. As we move into the next market cycle, a grants engine isn't just a "nice to have" it's a core differentiator.
I hope delegates provide constructive feedback to improve any gaps or concerns they have this proposal. It was impressive to watch how this played out in the forum last year for Milestone 1.
Really warming to see these laudable goals to increase Impact in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
I can see that the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity.
I'd like to help Plurality Labs and the Arbitrum community in achieving these goals.
I'm a business developer, product manager and a DevRel personnel, I'm also the Lead Partner at B<>rder/ess, a tech Not-For-Profit.
Really warming to see these laudable goals to increase Impact in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
I can see that the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity.
I'd like to help Plurality Labs and the Arbitrum community in achieving these goals.
I'm a business developer, product manager and a DevRel personnel, I'm also the Lead Partner at B<>rder/ess, a tech Not-For-Profit.
You can reach me here👇🏽
I am one of the Arbitrum grantees funded through Plurality Labs. We are building GAP, you can find more info here and here.
I wanted to share my support for PL team. Working with Feems, Shawn and Joe has been really amazing so far. They have helped us with regular product feedback and increasing product adoption (through twitter campaigns, workshops, office hours and more). I have been working with Feems almost on a daily basis as she is helping us get quality data, gathering feedback from users and relaying it to us and iterate. Many grant programs do a good job of allocating capital but PL team has gone beyond that and helping us get traction and make our product a long-term success. If you've any specific questions, don't hesitate to message me.
Impressed to see the so much work proposed, done and achieved by the DAO and the team.
Also worthy to note is that my startup, Play2Learn Games which indulges in building Blockchain based tabletop games are a beneficiary of the PL Milestone 1 and we have also successfully created special Arbitrum IRL card games which have been distributed to kids, teenagers and community members whom have been seen fit to receive such.
Impressed to see the so much work proposed, done and achieved by the DAO and the team.
Also worthy to note is that my startup, Play2Learn Games which indulges in building Blockchain based tabletop games are a beneficiary of the PL Milestone 1 and we have also successfully created special Arbitrum IRL card games which have been distributed to kids, teenagers and community members whom have been seen fit to receive such.
We do hope to extend this and be able to reach out to more individuals and persons as this medium not only educate people about the beauty of Blockchain technology but also educate them about the Arbitrum ecosystem.
See pictures here
See our Twitter page here also which tells the stories The story on twitter
Really warming to see these laudable goals to increase Impact in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
I can see that the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity.
I'd like to help Plurality Labs and the Arbitrum community in achieving these goals.
I'm a business developer, product manager and a DevRel personnel, I'm also the Lead Partner at B<>rder/ess, a tech Not-For-Profit.
Really warming to see these laudable goals to increase Impact in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
I can see that the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity.
I'd like to help Plurality Labs and the Arbitrum community in achieving these goals.
I'm a business developer, product manager and a DevRel personnel, I'm also the Lead Partner at B<>rder/ess, a tech Not-For-Profit.
You can reach me here👇🏽
I am one of the Arbitrum grantees funded through Plurality Labs. We are building GAP, you can find more info here and here.
I wanted to share my support for PL team. Working with Feems, Shawn and Joe has been really amazing so far. They have helped us with regular product feedback and increasing product adoption (through twitter campaigns, workshops, office hours and more). I have been working with Feems almost on a daily basis as she is helping us get quality data, gathering feedback from users and relaying it to us and iterate. Many grant programs do a good job of allocating capital but PL team has gone beyond that and helping us get traction and make our product a long-term success. If you've any specific questions, don't hesitate to message me.
Impressed to see the so much work proposed, done and achieved by the DAO and the team.
Also worthy to note is that my startup, Play2Learn Games which indulges in building Blockchain based tabletop games are a beneficiary of the PL Milestone 1 and we have also successfully created special Arbitrum IRL card games which have been distributed to kids, teenagers and community members whom have been seen fit to receive such.
Impressed to see the so much work proposed, done and achieved by the DAO and the team.
Also worthy to note is that my startup, Play2Learn Games which indulges in building Blockchain based tabletop games are a beneficiary of the PL Milestone 1 and we have also successfully created special Arbitrum IRL card games which have been distributed to kids, teenagers and community members whom have been seen fit to receive such.
We do hope to extend this and be able to reach out to more individuals and persons as this medium not only educate people about the beauty of Blockchain technology but also educate them about the Arbitrum ecosystem.
See pictures here
See our Twitter page here also which tells the stories The story on twitter
Great to see the next phase of this rolling out.
Phase one has already had great outcomes like Open Block Labs and R3Gen which both add a ton of value to the broader DAO, plus funding of the smaller grants programs seems to be cutting a lot of red tape and bringing in great programs and contributors. Doing everything you have been doing at a larger scale will be exciting to see.
Great to see the next phase of this rolling out.
Phase one has already had great outcomes like Open Block Labs and R3Gen which both add a ton of value to the broader DAO, plus funding of the smaller grants programs seems to be cutting a lot of red tape and bringing in great programs and contributors. Doing everything you have been doing at a larger scale will be exciting to see.
Having followed along since phase 1 started, I'm a huge fan of the work you all are doing and support this for the DAO.
This is truly impressive! I really like the emphasis on minimizing friction in DAO operations and set it up for future. 🚀
Great to see the next phase of this rolling out.
Phase one has already had great outcomes like Open Block Labs and R3Gen which both add a ton of value to the broader DAO, plus funding of the smaller grants programs seems to be cutting a lot of red tape and bringing in great programs and contributors. Doing everything you have been doing at a larger scale will be exciting to see.
Great to see the next phase of this rolling out.
Phase one has already had great outcomes like Open Block Labs and R3Gen which both add a ton of value to the broader DAO, plus funding of the smaller grants programs seems to be cutting a lot of red tape and bringing in great programs and contributors. Doing everything you have been doing at a larger scale will be exciting to see.
Having followed along since phase 1 started, I'm a huge fan of the work you all are doing and support this for the DAO.
This is truly impressive! I really like the emphasis on minimizing friction in DAO operations and set it up for future. 🚀
let's just put it this way. Milestone 2 was up for voting. It could have gone through, or not.
let's just put it this way. Milestone 2 was up for voting. It could have gone through, or not.
Thing is, assuming path 2 would be taken, then in a new proposal, on snapshot, we could have linked the previous one, see the vote, see it was not voted, and in a new one maybe get a positive vote that would have been considered even stronger thanks to the flip of the previous downvote.
Keeping history afloat, and transparent, and constantly account for that even by just saying "look, you said no before, we changed this, let's vote and take a yes" would just make the overall decision process stronger and more assertive.
Don't get me wrong, a yes vote is a yes vote, regarding of what there is behind, but the legitimacy in the sense of how the DAO feels about it would have just benefit by keeping the previous vote live.
But no worries, what is done is done, we can just all learn about this experience, and know how to do stuff better next time (and I am talking about everybody here just to be crystal clear, we are constantly experimenting with democracy basically).
I don't want to totally say it was all Joe's decision, I could have said "No" and kept it up. In the end I should have asked here or in the call if people felt fine deleting the proposal. Here was my thought process.
As I saw it the ideal option wasn't available on snapshot. I would have liked to Withdraw the proposal, stop the voting, leave it on the UI and make an easy UX for voting history.
I don't want to totally say it was all Joe's decision, I could have said "No" and kept it up. In the end I should have asked here or in the call if people felt fine deleting the proposal. Here was my thought process.
As I saw it the ideal option wasn't available on snapshot. I would have liked to Withdraw the proposal, stop the voting, leave it on the UI and make an easy UX for voting history.
But the options were either delete or leave it up.
In the end I made the proposal and didn't want to support it anymore as I was convinced by L2beat's argument that more time and work is needed by PL to finish out Milestone 1 and prove they can this work in a more professional manner, I wanted to withdraw my support of the proposal in its current form.
Joe didn't want the proposal up anymore, and my thought process was that, is it valuable for me, joe and everyone else to go tell everyone to vote no on the proposal as its not ready yet? Sounds like a waste of everyones time.
I value the time of other delegates. I know how it is, as a founder of many projects, trying to balance my delegate responsibilities with rest of my life really takes a toll, either on my projects or my personal time.
Everyone is busy and the idea of making the DAO waste cycles on voting on a proposal that isn't going to be carried out anyway was the tipping point for me to agree with the idea of deleting the proposal as opposed to leaving it up. Deleting the proposal just gives everyone more focus. PL can go back to finishing Milestone one, and repropose when they are ready, while no one else is distracted from real work, with needless DAO bureaucracy.
I wish there was a withdraw feature in snapshot, as that would have been ideal.... Either way, we probably acted a little too quickly and should have gotten advice here.
I probably acted in haste. Being human, I naturally was upset as I realized our baby (the proposal) was dying. I also probably should have recognized that I shouldn't make any rash decisions at that time.
I had no malicious intent. We simply wanted to revise the proposal and not confuse people with a proposal for something we didn't intend to see through.
I probably acted in haste. Being human, I naturally was upset as I realized our baby (the proposal) was dying. I also probably should have recognized that I shouldn't make any rash decisions at that time.
I had no malicious intent. We simply wanted to revise the proposal and not confuse people with a proposal for something we didn't intend to see through.
In my mind, taking it down because the proposer no longer intended to see it through was reasonable, though I should have recognized that even I felt awkward about it. I had hoped that we could just stop the vote, but Snapshot did not have that feature.
I understand the suggestion that it is easier for people if the data is in one place.
I also understand the suggestion that allowing others to vote would be helpful to others looking to understand how delegates think about different issues.
A logical interpretation of this good governance practice implies the intention that the results of proposals on Snapshot should be maintained so that they can be known by the voters. However, a discussion about interpretations may not be very meaningful. It would be good to explicitly state that a vote on Snapshot should not be deleted unless it contains some technical issue.
This totally makes sense. I guess I didn't consider that only I truly know that my intention is not to submit the same proposal to Tally. To clarify, it is not our intention to post the same vote to Tally as though this had passed.
Our intention is to rethink how we can best serve the community, take the feedback to heart, and draft something that works for the delegates.
I didn't see a way to withdraw the vote within snapshot, so that it would stay on the frontend... the only thing available for me to do was to delete it.
I will put the text here so it is saved:
Withdrawing and deleting a proposal in Snapshot if it's not looking good to pass, in my opinion, is not a good practice and we shouldn't endorse it. We should have left it live, and abide by the result. Either by moving forward with it if it passed or by considering resubmitting if it failed. That's why we create them.
Hi, @Griff It seems to me that any option was acceptable, whether deleting or voting against. Perhaps the forum should be given more time for discussion before putting it up for voting.
I agree with @olimpio comment. Even though the partial result of the vote was recorded, it is now in a comment on a post that will eventually be lost in the forum and only those who participated in this thread will remember it.
The purpose of the temp-check is not only for the proposers to obtain detailed feedback and certainty about the widespread support or lack thereof for a proposal. It is also to keep a record of how the DAO voted, to maintain an easily understandable and accessible database to understand "what the DAO wants," and even more importantly, what it does not want.
let's just put it this way. Milestone 2 was up for voting. It could have gone through, or not.
let's just put it this way. Milestone 2 was up for voting. It could have gone through, or not.
Thing is, assuming path 2 would be taken, then in a new proposal, on snapshot, we could have linked the previous one, see the vote, see it was not voted, and in a new one maybe get a positive vote that would have been considered even stronger thanks to the flip of the previous downvote.
Keeping history afloat, and transparent, and constantly account for that even by just saying "look, you said no before, we changed this, let's vote and take a yes" would just make the overall decision process stronger and more assertive.
Don't get me wrong, a yes vote is a yes vote, regarding of what there is behind, but the legitimacy in the sense of how the DAO feels about it would have just benefit by keeping the previous vote live.
But no worries, what is done is done, we can just all learn about this experience, and know how to do stuff better next time (and I am talking about everybody here just to be crystal clear, we are constantly experimenting with democracy basically).
I don't want to totally say it was all Joe's decision, I could have said "No" and kept it up. In the end I should have asked here or in the call if people felt fine deleting the proposal. Here was my thought process.
As I saw it the ideal option wasn't available on snapshot. I would have liked to Withdraw the proposal, stop the voting, leave it on the UI and make an easy UX for voting history.
I don't want to totally say it was all Joe's decision, I could have said "No" and kept it up. In the end I should have asked here or in the call if people felt fine deleting the proposal. Here was my thought process.
As I saw it the ideal option wasn't available on snapshot. I would have liked to Withdraw the proposal, stop the voting, leave it on the UI and make an easy UX for voting history.
But the options were either delete or leave it up.
In the end I made the proposal and didn't want to support it anymore as I was convinced by L2beat's argument that more time and work is needed by PL to finish out Milestone 1 and prove they can this work in a more professional manner, I wanted to withdraw my support of the proposal in its current form.
Joe didn't want the proposal up anymore, and my thought process was that, is it valuable for me, joe and everyone else to go tell everyone to vote no on the proposal as its not ready yet? Sounds like a waste of everyones time.
I value the time of other delegates. I know how it is, as a founder of many projects, trying to balance my delegate responsibilities with rest of my life really takes a toll, either on my projects or my personal time.
Everyone is busy and the idea of making the DAO waste cycles on voting on a proposal that isn't going to be carried out anyway was the tipping point for me to agree with the idea of deleting the proposal as opposed to leaving it up. Deleting the proposal just gives everyone more focus. PL can go back to finishing Milestone one, and repropose when they are ready, while no one else is distracted from real work, with needless DAO bureaucracy.
I wish there was a withdraw feature in snapshot, as that would have been ideal.... Either way, we probably acted a little too quickly and should have gotten advice here.
I probably acted in haste. Being human, I naturally was upset as I realized our baby (the proposal) was dying. I also probably should have recognized that I shouldn't make any rash decisions at that time.
I had no malicious intent. We simply wanted to revise the proposal and not confuse people with a proposal for something we didn't intend to see through.
I probably acted in haste. Being human, I naturally was upset as I realized our baby (the proposal) was dying. I also probably should have recognized that I shouldn't make any rash decisions at that time.
I had no malicious intent. We simply wanted to revise the proposal and not confuse people with a proposal for something we didn't intend to see through.
In my mind, taking it down because the proposer no longer intended to see it through was reasonable, though I should have recognized that even I felt awkward about it. I had hoped that we could just stop the vote, but Snapshot did not have that feature.
I understand the suggestion that it is easier for people if the data is in one place.
I also understand the suggestion that allowing others to vote would be helpful to others looking to understand how delegates think about different issues.
A logical interpretation of this good governance practice implies the intention that the results of proposals on Snapshot should be maintained so that they can be known by the voters. However, a discussion about interpretations may not be very meaningful. It would be good to explicitly state that a vote on Snapshot should not be deleted unless it contains some technical issue.
This totally makes sense. I guess I didn't consider that only I truly know that my intention is not to submit the same proposal to Tally. To clarify, it is not our intention to post the same vote to Tally as though this had passed.
Our intention is to rethink how we can best serve the community, take the feedback to heart, and draft something that works for the delegates.
I didn't see a way to withdraw the vote within snapshot, so that it would stay on the frontend... the only thing available for me to do was to delete it.
I will put the text here so it is saved:
Withdrawing and deleting a proposal in Snapshot if it's not looking good to pass, in my opinion, is not a good practice and we shouldn't endorse it. We should have left it live, and abide by the result. Either by moving forward with it if it passed or by considering resubmitting if it failed. That's why we create them.
Hi, @Griff It seems to me that any option was acceptable, whether deleting or voting against. Perhaps the forum should be given more time for discussion before putting it up for voting.
I agree with @olimpio comment. Even though the partial result of the vote was recorded, it is now in a comment on a post that will eventually be lost in the forum and only those who participated in this thread will remember it.
The purpose of the temp-check is not only for the proposers to obtain detailed feedback and certainty about the widespread support or lack thereof for a proposal. It is also to keep a record of how the DAO voted, to maintain an easily understandable and accessible database to understand "what the DAO wants," and even more importantly, what it does not want.
I didn't see a way to withdraw the vote within snapshot, so that it would stay on the frontend... the only thing available for me to do was to delete it.
I will put the text here so it is saved:
We're pleased to announce the next phase in our journey with the Arbitrum DAO community. Following extensive dialogue with delegates and insights from our overwhelmingly positive forum poll, we are presenting a streamlined temperature-check on Snapshot.
This proposal is the second milestone of our originally proposed three milestone phased approach to bring scalable and capture-resistant governance to Arbitrum DAO.
Ethereum provides a digital public infrastructure which no single entity controls. Who remembers “unstoppable code”? In web2, we saw developers rugged by the platform they built on too many times. From Facebook banning Zynga to build their own version of popular games, to Apple’s app store battles today, web2 was and is built on politically centralized platforms.
We wanted unruggable money. We wanted to build applications not dependent on the executive of a platform - and we got it! Almost…
L1 grant programs have seen hundreds of millions of dollar value not to mention the myriad of new L2s launching. Optimism alone just allocated over $100 million in RPGF 3 and is poised to allocate almost $1 billion in a few years. Avalanche has allocated 4M AVAX ($290M USD), Polygon Village has a budget of 110M MATIC, Uniswap has a $72 million grant program, Binance, Polkadot, DFINITY; the list goes on. We believe we can match their impact with much less funding using the Pluralist Grants Framework.
Aribtrum’s credible neutrality is dependent on the enduring political decentralization of Arbitrum DAO, but we all know that over time, DAOs tend to recentralize. This is CAPTURE.
Political power builds around the entities which distribute resources. Even the time spent together by top decision makers create social bonds that create bias and “circles of influence”. This is how capture happens.
Plurality Labs brought the idea of a pluralist grants framework to Arbitrum. It distributes power across a larger set of actors. A pluralist democracy in governance can both enhance political decentralization and accelerate the growth of the ecosystem by scaling faster than a traditional hierarchical system. It uses evolutionary mechanics which are responsive to the needs of an infinite game.
The only way for Arbitrum to become a truly neutral digital public infrastructure is to solve capture-resistance. The strange thing is that it requires some level of centralization to do it.
In this proposal, we are asking the community to continue their trust in our processes and our ability to lead the effort to find a capture-resistant model for distributing resources. We do this in a “container” we call Thank ARB. Within this container we intend to scale the framework that we have been working on the last 6 months.
During the first milestone, we allocated 3 million ARB to over 200 projects via 12 distinct programs. These programs included over 30 governance experiments. We learned the realities of dealing with compliance issues and have now built out both a process and technical infrastructure for collaborating with the foundation which has served other grant programs such as STIP, Backfund STIP, and the upcoming LTIPP. We plan to bring on additional staff to provide capacity for improvements in professionalization of our documentation, much better marketing reach, and to allow us to provide immediate impact upon approval of Milestone 2.
We are much more like a startup than an enterprise. We are responsible for innovation which requires our ability to execute and learn. We are in a technological race which requires us to execute with speed. We are in a cultural revolution fueling financial sovereignty which requires your trust in us to remove ourselves from the position you are granting us. Designing onchain accountability processes resilient to centralizing pressure without a sustaining administrative entity is the primary objective of Plurality Labs.
Our first milestone mandated the allocation of 3 million ARB. Our second milestone was originally proposed to be 30M ARB - and our third milestone was proposed to be 100M ARB! But, because of the rapid price increase of ARB we are choosing to denominate the second milestones in USD instead. Therefore, this milestone we will request $30M as the size of the allocation fund we are responsible to deliver during 2024.
The allocation fund will be used to fund initiatives aligned with the DAOs strategic priorities. This happens in parallel to the experimentation and design work needed to deliver our overarching goals. The intention of the second milestone is to scale the amount the DAO can safely fund while also decentralizing from Plurality Labs being the primary funder for DAO operational costs. By empowering workstreams and working groups as Program Providers, Plurality Labs can remove itself from being the sole allocator funding DAO operations and focus.
Based on our learnings, our plan for 2024 is to cleanly wrap up the allocation of the fund prior to December allowing for multiple months of review time for delegates to investigate our work before the Milestone 3 proposal.
Funding Considerations:
Throughout Milestone 2, we'll allocate our service fee between the Plurality Labs and ThriveCoin teams, in recognition of their contributions.
In total, $33.75 million USD of ARB will be sent to the PL-ARB Grant Safety Multisig upon a successful vote on Tally. We intend to increase participation to be a 4/9 from 4/6 current setup prior to Tally. This includes only 2 Plurality Labs signers and the rest top 50 delegates. The DAO retains a clawback option for 2.75 million ARB from the fee portion and the entirety of the $30M allocation fund.
Upon approval, we'll refine any emerging details and proceed to Tally.
This is a very brief summary of the proposal, written by Plurality labs and reviewed by me (Griff). For more details and to participate in the decision-making process, visit our forum post: https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-thank-arb-by-plurality-labs-milestone-2-scaling-value-creation-in-the-dao/20534.
I agree with @olimpio comment. Even though the partial result of the vote was recorded, it is now in a comment on a post that will eventually be lost in the forum and only those who participated in this thread will remember it.
The purpose of the temp-check is not only for the proposers to obtain detailed feedback and certainty about the widespread support or lack thereof for a proposal. It is also to keep a record of how the DAO voted, to maintain an easily understandable and accessible database to understand "what the DAO wants," and even more importantly, what it does not want.
If we erase everything that seems to be disapproved (this was the partial result, although it's impossible to know the final outcome), we won't have a detailed record of what is not wanted, and as a result, it will be more difficult for third parties that bring new proposals to understand the general sentiment of the delegates. Note that Tally is not an ideal source for this kind of data, as everything put up for a vote there is generally known beforehand to be likely approved.
In this specific case, for example (although it would be the same in any case), a new participant in the DAO (delegate or stakeholder) will find it more difficult to understand the reasons behind the content and/or modifications of the future proposal. I believe that we should always strive to facilitate the understanding of the processes and motivations of governance for those who are not immersed in it.
The more information available, the better. Not the other way around.
Although it is not expressly stated in the constitution, Section 2 of the same states that “If an AIP fails the temperature check, or has not undergone a temperature check, as a matter of good governance practice, it is recommended that voters strongly consider voting to reject it.”
A logical interpretation of this good governance practice implies the intention that the results of proposals on Snapshot should be maintained so that they can be known by the voters. However, a discussion about interpretations may not be very meaningful. It would be good to explicitly state that a vote on Snapshot should not be deleted unless it contains some technical issue.
On the other hand, part of the delegates' commitment to the holders is to participate in debates and vote on proposals. This is what they have committed to their delegators. Proceeding in this manner is to erase their work, something no one is entailed to do.
Finally, I believe that Plurality Labs is also harmed, as by waiting, you could have obtained detailed feedback from a greater number of delegates who had not yet voiced their opinion, and have an even greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal for its improvement. That’s the whole point of the Snapshot voting.
This opinion is my own and does not reflect the one of SEEDLatam Gov.
I think @krst makes a lot of valid points, and I would like to see a revised proposal addressing them. The PL team has added a lot of value to the DAO and clearly deserves a second milestone, however, I think there are some easy improvements that should be made before we go forward with the proposal.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
Going from the last item to the first one:
• Plurality Labs must provide well-scoped and defined deliverables for Milestone 2 that we can be held accountable for afterwards.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
Going from the last item to the first one:
• Plurality Labs must provide well-scoped and defined deliverables for Milestone 2 that we can be held accountable for afterwards.
That is correct. We believe that to be a reasonable expectation for any proposal that comes to the DAO for funding, let alone for such amounts.
• Plurality Labs must clearly define the actionable insights derived from the experiments/learnings and document the reasons for continuing or cutting programs
That is also correct, and again an expectation which we believe is reasonable.
• Plurality Labs must provide the framework in a well-documented way such that a greenfield team could take it and run with it.
We expect Plurality Labs to provide a framework in a well-documented way. And while we don’t necessarily expect a greenfield team to be able pick up and run with the framework, we expect a framework that could potentially be picked up by other DAO contributors with relevant experience and be used as the basis on which they’ll build on.
• Plurality Labs does not propose a second milestone until all the current programs have run their course and individually been evaluated.
It’s not necessary to wait until all current programs have run their course before proposing a second milestone. However, we believe that moving forward with Milestone 2 should only come after enough insights from Milestone 1 have been gathered and used to form and evaluate a framework which can be scaled during Milestone 2.
I am hearing that these are your expectations:
I am hearing that these are your expectations:
It seems that you would like to see us take a bridge of some type to continue on and finish a clean execution of the milestone 1 deliverables. Is that correct?
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We’ll be voting against the proposal during temp-check for the reasons outlined below.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We’ll be voting against the proposal during temp-check for the reasons outlined below.
First and foremost, we believe Milestone 2 is follow up on and an extension of Milestone 1 that should naturally happen once Milestone 1 has concluded and successfully delivered the items that it set out to accomplish. We just published our extensive review of Milestone 1 and we do not believe it was successful in that regard.
Furthermore, when it comes to the proposal of Milestone 2 itself, we believe that any proposal requesting a similar amount ($33,750,000) warrants a little more information and discussion than vaguely defined bullet-points.
Overall, we’d much rather explore how we can continue funding Plurality Labs in order to be able to properly finish and deliver on Milestone 1 before we consider scaling it 10x with Milestone 2.
We understand that we might be missing something or we might be seeing things from the wrong perspective. Therefore we invite all the delegates that disagree with our point of view to a discussion so we can better inform our decision.
There’s a call being hosted to discuss Plurality Labs’ Milestone 2 proposal on Wednesday 31st of January at 4:30 pm UTC. We’d also like to invite all delegates and Arbitrum DAO participants to discuss Milestone 1 and our review during our Arbitrum Office Hours on Thursday 1st of February at 4 pm UTC.
This is one of my highest conviction vote so far.
I was initially puzzled when Plurality Labs came out with their approach - a centralized entity for a decentralized grant framework? - But I have to say, and I am glad to see others share my opinion, they have definitely overcome my expectations.
This is one of my highest conviction vote so far.
I was initially puzzled when Plurality Labs came out with their approach - a centralized entity for a decentralized grant framework? - But I have to say, and I am glad to see others share my opinion, they have definitely overcome my expectations.
The variety of experiments and grant programs launched and planned, from the Small Grants toThank Arb, align perfectly with our DAO's objectives:
Milestone 2 is ambitious.
I am eager to see:
I also see a point in @Griff's argument on vesting part of the rewards, and this is something I would advocate for multiple initiatives. Everyone is fully committed to Arbitrum, but token-vesting (when possible!) promotes a better long-term alignment.
I feel we are on the right track to do grandiose things. Full steam ahead: let's Fueling Financial Sovereignty.
I will be supporting this snapshot proposal, but with a request that we take a large portion of the funds requested and make it subject to vesting.
I will be supporting this snapshot proposal, but with a request that we take a large portion of the funds requested and make it subject to vesting.
To allocate this $30M in funding I would like to see long term incentive alignment between the PL & ThriveCoin decision makers and the ArbitrumDAO. Of course many people on the team can just collect a salary with no lockup, but the key decision makers will have other financial biases and probably even get bribed. If they have a large portion of their salaries actually given to them in ARB locked for a few years, it will provide a clear financial bias in the DAO's direction, and make it a lot easier for them to stay focused on the long term success of Arbitrum.
Suggested revision:
A few other notes.
I really like the diversity of programs that have emerged out of Arbitrum in the last several months, compared to other ecosystems I participate in which only have 1-3 programs. We have yet to see the full scope of impact that the work has had so far, but given the market conditions, the abundant grants funding coming out of other competing ecosystems, and progress that PL has shown so far, I think this is an easy yes for the DAO.
I do think large improvements can be made, especially in coordination and marketing around these funding opportunities, but this has all been addressed in the proposal.
I should also be clear that I have a potential conflict of interest as I am in talks with PL about using Pairwise for running a grants program this year, but that said, even without this bias I would absolutely double down on PL for this vote. Many of the most important wins for the DAO came because of the work of PL I would love to see what they can do with a larger team, a longer deadline and a larger allocation.
Based on feedback during the call today, we are asking @Griff to remove the vote from Snapshot. We aren't looking to see if by chance it passes. We want overwhelming support from the DAO.
We will revise and post when we think we have better sensed the desire of the DAO as a whole.
The DAO currently has one decision making modality: delegates must vote for everything big and small. This does not scale and is suboptimal for outcomes. Once the noise surpasses the signal, this becomes a popularity contest. Can I get enough voters’ attention?
I had the opportunity to work with Joe initially in the first iteration of the proposal six months back. I would like to echo what Bobby mentioned, even I was a bit unsure about how this would work because something like this had never been implemented by any DAOs. All the DAOs had a standard way of running a grants program, either through a council, committee, or something like DDA. However, Joe did something different, and it worked. I would like to mention some of the key points.
Prior to the approval of plurality labs initial proposal, I was unsure of how this would play out, but I'm glad to say that it exceeded my expectations. Their consistent presence and support has been remarkable.They initiated working groups and programs and retained talent that would have otherwise been unpaid and gone elsewhere.
Their performance in milestone 1 instills confidence in approving a higher budget for them, as they have proven to be prudent and responsible in their spending. A lot of experiments were conducted, albeit not all successful, but the aim was to experiment, reflect, and improve.
As someone who got a grant (Thank ARB on Gitcoin) and is now serving as a contributor (Voting Council at Mini-Grants), I just want to say thanks to Thank ARB programs for getting me more involved in the Arbitrum ecosystem. I'm all in to back any move Joe and Plurality Labs make—they've got my trust. :metal:
After joining yesterday's discussion call, I agree with @krst point about needing to look more closely at this topic for improvements. I would appreciate a detailed cost breakdown and additional documents for better clarity. I'm already pleased with PL's contributions to the DAO and am excited to see an improved version of their work. Also, I'd like to thank everyone for their valuable discussions, which have been instrumental in enhancing this process.
Is it possible to bring down the administrative costs? They're more than 6% of the total request. Leaving aside lively discussion here and on the Milestone 1 thread, it's just hard to see how high administrative costs can be justified.
To invert things a bit, would you provide a grant to an applicant that included costs that high? It's not as if the funds are going to pay for developer hours or large legal expenses.
the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity
I didn't see a way to withdraw the vote within snapshot, so that it would stay on the frontend... the only thing available for me to do was to delete it.
I will put the text here so it is saved:
We're pleased to announce the next phase in our journey with the Arbitrum DAO community. Following extensive dialogue with delegates and insights from our overwhelmingly positive forum poll, we are presenting a streamlined temperature-check on Snapshot.
This proposal is the second milestone of our originally proposed three milestone phased approach to bring scalable and capture-resistant governance to Arbitrum DAO.
Ethereum provides a digital public infrastructure which no single entity controls. Who remembers “unstoppable code”? In web2, we saw developers rugged by the platform they built on too many times. From Facebook banning Zynga to build their own version of popular games, to Apple’s app store battles today, web2 was and is built on politically centralized platforms.
We wanted unruggable money. We wanted to build applications not dependent on the executive of a platform - and we got it! Almost…
L1 grant programs have seen hundreds of millions of dollar value not to mention the myriad of new L2s launching. Optimism alone just allocated over $100 million in RPGF 3 and is poised to allocate almost $1 billion in a few years. Avalanche has allocated 4M AVAX ($290M USD), Polygon Village has a budget of 110M MATIC, Uniswap has a $72 million grant program, Binance, Polkadot, DFINITY; the list goes on. We believe we can match their impact with much less funding using the Pluralist Grants Framework.
Aribtrum’s credible neutrality is dependent on the enduring political decentralization of Arbitrum DAO, but we all know that over time, DAOs tend to recentralize. This is CAPTURE.
Political power builds around the entities which distribute resources. Even the time spent together by top decision makers create social bonds that create bias and “circles of influence”. This is how capture happens.
Plurality Labs brought the idea of a pluralist grants framework to Arbitrum. It distributes power across a larger set of actors. A pluralist democracy in governance can both enhance political decentralization and accelerate the growth of the ecosystem by scaling faster than a traditional hierarchical system. It uses evolutionary mechanics which are responsive to the needs of an infinite game.
The only way for Arbitrum to become a truly neutral digital public infrastructure is to solve capture-resistance. The strange thing is that it requires some level of centralization to do it.
In this proposal, we are asking the community to continue their trust in our processes and our ability to lead the effort to find a capture-resistant model for distributing resources. We do this in a “container” we call Thank ARB. Within this container we intend to scale the framework that we have been working on the last 6 months.
During the first milestone, we allocated 3 million ARB to over 200 projects via 12 distinct programs. These programs included over 30 governance experiments. We learned the realities of dealing with compliance issues and have now built out both a process and technical infrastructure for collaborating with the foundation which has served other grant programs such as STIP, Backfund STIP, and the upcoming LTIPP. We plan to bring on additional staff to provide capacity for improvements in professionalization of our documentation, much better marketing reach, and to allow us to provide immediate impact upon approval of Milestone 2.
We are much more like a startup than an enterprise. We are responsible for innovation which requires our ability to execute and learn. We are in a technological race which requires us to execute with speed. We are in a cultural revolution fueling financial sovereignty which requires your trust in us to remove ourselves from the position you are granting us. Designing onchain accountability processes resilient to centralizing pressure without a sustaining administrative entity is the primary objective of Plurality Labs.
Our first milestone mandated the allocation of 3 million ARB. Our second milestone was originally proposed to be 30M ARB - and our third milestone was proposed to be 100M ARB! But, because of the rapid price increase of ARB we are choosing to denominate the second milestones in USD instead. Therefore, this milestone we will request $30M as the size of the allocation fund we are responsible to deliver during 2024.
The allocation fund will be used to fund initiatives aligned with the DAOs strategic priorities. This happens in parallel to the experimentation and design work needed to deliver our overarching goals. The intention of the second milestone is to scale the amount the DAO can safely fund while also decentralizing from Plurality Labs being the primary funder for DAO operational costs. By empowering workstreams and working groups as Program Providers, Plurality Labs can remove itself from being the sole allocator funding DAO operations and focus.
Based on our learnings, our plan for 2024 is to cleanly wrap up the allocation of the fund prior to December allowing for multiple months of review time for delegates to investigate our work before the Milestone 3 proposal.
Funding Considerations:
Throughout Milestone 2, we'll allocate our service fee between the Plurality Labs and ThriveCoin teams, in recognition of their contributions.
In total, $33.75 million USD of ARB will be sent to the PL-ARB Grant Safety Multisig upon a successful vote on Tally. We intend to increase participation to be a 4/9 from 4/6 current setup prior to Tally. This includes only 2 Plurality Labs signers and the rest top 50 delegates. The DAO retains a clawback option for 2.75 million ARB from the fee portion and the entirety of the $30M allocation fund.
Upon approval, we'll refine any emerging details and proceed to Tally.
This is a very brief summary of the proposal, written by Plurality labs and reviewed by me (Griff). For more details and to participate in the decision-making process, visit our forum post: https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/non-constitutional-thank-arb-by-plurality-labs-milestone-2-scaling-value-creation-in-the-dao/20534.
I agree with @olimpio comment. Even though the partial result of the vote was recorded, it is now in a comment on a post that will eventually be lost in the forum and only those who participated in this thread will remember it.
The purpose of the temp-check is not only for the proposers to obtain detailed feedback and certainty about the widespread support or lack thereof for a proposal. It is also to keep a record of how the DAO voted, to maintain an easily understandable and accessible database to understand "what the DAO wants," and even more importantly, what it does not want.
If we erase everything that seems to be disapproved (this was the partial result, although it's impossible to know the final outcome), we won't have a detailed record of what is not wanted, and as a result, it will be more difficult for third parties that bring new proposals to understand the general sentiment of the delegates. Note that Tally is not an ideal source for this kind of data, as everything put up for a vote there is generally known beforehand to be likely approved.
In this specific case, for example (although it would be the same in any case), a new participant in the DAO (delegate or stakeholder) will find it more difficult to understand the reasons behind the content and/or modifications of the future proposal. I believe that we should always strive to facilitate the understanding of the processes and motivations of governance for those who are not immersed in it.
The more information available, the better. Not the other way around.
Although it is not expressly stated in the constitution, Section 2 of the same states that “If an AIP fails the temperature check, or has not undergone a temperature check, as a matter of good governance practice, it is recommended that voters strongly consider voting to reject it.”
A logical interpretation of this good governance practice implies the intention that the results of proposals on Snapshot should be maintained so that they can be known by the voters. However, a discussion about interpretations may not be very meaningful. It would be good to explicitly state that a vote on Snapshot should not be deleted unless it contains some technical issue.
On the other hand, part of the delegates' commitment to the holders is to participate in debates and vote on proposals. This is what they have committed to their delegators. Proceeding in this manner is to erase their work, something no one is entailed to do.
Finally, I believe that Plurality Labs is also harmed, as by waiting, you could have obtained detailed feedback from a greater number of delegates who had not yet voiced their opinion, and have an even greater understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal for its improvement. That’s the whole point of the Snapshot voting.
This opinion is my own and does not reflect the one of SEEDLatam Gov.
I think @krst makes a lot of valid points, and I would like to see a revised proposal addressing them. The PL team has added a lot of value to the DAO and clearly deserves a second milestone, however, I think there are some easy improvements that should be made before we go forward with the proposal.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
Going from the last item to the first one:
• Plurality Labs must provide well-scoped and defined deliverables for Milestone 2 that we can be held accountable for afterwards.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
Going from the last item to the first one:
• Plurality Labs must provide well-scoped and defined deliverables for Milestone 2 that we can be held accountable for afterwards.
That is correct. We believe that to be a reasonable expectation for any proposal that comes to the DAO for funding, let alone for such amounts.
• Plurality Labs must clearly define the actionable insights derived from the experiments/learnings and document the reasons for continuing or cutting programs
That is also correct, and again an expectation which we believe is reasonable.
• Plurality Labs must provide the framework in a well-documented way such that a greenfield team could take it and run with it.
We expect Plurality Labs to provide a framework in a well-documented way. And while we don’t necessarily expect a greenfield team to be able pick up and run with the framework, we expect a framework that could potentially be picked up by other DAO contributors with relevant experience and be used as the basis on which they’ll build on.
• Plurality Labs does not propose a second milestone until all the current programs have run their course and individually been evaluated.
It’s not necessary to wait until all current programs have run their course before proposing a second milestone. However, we believe that moving forward with Milestone 2 should only come after enough insights from Milestone 1 have been gathered and used to form and evaluate a framework which can be scaled during Milestone 2.
I am hearing that these are your expectations:
I am hearing that these are your expectations:
It seems that you would like to see us take a bridge of some type to continue on and finish a clean execution of the milestone 1 deliverables. Is that correct?
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We’ll be voting against the proposal during temp-check for the reasons outlined below.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We’ll be voting against the proposal during temp-check for the reasons outlined below.
First and foremost, we believe Milestone 2 is follow up on and an extension of Milestone 1 that should naturally happen once Milestone 1 has concluded and successfully delivered the items that it set out to accomplish. We just published our extensive review of Milestone 1 and we do not believe it was successful in that regard.
Furthermore, when it comes to the proposal of Milestone 2 itself, we believe that any proposal requesting a similar amount ($33,750,000) warrants a little more information and discussion than vaguely defined bullet-points.
Overall, we’d much rather explore how we can continue funding Plurality Labs in order to be able to properly finish and deliver on Milestone 1 before we consider scaling it 10x with Milestone 2.
We understand that we might be missing something or we might be seeing things from the wrong perspective. Therefore we invite all the delegates that disagree with our point of view to a discussion so we can better inform our decision.
There’s a call being hosted to discuss Plurality Labs’ Milestone 2 proposal on Wednesday 31st of January at 4:30 pm UTC. We’d also like to invite all delegates and Arbitrum DAO participants to discuss Milestone 1 and our review during our Arbitrum Office Hours on Thursday 1st of February at 4 pm UTC.
This is one of my highest conviction vote so far.
I was initially puzzled when Plurality Labs came out with their approach - a centralized entity for a decentralized grant framework? - But I have to say, and I am glad to see others share my opinion, they have definitely overcome my expectations.
This is one of my highest conviction vote so far.
I was initially puzzled when Plurality Labs came out with their approach - a centralized entity for a decentralized grant framework? - But I have to say, and I am glad to see others share my opinion, they have definitely overcome my expectations.
The variety of experiments and grant programs launched and planned, from the Small Grants toThank Arb, align perfectly with our DAO's objectives:
Milestone 2 is ambitious.
I am eager to see:
I also see a point in @Griff's argument on vesting part of the rewards, and this is something I would advocate for multiple initiatives. Everyone is fully committed to Arbitrum, but token-vesting (when possible!) promotes a better long-term alignment.
I feel we are on the right track to do grandiose things. Full steam ahead: let's Fueling Financial Sovereignty.
I will be supporting this snapshot proposal, but with a request that we take a large portion of the funds requested and make it subject to vesting.
I will be supporting this snapshot proposal, but with a request that we take a large portion of the funds requested and make it subject to vesting.
To allocate this $30M in funding I would like to see long term incentive alignment between the PL & ThriveCoin decision makers and the ArbitrumDAO. Of course many people on the team can just collect a salary with no lockup, but the key decision makers will have other financial biases and probably even get bribed. If they have a large portion of their salaries actually given to them in ARB locked for a few years, it will provide a clear financial bias in the DAO's direction, and make it a lot easier for them to stay focused on the long term success of Arbitrum.
Suggested revision:
A few other notes.
I really like the diversity of programs that have emerged out of Arbitrum in the last several months, compared to other ecosystems I participate in which only have 1-3 programs. We have yet to see the full scope of impact that the work has had so far, but given the market conditions, the abundant grants funding coming out of other competing ecosystems, and progress that PL has shown so far, I think this is an easy yes for the DAO.
I do think large improvements can be made, especially in coordination and marketing around these funding opportunities, but this has all been addressed in the proposal.
I should also be clear that I have a potential conflict of interest as I am in talks with PL about using Pairwise for running a grants program this year, but that said, even without this bias I would absolutely double down on PL for this vote. Many of the most important wins for the DAO came because of the work of PL I would love to see what they can do with a larger team, a longer deadline and a larger allocation.
Based on feedback during the call today, we are asking @Griff to remove the vote from Snapshot. We aren't looking to see if by chance it passes. We want overwhelming support from the DAO.
We will revise and post when we think we have better sensed the desire of the DAO as a whole.
The DAO currently has one decision making modality: delegates must vote for everything big and small. This does not scale and is suboptimal for outcomes. Once the noise surpasses the signal, this becomes a popularity contest. Can I get enough voters’ attention?
I had the opportunity to work with Joe initially in the first iteration of the proposal six months back. I would like to echo what Bobby mentioned, even I was a bit unsure about how this would work because something like this had never been implemented by any DAOs. All the DAOs had a standard way of running a grants program, either through a council, committee, or something like DDA. However, Joe did something different, and it worked. I would like to mention some of the key points.
Prior to the approval of plurality labs initial proposal, I was unsure of how this would play out, but I'm glad to say that it exceeded my expectations. Their consistent presence and support has been remarkable.They initiated working groups and programs and retained talent that would have otherwise been unpaid and gone elsewhere.
Their performance in milestone 1 instills confidence in approving a higher budget for them, as they have proven to be prudent and responsible in their spending. A lot of experiments were conducted, albeit not all successful, but the aim was to experiment, reflect, and improve.
As someone who got a grant (Thank ARB on Gitcoin) and is now serving as a contributor (Voting Council at Mini-Grants), I just want to say thanks to Thank ARB programs for getting me more involved in the Arbitrum ecosystem. I'm all in to back any move Joe and Plurality Labs make—they've got my trust. :metal:
After joining yesterday's discussion call, I agree with @krst point about needing to look more closely at this topic for improvements. I would appreciate a detailed cost breakdown and additional documents for better clarity. I'm already pleased with PL's contributions to the DAO and am excited to see an improved version of their work. Also, I'd like to thank everyone for their valuable discussions, which have been instrumental in enhancing this process.
Is it possible to bring down the administrative costs? They're more than 6% of the total request. Leaving aside lively discussion here and on the Milestone 1 thread, it's just hard to see how high administrative costs can be justified.
To invert things a bit, would you provide a grant to an applicant that included costs that high? It's not as if the funds are going to pay for developer hours or large legal expenses.
the aim is for quality of contributors and impact measured over quantity
The DAO currently has one decision making modality: delegates must vote for everything big and small. This does not scale and is suboptimal for outcomes. Once the noise surpasses the signal, this becomes a popularity contest. Can I get enough voters’ attention?
Delegates know this, and see the need for different groups to take responsibility for parts of an allocation approval process.
Plurality Labs has been one of those groups. Our ability to experiment in making decisions enables two huge benefits to the DAO:
When there is an urgent need, we are able to fund it right away.
We are able to harness evolutionary mechanics by trying out different mechanisms
We have been able to fund impactful work with our grant spending because we are able to sense the needs of the DAO and address the biggest issues fast. We do this in parallel to the experimentation and design work needed to deliver over three milestones and exit.
We are a framework architect for the pluralist grants programs for the DAO. What does this mean?
What does this mean?
You can see the roles as indicated in the picture below representing how the DAO is allocating funds. Each shade of blue represents a different role in the pluralist framework. A black-line border indicates a governance layer.
Plurality Labs is a “Program Provider”
A program provider is responsible for selecting Grant Programs to fund. They help avoid redundancies by connecting the dots between programs and communicating with other service providers. Their success is based on selecting quality programs which in turn select impactful grants to fund. The program provider is indirectly responsible for grant success in so much as they must focus funding to top programs and coach program managers in design and ensuring grantee participation in accountability systems.
Royal Blue = Grant Program
Grant programs fund the decentralized community to build in alignment with the DAO. They consist of Voters, Pools, & Recipients. Grant programs may consist of multiple funding rounds.
Grant Program managers are responsible for the design and execution of grant programs. They are responsible for the end-to-end program including comms, operations, and project management. They should be able to match allocation strategies to the funding needed in a way that provides the best results. Grant program managers are grantees themselves as they may require some level of compensation which can range depending on the program design.
Dark Blue indicates the number of funding rounds in the program
Rounds are discreet funding events. They have pre-processing, execution, and post-processing work. The initial conditions, especially for fully onchain systems, can be iterated each round.
This doesn’t even look at the grantees!
Within grant programs, there are a few very different categories of grant types. Each has its own set of benefits and risks:
| Type of Grant | Benefit to Ecosystem | Benefit to Builder | Risks |
|---|---|---|---|
| User/Liquidity Incentives | - Acquire new users - Large investors bridge | - Acquire new users - Offer better returns | - Users leave when incentives stop - Attracts engagement farmers |
| Product-market fit bets | - More businesses to bring users | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Very low odds - Requires infrastrucutre to support it - Can’t compete with professional orgs |
| Open source infrastructure development | - Tooling needed to make builders lives easier is funded | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Builders don’t have to build things that aren’t part of their core product |
| Community education & events | - A more informed population - Acquisition & retention | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Very hard to be fair and unbiased - Lots of grifters |
| DAO operations | - People can easily find their way - Onchain systems ensure credible neutrality - Ensures legitimacy - Maintains context - Can sense & respond - Executes ideas that suggesting parties don’t have time to do | - They receive funds - They belong to the community - They have access to leadership - Opens up career opportunities | - Can lead to bureaucracy - Can lead to capture - Naturally tend to bloat - Naturally tend to work in silos |
Most of the Arbitrum grant programs have done open source infrastructure. The foundation has so far taken the lead in product-market fit bets and community education and events. Questbook programs have done a bit in these areas as well. Open source infrastructure development can be attributed to all of the grants programs.
Plurality Labs is the only organization funding DAO operations, although it hasn’t been our direct focus.
We are committed to building capture-resistance, scalability, AND efficiency. This is the point of hiring our team. Our flexibility will also allow us to wisely experiment with new methods which may optimize funding in the other categories.
The portion we allocate is represented by size in the graphic below on the left. On the right you can see the relative grant size if our proposal was passed.
The light blue area on the left is the only funding which is allocated to:
The Arbitrum DAO governance is the decision-making modality for everything outside of the programs it has funded. When it does approve a grant program directly, it only does so if it knows what the governance mode of the program will be. You see proof of this when the most engaging delegate discussions are about councils and elections. Questbook is a program provider which allocated funds to 4 programs based on conversations with delegates and contributors. All of its four programs use one decision making modality - delegated domain authority.
In Plurality Labs’ first Milestone, we were the only program provider with decision-making to make adjustments and iteratively improve their program’s governance.
The methodology funded 12 programs which managed 27 rounds of fund distribution in less than 6 months. We had over 30 experiments in grant governance design including 6 at the program manager level and 24 at the round level.
For Plurality Labs to be successful in delivering across three milestones, we need to run enough experiments to find optimal solutions. Then we need to build them onchain and run them again to see that they work correctly. We also need to be able to attract top talent by having a runway long enough for them to view Arbitrum as a quality career opportunity.
The allocation fund made available to Plurality Labs goes to the PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig which is a 4/6 with only two Plurality Labs team members. This is low risk.. The DAO can claw this back with a Tally vote at any time. They can even claw back a portion of the PL fee. Because of this, we don’t think most people will object to the amount set to allocate.
We learned that we need other program providers to keep us on our toes to maintain context in a given area over time. During our second milestone, we will empower workstreams to allocate 60% of the allocation fund and we will select programs to deliver the other 40%.
This graphic shows the ideal future state for how the Plurality Labs team facilitates the decentralization of Arbitrum DAO. It includes our team roles as framework architect and program provider.
We will take the month of February to publish an in depth report on the state of the grants overall. We will use the time to conduct our PL Community Council elections and begin planning our strategic objectives for 2024.We will begin deploying funds at scale in March 2024
To move fast, we will move some big bets forward by working with the DAO and delegates to craft well-liked programs. At the beginning of 2024, we will spend more time setting up workstreams and facilitating alignment and planning some big bets. By the end of 2024, there will be multiple other program providers known as workstreams with full-time Arbitrum dedicated people and keeping context for us all.
We will establish a container to design and implement capture-resistant governance that we can walk away from and expect it to operate in a Decentralized, Autonomous, and ORGANIZED way.
I had the opportunity to work with Joe initially in the first iteration of the proposal six months back. I would like to echo what Bobby mentioned, even I was a bit unsure about how this would work because something like this had never been implemented by any DAOs. All the DAOs had a standard way of running a grants program, either through a council, committee, or something like DDA. However, Joe did something different, and it worked. I would like to mention some of the key points.
Just one goal I would like to see this program achieve is if we can get more projects to launch their chain on Orbit.
Prior to the approval of plurality labs initial proposal, I was unsure of how this would play out, but I'm glad to say that it exceeded my expectations. Their consistent presence and support has been remarkable.They initiated working groups and programs and retained talent that would have otherwise been unpaid and gone elsewhere.
Their performance in milestone 1 instills confidence in approving a higher budget for them, as they have proven to be prudent and responsible in their spending. A lot of experiments were conducted, albeit not all successful, but the aim was to experiment, reflect, and improve.
Regarding the payment, the DAO needs to responsibly compensate its contributors. Fair payment is key to attracting and retaining talent, essential for the sustainability of these programs. As mentioned by Joe and Devansh, now is the time to double down on these experiments as the L2 wars break out. There is a lot more that can be done in the arbitrum ecosystem.
Overall, I support the proposal.
Is it possible to bring down the administrative costs? They're more than 6% of the total request. Leaving aside lively discussion here and on the Milestone 1 thread, it's just hard to see how high administrative costs can be justified.
To invert things a bit, would you provide a grant to an applicant that included costs that high? It's not as if the funds are going to pay for developer hours or large legal expenses.
Many grants programs in the real world cap administrative costs at 5% or even 2%. We believe that no one should work for free, but the cost structure seems like it can be better optimized, especially since Arbitrum Foundation presumably continues to bear costs of KYC/KYB compliance for onboarding of grantees?
For a comparison, let's put it side by side with the upcoming LTIP pilot. Dollar amounts just plug in today's price of ARB and should be taken as just rough estimates.
| Milestone 2 | LTIP Pilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Grants Budget | 30,000,000 ARB | 45,100,000 ARB |
| Administrative Budget | $3,750,000 | 715,000 ARB (~$1,200,000) |
| Admin Costs as % of Total Request | ~6.5% | 1.6% |
LTIP Pilot is meant to be over a smaller period of time, but it's still even more grants money and the easiest comparison. What accounts for the several million dollars in additional overhead for Milestone 2? How can we bring those down to around 2-3% of the total spend?
Hey everyone, I'm Joe and I'm leading the Plurality Labs team. I started the conversation around building a grants framework with this post discussing the pitfall DAOs have faced so far.
If you have questions or want to discuss a component of this proposal, please reply here or feel free to reach out. I will try to consolidate all my answers in this comment.
Hey everyone, I'm Joe and I'm leading the Plurality Labs team. I started the conversation around building a grants framework with this post discussing the pitfall DAOs have faced so far.
If you have questions or want to discuss a component of this proposal, please reply here or feel free to reach out. I will try to consolidate all my answers in this comment.
Thank you for your question!
The best organizations in the world for allocating funding do so for 10-12% administrative cost. The BEST. These are organizations like the Red Cross which has 100 years of learning. Their staff is administrative, not innovative.
Our first milestone fee annualized is 672k ARB. There were multiple roles we needed but couldn't afford to hire. The team I poached is passionate, but they had to take cuts from previous roles. We did this in part because we realized we would need to show our value for the DAO to pay what we are worth. We took the bet on ourselves and on Arbitrum delegates to allow us to show our value and right size after milestone 1.
Another consideration is thinking about our intention to execute and leave the DAO. There is no exit built in. We need to find a balance between what a fair payment is and what our margin is. Take a look at any other DAO with a grants program this size and you will see we are WELL below the standard.
Take the work we have done around STIP which will impact LTIPP and the ongoing program.
We will likely see over $100 million in incentives given in 2024. If you think our work will have saved even 5% in efficiency through these grants, then our fee has paid for itself.
This is ONLY ONE example of many ways we have and will have created value for Arbitrum.
Our 336k ARB for the first milestone went down from 1.16 to around $0.80 for half of our milestone time. Had we not been delayed by compliance issues, we would have paid out when the price was down. Had that happened, our team would have been out of funds to pay a team of four at the end of December.
This is an important point, this vote doesn't send the allocation fund to Plurality Labs team! All the funds are sent to the PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig which is run by a majority of delegates. Our fee is then sent to our multisig from there. If there is leftover, we will simply roll it forward. There is no way for us to keep it. A good thing about the funds still being controlled by the DAO is that we don't need to nitpick at how much is being rolled forward because it is all the DAOs funds.
In terms of the fee, we could right size it with the next budget. Say we allocated 80% of the total, we could calculate 20% of our fee and take it out of our third milestone fee. I totally understand that there is a slight incentive for our team to want to allocate everything, even if we do it poorly. That is a legitimate risk, but I'm committing to not doing that.
Our team's interest in solving this problem without an exit package is that we know solving the problems and bringing success to Arbitrum will open a wide tapestry of lucrative offers in the future. We don't get that if we aren't genuine in how we handle disputes and conflict that naturally arises. Hopefully you can understand our position and see how our best interest is aligned with Arbitrum.
We stated the goal of massively scaling what the DAO can safely allocate in our first milestone proposal. In an early comment about that statement, we clarified it meant going from 3 million ARB in Milestone 1 to 30 million in Milestone 2 to 100 million in Milestone 3. While these numbers were just randomly pulled out of thin air, there is some logic to it.
Other ecosystems are spending hundreds of millions attracting builders. How much did Optimism drop yesterday? That was the second one this year, correct? How about Polygon's 200 million? Avalanche? Near? Solana? I think you get the point.
How are we going to keep up???
Also consider that Optimism's foundation has like 35% of the token supply. Our foundation has 7.5% (and they got dragged for taking that much!) We then collectively forced them to put their funds into a vesting schedule! (I was in support of this at the time, but now I realize it was a mistake.)
We don't have anyone capable of making big bets for our ecosystem. Let's free up some funds for Plurality Labs to try and make some big bets as approved by the oversight delegates! We are very willing to work on what checks and balances are in place to ensure quality. (That is literally the job we are being hired to do.)
NO! We will first design a structure which can be implemented onchain using hats protocol. A process will accompany this structure which may include a council of elected delegates as "approver" role to our "driver" function. Basically, someone has to do the work of creating job descriptions, listing them, tracking applicants, etc. The delegates don't want to do this. We may find 2-3 different ways to select candidates and compare results. We love to experiment! 😁
Here is an example of how we might shift responsibilities from Plurality Labs to the DAO over time.
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
Hey hey, there will indeed be more grant funding opportunities which imply more grants and grant programs will be created.
I will give only a small example, one of the former programs "The Arbitrum Citizens Retro round" had 100k ARB in funding and 25 recepients and was lazer focused on those that stepped up for Arbitrum DAO, if a similar program starts out via Milestone 2 and has 5x 10x the funding its scope can be broader which means it can accept 5x 10x even 20x grantees...and this is just one small grant program out of a plurality of grant programs, but the example sticks for all of them as well.
I remember voting against the initial proposal that funded Plurality Labs. In a true testament of Joe's character, he did not take it personally and in fact reached out asking if I wanted to lead the Arbitrum Treasury and Sustainability WG!
I am currently one of the grantees in their firestarter stream and will remain at the treasury WG for milestone 2, so I shall have to abstain in this vote. Nonetheless here are some considerations to make when voting and choosing an amount to sanction for PL
I remember voting against the initial proposal that funded Plurality Labs. In a true testament of Joe's character, he did not take it personally and in fact reached out asking if I wanted to lead the Arbitrum Treasury and Sustainability WG!
I am currently one of the grantees in their firestarter stream and will remain at the treasury WG for milestone 2, so I shall have to abstain in this vote. Nonetheless here are some considerations to make when voting and choosing an amount to sanction for PL
Scaling with speed is a requirement for winning the L2 race. We must be willing to take big bets and make big experiments now.
The power law hasn't yet kicked in for L2s. This bull market, one L2 will absorb the market and start enjoying network effects. I honestly hate to say it, but Base + OP is looking like a front-runner.
Which is to say, now is the time to double down on previously funded projects that have shown success, and not pull up the bridge
And that leads to my second point - the fact that PL has achieved success in milestone 1, warranting our trust in their capacility to deliver. Let's look at some of the plural mechanisms they devised in 6 months;
Obviously not all these mechanisms have proven effective; that's what the far more difficult milestone 2 seeks to achieve, identifying what doesn't work so we can cut out the flab and scale up on what is delivering value to the DAO.
Joe and the PL team show up in these forums + TG groups everyday and have their finger on the pulse of ArbitrumDAO like no other grantee. I feel confident they will do what is best for the DAO, including returning excess funds that cannot be well allocated, rather than exhaust the budget for winning personal reputation points. Their performance in milestone 1 gives confidence in sanctioning a higher amount to them, as they have shown they spend judiciously and not recklessly.
One question I had was on the difference between the strategy layer and the decentralized action layer - is there a hierarchy between them where the strategy folks manage the action team? Would there be porous movement between both groups or is the action team just contractors hired by the strategy team to execute on formulated tasks?
Thanks to you and your team for hard work. I think option 2 would be the best solution. However, I would like to ask you about your commission for the work:
Thanks to you and your team for hard work. I think option 2 would be the best solution. However, I would like to ask you about your commission for the work:
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
I did not realize this was an issue. This was 100% because I asked Griff to take it down and I should take responsibility.
These are the reasons I thought it was not a problem to ask for it to be taken down:
I did not realize this was an issue. This was 100% because I asked Griff to take it down and I should take responsibility.
These are the reasons I thought it was not a problem to ask for it to be taken down:
Honestly, I had no clue this would be an issue. In some DAOs where Snapshot is considered a vote, I would never think of doing this. I thought the "temp check" is clear and explicit. No harm intended.
I only see "this is bad practice" as a reason to not do it.
I don't really agree or disagree with the logic, but I respect your voice here. Can you help me understand what problem it might cause?
I want to thank Plurality labs for their work so far on this, they have put in a ton of work and it is especially appreciated that they put together the Milestone 1 Review. It is crazy how fast time has flown by - I can't believe it's been 6 months!
I did read the Milestone 1 review just now and have to admit I the results have far surpassed what I expected when first voting to approve this. I think it's fair to say the first milestone was a success and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read it to do so. Seeing the success makes me more comfortable supporting as it moves towards Milestone 2.
I want to thank Plurality labs for their work so far on this, they have put in a ton of work and it is especially appreciated that they put together the Milestone 1 Review. It is crazy how fast time has flown by - I can't believe it's been 6 months!
I did read the Milestone 1 review just now and have to admit I the results have far surpassed what I expected when first voting to approve this. I think it's fair to say the first milestone was a success and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read it to do so. Seeing the success makes me more comfortable supporting as it moves towards Milestone 2.
One message from above / the Milestone 1 review I wanted to touch on is the communication points. I think below from the review hits it on the head.
DAO members need communications to be simplified and aggregated. They don’t know where to go to maintain context, know what they should do, and learn about other ways to be a good Arbitrum citizen.
I have to admit some of these projects I even missed, so I hope Milestone 2 looks to addresses some of that further. I was seeing this too with a few projects that reached out to me on grant applications, and in the DAO's defense this is to be expected as we find our footing and mature. I'm hoping this project helps to get us to a place years from now where a real good system is in place!
I also would agree that there isn't really time to delay given current market conditions. Both in the broad uptick in the market and other L2's continuing to innovate. So I'm glad to see that urgency acknowledged!
Edit: Adding that I have voted "For" this proposal. I believe Plurality Labs has shown success with Milestone 1 and deserves their work to continue to be funded for Milestone 2
The DAO currently has one decision making modality: delegates must vote for everything big and small. This does not scale and is suboptimal for outcomes. Once the noise surpasses the signal, this becomes a popularity contest. Can I get enough voters’ attention?
Delegates know this, and see the need for different groups to take responsibility for parts of an allocation approval process.
Plurality Labs has been one of those groups. Our ability to experiment in making decisions enables two huge benefits to the DAO:
When there is an urgent need, we are able to fund it right away.
We are able to harness evolutionary mechanics by trying out different mechanisms
We have been able to fund impactful work with our grant spending because we are able to sense the needs of the DAO and address the biggest issues fast. We do this in parallel to the experimentation and design work needed to deliver over three milestones and exit.
We are a framework architect for the pluralist grants programs for the DAO. What does this mean?
What does this mean?
You can see the roles as indicated in the picture below representing how the DAO is allocating funds. Each shade of blue represents a different role in the pluralist framework. A black-line border indicates a governance layer.
Plurality Labs is a “Program Provider”
A program provider is responsible for selecting Grant Programs to fund. They help avoid redundancies by connecting the dots between programs and communicating with other service providers. Their success is based on selecting quality programs which in turn select impactful grants to fund. The program provider is indirectly responsible for grant success in so much as they must focus funding to top programs and coach program managers in design and ensuring grantee participation in accountability systems.
Royal Blue = Grant Program
Grant programs fund the decentralized community to build in alignment with the DAO. They consist of Voters, Pools, & Recipients. Grant programs may consist of multiple funding rounds.
Grant Program managers are responsible for the design and execution of grant programs. They are responsible for the end-to-end program including comms, operations, and project management. They should be able to match allocation strategies to the funding needed in a way that provides the best results. Grant program managers are grantees themselves as they may require some level of compensation which can range depending on the program design.
Dark Blue indicates the number of funding rounds in the program
Rounds are discreet funding events. They have pre-processing, execution, and post-processing work. The initial conditions, especially for fully onchain systems, can be iterated each round.
This doesn’t even look at the grantees!
Within grant programs, there are a few very different categories of grant types. Each has its own set of benefits and risks:
| Type of Grant | Benefit to Ecosystem | Benefit to Builder | Risks |
|---|---|---|---|
| User/Liquidity Incentives | - Acquire new users - Large investors bridge | - Acquire new users - Offer better returns | - Users leave when incentives stop - Attracts engagement farmers |
| Product-market fit bets | - More businesses to bring users | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Very low odds - Requires infrastrucutre to support it - Can’t compete with professional orgs |
| Open source infrastructure development | - Tooling needed to make builders lives easier is funded | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Builders don’t have to build things that aren’t part of their core product |
| Community education & events | - A more informed population - Acquisition & retention | - They receive funds - They belong to the community | - Very hard to be fair and unbiased - Lots of grifters |
| DAO operations | - People can easily find their way - Onchain systems ensure credible neutrality - Ensures legitimacy - Maintains context - Can sense & respond - Executes ideas that suggesting parties don’t have time to do | - They receive funds - They belong to the community - They have access to leadership - Opens up career opportunities | - Can lead to bureaucracy - Can lead to capture - Naturally tend to bloat - Naturally tend to work in silos |
Most of the Arbitrum grant programs have done open source infrastructure. The foundation has so far taken the lead in product-market fit bets and community education and events. Questbook programs have done a bit in these areas as well. Open source infrastructure development can be attributed to all of the grants programs.
Plurality Labs is the only organization funding DAO operations, although it hasn’t been our direct focus.
We are committed to building capture-resistance, scalability, AND efficiency. This is the point of hiring our team. Our flexibility will also allow us to wisely experiment with new methods which may optimize funding in the other categories.
The portion we allocate is represented by size in the graphic below on the left. On the right you can see the relative grant size if our proposal was passed.
The light blue area on the left is the only funding which is allocated to:
The Arbitrum DAO governance is the decision-making modality for everything outside of the programs it has funded. When it does approve a grant program directly, it only does so if it knows what the governance mode of the program will be. You see proof of this when the most engaging delegate discussions are about councils and elections. Questbook is a program provider which allocated funds to 4 programs based on conversations with delegates and contributors. All of its four programs use one decision making modality - delegated domain authority.
In Plurality Labs’ first Milestone, we were the only program provider with decision-making to make adjustments and iteratively improve their program’s governance.
The methodology funded 12 programs which managed 27 rounds of fund distribution in less than 6 months. We had over 30 experiments in grant governance design including 6 at the program manager level and 24 at the round level.
For Plurality Labs to be successful in delivering across three milestones, we need to run enough experiments to find optimal solutions. Then we need to build them onchain and run them again to see that they work correctly. We also need to be able to attract top talent by having a runway long enough for them to view Arbitrum as a quality career opportunity.
The allocation fund made available to Plurality Labs goes to the PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig which is a 4/6 with only two Plurality Labs team members. This is low risk.. The DAO can claw this back with a Tally vote at any time. They can even claw back a portion of the PL fee. Because of this, we don’t think most people will object to the amount set to allocate.
We learned that we need other program providers to keep us on our toes to maintain context in a given area over time. During our second milestone, we will empower workstreams to allocate 60% of the allocation fund and we will select programs to deliver the other 40%.
This graphic shows the ideal future state for how the Plurality Labs team facilitates the decentralization of Arbitrum DAO. It includes our team roles as framework architect and program provider.
We will take the month of February to publish an in depth report on the state of the grants overall. We will use the time to conduct our PL Community Council elections and begin planning our strategic objectives for 2024.We will begin deploying funds at scale in March 2024
To move fast, we will move some big bets forward by working with the DAO and delegates to craft well-liked programs. At the beginning of 2024, we will spend more time setting up workstreams and facilitating alignment and planning some big bets. By the end of 2024, there will be multiple other program providers known as workstreams with full-time Arbitrum dedicated people and keeping context for us all.
We will establish a container to design and implement capture-resistant governance that we can walk away from and expect it to operate in a Decentralized, Autonomous, and ORGANIZED way.
I had the opportunity to work with Joe initially in the first iteration of the proposal six months back. I would like to echo what Bobby mentioned, even I was a bit unsure about how this would work because something like this had never been implemented by any DAOs. All the DAOs had a standard way of running a grants program, either through a council, committee, or something like DDA. However, Joe did something different, and it worked. I would like to mention some of the key points.
Just one goal I would like to see this program achieve is if we can get more projects to launch their chain on Orbit.
Prior to the approval of plurality labs initial proposal, I was unsure of how this would play out, but I'm glad to say that it exceeded my expectations. Their consistent presence and support has been remarkable.They initiated working groups and programs and retained talent that would have otherwise been unpaid and gone elsewhere.
Their performance in milestone 1 instills confidence in approving a higher budget for them, as they have proven to be prudent and responsible in their spending. A lot of experiments were conducted, albeit not all successful, but the aim was to experiment, reflect, and improve.
Regarding the payment, the DAO needs to responsibly compensate its contributors. Fair payment is key to attracting and retaining talent, essential for the sustainability of these programs. As mentioned by Joe and Devansh, now is the time to double down on these experiments as the L2 wars break out. There is a lot more that can be done in the arbitrum ecosystem.
Overall, I support the proposal.
Is it possible to bring down the administrative costs? They're more than 6% of the total request. Leaving aside lively discussion here and on the Milestone 1 thread, it's just hard to see how high administrative costs can be justified.
To invert things a bit, would you provide a grant to an applicant that included costs that high? It's not as if the funds are going to pay for developer hours or large legal expenses.
Many grants programs in the real world cap administrative costs at 5% or even 2%. We believe that no one should work for free, but the cost structure seems like it can be better optimized, especially since Arbitrum Foundation presumably continues to bear costs of KYC/KYB compliance for onboarding of grantees?
For a comparison, let's put it side by side with the upcoming LTIP pilot. Dollar amounts just plug in today's price of ARB and should be taken as just rough estimates.
| Milestone 2 | LTIP Pilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Grants Budget | 30,000,000 ARB | 45,100,000 ARB |
| Administrative Budget | $3,750,000 | 715,000 ARB (~$1,200,000) |
| Admin Costs as % of Total Request | ~6.5% | 1.6% |
LTIP Pilot is meant to be over a smaller period of time, but it's still even more grants money and the easiest comparison. What accounts for the several million dollars in additional overhead for Milestone 2? How can we bring those down to around 2-3% of the total spend?
Hey everyone, I'm Joe and I'm leading the Plurality Labs team. I started the conversation around building a grants framework with this post discussing the pitfall DAOs have faced so far.
If you have questions or want to discuss a component of this proposal, please reply here or feel free to reach out. I will try to consolidate all my answers in this comment.
Hey everyone, I'm Joe and I'm leading the Plurality Labs team. I started the conversation around building a grants framework with this post discussing the pitfall DAOs have faced so far.
If you have questions or want to discuss a component of this proposal, please reply here or feel free to reach out. I will try to consolidate all my answers in this comment.
Thank you for your question!
The best organizations in the world for allocating funding do so for 10-12% administrative cost. The BEST. These are organizations like the Red Cross which has 100 years of learning. Their staff is administrative, not innovative.
Our first milestone fee annualized is 672k ARB. There were multiple roles we needed but couldn't afford to hire. The team I poached is passionate, but they had to take cuts from previous roles. We did this in part because we realized we would need to show our value for the DAO to pay what we are worth. We took the bet on ourselves and on Arbitrum delegates to allow us to show our value and right size after milestone 1.
Another consideration is thinking about our intention to execute and leave the DAO. There is no exit built in. We need to find a balance between what a fair payment is and what our margin is. Take a look at any other DAO with a grants program this size and you will see we are WELL below the standard.
Take the work we have done around STIP which will impact LTIPP and the ongoing program.
We will likely see over $100 million in incentives given in 2024. If you think our work will have saved even 5% in efficiency through these grants, then our fee has paid for itself.
This is ONLY ONE example of many ways we have and will have created value for Arbitrum.
Our 336k ARB for the first milestone went down from 1.16 to around $0.80 for half of our milestone time. Had we not been delayed by compliance issues, we would have paid out when the price was down. Had that happened, our team would have been out of funds to pay a team of four at the end of December.
This is an important point, this vote doesn't send the allocation fund to Plurality Labs team! All the funds are sent to the PL-ARB Grants Safety Multisig which is run by a majority of delegates. Our fee is then sent to our multisig from there. If there is leftover, we will simply roll it forward. There is no way for us to keep it. A good thing about the funds still being controlled by the DAO is that we don't need to nitpick at how much is being rolled forward because it is all the DAOs funds.
In terms of the fee, we could right size it with the next budget. Say we allocated 80% of the total, we could calculate 20% of our fee and take it out of our third milestone fee. I totally understand that there is a slight incentive for our team to want to allocate everything, even if we do it poorly. That is a legitimate risk, but I'm committing to not doing that.
Our team's interest in solving this problem without an exit package is that we know solving the problems and bringing success to Arbitrum will open a wide tapestry of lucrative offers in the future. We don't get that if we aren't genuine in how we handle disputes and conflict that naturally arises. Hopefully you can understand our position and see how our best interest is aligned with Arbitrum.
We stated the goal of massively scaling what the DAO can safely allocate in our first milestone proposal. In an early comment about that statement, we clarified it meant going from 3 million ARB in Milestone 1 to 30 million in Milestone 2 to 100 million in Milestone 3. While these numbers were just randomly pulled out of thin air, there is some logic to it.
Other ecosystems are spending hundreds of millions attracting builders. How much did Optimism drop yesterday? That was the second one this year, correct? How about Polygon's 200 million? Avalanche? Near? Solana? I think you get the point.
How are we going to keep up???
Also consider that Optimism's foundation has like 35% of the token supply. Our foundation has 7.5% (and they got dragged for taking that much!) We then collectively forced them to put their funds into a vesting schedule! (I was in support of this at the time, but now I realize it was a mistake.)
We don't have anyone capable of making big bets for our ecosystem. Let's free up some funds for Plurality Labs to try and make some big bets as approved by the oversight delegates! We are very willing to work on what checks and balances are in place to ensure quality. (That is literally the job we are being hired to do.)
NO! We will first design a structure which can be implemented onchain using hats protocol. A process will accompany this structure which may include a council of elected delegates as "approver" role to our "driver" function. Basically, someone has to do the work of creating job descriptions, listing them, tracking applicants, etc. The delegates don't want to do this. We may find 2-3 different ways to select candidates and compare results. We love to experiment! 😁
Here is an example of how we might shift responsibilities from Plurality Labs to the DAO over time.
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
Hey hey, there will indeed be more grant funding opportunities which imply more grants and grant programs will be created.
I will give only a small example, one of the former programs "The Arbitrum Citizens Retro round" had 100k ARB in funding and 25 recepients and was lazer focused on those that stepped up for Arbitrum DAO, if a similar program starts out via Milestone 2 and has 5x 10x the funding its scope can be broader which means it can accept 5x 10x even 20x grantees...and this is just one small grant program out of a plurality of grant programs, but the example sticks for all of them as well.
I remember voting against the initial proposal that funded Plurality Labs. In a true testament of Joe's character, he did not take it personally and in fact reached out asking if I wanted to lead the Arbitrum Treasury and Sustainability WG!
I am currently one of the grantees in their firestarter stream and will remain at the treasury WG for milestone 2, so I shall have to abstain in this vote. Nonetheless here are some considerations to make when voting and choosing an amount to sanction for PL
I remember voting against the initial proposal that funded Plurality Labs. In a true testament of Joe's character, he did not take it personally and in fact reached out asking if I wanted to lead the Arbitrum Treasury and Sustainability WG!
I am currently one of the grantees in their firestarter stream and will remain at the treasury WG for milestone 2, so I shall have to abstain in this vote. Nonetheless here are some considerations to make when voting and choosing an amount to sanction for PL
Scaling with speed is a requirement for winning the L2 race. We must be willing to take big bets and make big experiments now.
The power law hasn't yet kicked in for L2s. This bull market, one L2 will absorb the market and start enjoying network effects. I honestly hate to say it, but Base + OP is looking like a front-runner.
Which is to say, now is the time to double down on previously funded projects that have shown success, and not pull up the bridge
And that leads to my second point - the fact that PL has achieved success in milestone 1, warranting our trust in their capacility to deliver. Let's look at some of the plural mechanisms they devised in 6 months;
Obviously not all these mechanisms have proven effective; that's what the far more difficult milestone 2 seeks to achieve, identifying what doesn't work so we can cut out the flab and scale up on what is delivering value to the DAO.
Joe and the PL team show up in these forums + TG groups everyday and have their finger on the pulse of ArbitrumDAO like no other grantee. I feel confident they will do what is best for the DAO, including returning excess funds that cannot be well allocated, rather than exhaust the budget for winning personal reputation points. Their performance in milestone 1 gives confidence in sanctioning a higher amount to them, as they have shown they spend judiciously and not recklessly.
One question I had was on the difference between the strategy layer and the decentralized action layer - is there a hierarchy between them where the strategy folks manage the action team? Would there be porous movement between both groups or is the action team just contractors hired by the strategy team to execute on formulated tasks?
Thanks to you and your team for hard work. I think option 2 would be the best solution. However, I would like to ask you about your commission for the work:
Thanks to you and your team for hard work. I think option 2 would be the best solution. However, I would like to ask you about your commission for the work:
Can you explain such a significant change, taking into account the fact that you want to increase your team by 4 people at the moment, and in the end there will probably be 8 people. The fact that more funds will be allocated for grants does not mean that there will be more grants themselves, it will simply be possible to allocate a larger amount for each grant.
I did not realize this was an issue. This was 100% because I asked Griff to take it down and I should take responsibility.
These are the reasons I thought it was not a problem to ask for it to be taken down:
I did not realize this was an issue. This was 100% because I asked Griff to take it down and I should take responsibility.
These are the reasons I thought it was not a problem to ask for it to be taken down:
Honestly, I had no clue this would be an issue. In some DAOs where Snapshot is considered a vote, I would never think of doing this. I thought the "temp check" is clear and explicit. No harm intended.
I only see "this is bad practice" as a reason to not do it.
I don't really agree or disagree with the logic, but I respect your voice here. Can you help me understand what problem it might cause?
I want to thank Plurality labs for their work so far on this, they have put in a ton of work and it is especially appreciated that they put together the Milestone 1 Review. It is crazy how fast time has flown by - I can't believe it's been 6 months!
I did read the Milestone 1 review just now and have to admit I the results have far surpassed what I expected when first voting to approve this. I think it's fair to say the first milestone was a success and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read it to do so. Seeing the success makes me more comfortable supporting as it moves towards Milestone 2.
I want to thank Plurality labs for their work so far on this, they have put in a ton of work and it is especially appreciated that they put together the Milestone 1 Review. It is crazy how fast time has flown by - I can't believe it's been 6 months!
I did read the Milestone 1 review just now and have to admit I the results have far surpassed what I expected when first voting to approve this. I think it's fair to say the first milestone was a success and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read it to do so. Seeing the success makes me more comfortable supporting as it moves towards Milestone 2.
One message from above / the Milestone 1 review I wanted to touch on is the communication points. I think below from the review hits it on the head.
DAO members need communications to be simplified and aggregated. They don’t know where to go to maintain context, know what they should do, and learn about other ways to be a good Arbitrum citizen.
I have to admit some of these projects I even missed, so I hope Milestone 2 looks to addresses some of that further. I was seeing this too with a few projects that reached out to me on grant applications, and in the DAO's defense this is to be expected as we find our footing and mature. I'm hoping this project helps to get us to a place years from now where a real good system is in place!
I also would agree that there isn't really time to delay given current market conditions. Both in the broad uptick in the market and other L2's continuing to innovate. So I'm glad to see that urgency acknowledged!
Edit: Adding that I have voted "For" this proposal. I believe Plurality Labs has shown success with Milestone 1 and deserves their work to continue to be funded for Milestone 2
