Based on my conversations with people from Kernel and our team, I am satisfied with the answers given.
I am still making up my mind, but leaning towards support. Iâd like to see projects go from Hackathons, to grants, to kernel, to partners. This is an exciting opportunity.
The aqueduct will set a great precedent as well. While I am still unsure if we should be investing in early stage products AND I have reservations around not having any sort of comparison to the overall budget and treasury of the DAO, I am hesitantly supportive at this point.
Thanks for clearing that up. I liked the green flag detail, but youâre right about the negative connotation of the word âred flagâ, itâs an interesting point.
I would personally prefer to see gitcoin invest in products that we can test ourselves and to buy tokens that can be independently valued by the market. But it seems that those who have actually seen the product and have some way to evaluate the value of the promised tokens are more excited, which is definitely a good sign.
Iâm supportive of the new 50k GTC revised amount.
It seems Wonder is doing good work and would be a positive partnership for Gitcoin
I was initially hesitant about the 100k GTC amount, especially since at the time GTC was at $8. An $800k early-stage token swap didnât really seem to me what Gitcoin DAO should be focused on directing funds to. A smaller amount to foster long term collaboration is something I can be supportive of though
I think in anticipation of future similar proposals, itâs worth Stewards discussing how we feel about Gitcoin DAO directing treasury funds into early-stage projects as this feels different to me than standard treasury diversification (moving some funds into more stable or liquid assets)
I think itâs also worth a discussion among Stewards on meta-governance if we have the proper structures/processes in place for it and if this is what we want to dedicate resources to. Thanks @Pop for offering to be the meta-delegate in the case of Wonder!
I just read the thread, and for the first time as an occasional GD voter, Iâm leaning towards voting against the majority here.
There are many positive aspects to this partnership, very well articulated by @andros. I acknowledge all of the pros, Iâm just not convinced enough that they balance the cons.
As mentioned by @linda, funding early-stage projects is a different activity than treasury diversification. A token swap can have other purposes, like solidifying an incubation process or expanding an existing partnership. As many people mentioned here, GD doesnât have processes in place to incubate early-stage projects (while Gitcoin has a long history of funding such projects through grants). Unless I missed it, it has never been an approved strategy with associated policy, structure, and budget. I understand and approve of the usefulness of having meta-delegates, but it sounds like a rushed and ad hoc measure that covers only a small part of what such activity would entail.
My main concern is that the proposal would set apart Wonder from other projects supported by grants (or not supported at all). There are so many new open source projects for DAO tooling right now (Dework, Charmverse, Otterspace, Crew3, Station, etc.). Iâm concerned about the unintended and unforeseen consequences that may result from forming a special relationship with one of them without the justification of an existing and successful partnership, or the existence of a seed investment program.
Let me say, I tried to start a similar product with the Swarm City team in 2018 called ETHkan and am a big fan of what Wonder is doing! I also really like Dework and would love to personally support any and every project that is integrating the Kanban approach with web3 tooling. Very needed!
That said, 50k GTC is a lot of money, more than most working groups get, and the convo in this thread feels like trying to justify throwing money to our friends more than it feels like this is an awesome opportunity that we should go out on a limb to support, so I am going to vote AGAINST to help get a discussion going and reserve my right to change my after the Stewards Council meeting.
My biggest issue is understanding if being part of this is in scope of Gitcoin DAO? If so, thats cool, and we should get a group together around it, and itâs not a bad move, Metacartel and ETHDenver do this sort of work for their ecosystem incubating Kernal projects could be an awesome move towards making Gitcoin DAO regenerative while also supporting the ecosystem⌠but I doubt making a full DAO vote for every move would be the way to go for that.
So yeah⌠I am on vacation this week but will try hard to make the 8am (my time) Stewards Call on Thursday to better understand this, and I might change my vote to âFor.â
Totally understand your concerns but I would like to highlight parts of the proposal.
Just to be clear, this is not an investment, but a partnership like the ones previously passed with Developer DAO and Prime DAO.
With this partnership, we want to build tooling that GitcoinDAO uses and closely work with GitcoinDAO to improve our platform in a way that specifically serves the needs of the DAO as well as Gitcoin funded projects.
We also want to help those in Kernel better collaborate on their projects since Wonder was actually started in KB4. Specifically, this would be tooling that:
Helps onboard new contributors and gives context to work that needs to be done in the GitcoinDAO
Makes it easier to pay Gitcoin contributors for tasks/bounties and through retroactive/recurring payments
Sets up more nuanced permissioning and token gating around who can create/review tasks
Helps create better task workflows within the DAO across the different working groups
Enables contributors to build up their web3/on chain profile (weâre part of DAOStar where we help build standards around credentialing).
Helps Kernel fellows build their projects in public and invite other fellows to collaborate on those projects.
In addition, 1% of our treasury will also be dedicated towards aqueduct to help improve the aqueduct technology as well as to ensure part of the funding of Wonder projects flows back into the Gitcoin ecosystem.
This is why we think this is more of a partnership, not an investment. Happy to attend the Stewardâs meeting or set up a separate call/meeting to discuss more!
I am supportive of this proposal and think the revision of the amount to 50K is a good one.
I will acknowledge that I have been part of conversations weâve been having internally at the DAO around partnerships & mutual grants strategy which many folks who are commenting may not be privy to, and we should do a better job surfacing these with stewards and coming to alignment collectively on the strategy, in addition to this specific proposal. I think @ceresstationâs post from earlier today does a great job in starting to surface this discussion.
As it relates to the concerns brought up by @bobjiang, the way I see it is:
This proposal gives Gitcoin the ability to shape the direction of this DAO tool to more closely match the needs of the Gitcoin community.
The partnership is positive sum in the sense that it helps Wonder to have GitcoinDAO in its network, and it helps GitcoinDAO to have stakes in Wonder since that implies a say in the direction of a DAO tool that is already serving large DAOs and making them more efficient. This will make Wonder more decentralized and transparent by bringing the Gitcoin community to it, and it will make Gitcoin more efficient and productive since the Wonder team will start building features that specifically fit GitcoinDAOâs needs. Another good illustration of the positive sum nature of this collaboration is that 1% of the Wonder treasury will be dedicated to quadratic funding of Gitcoin grant rounds that use Wonder for project management.
With regards to the other questions:
StemsDAO which I am a core contributor of, is using Wonder extensively to onboard and handle contributor workflows - it has been very helpful for us to streamline that process. Iâm happy to answer more specific questions about this. Also, having large DAOs on the platform that are already doing work and have high throughput productivity requirements means that the contributors on Wonder are all typically experienced with web3 projects and decentralized work environments .
Wonder actually supports payment via Utopia payment request links, but additionally allows context of each payment to be attached to a task, as well as being able to batch pay multiple bounties at the same time. Think @andros attached some demos in this comment.
I voted against this mutual grant. I already explained the line of reasoning to my fellow stewards in the call we had today. Let me sum up here:
I donât believe this proposal has followed due process. The original proposal was for 100k GTC. In fact as of right now the post still says 100k. The snapshot is for 50k GTC, but it links to this post which says 100k GTC. The amount changed somewhere in the middle of the discussion but not enough time has been given to deliberate and the proposal has not been updated accordingly.
This is a mutual grant acting as a bet for something that may exist in the future. Wonder does not have a token yet. We are effectively setting up a price floor for their token which is not something I believe gitcoin should be touching at all. I am not againt such mutual grants with projects that already have tokens in the market but a grant for a promise of a token is not something I think gitcoin should do.
I feel (this could be my personal shortcoming) that not enough deliberation and discussion has happened on this proposal. I learned about it 2 days ago. We got an explanation by Scott in the stewards call today. But the snapshot already ends in less than 24 hours. For such proposals I really think stewards should be given a heads up and context much earlier in the process.
Seconding @lefterisjp on his comment this proposal request a budget of 100,000k GTC while we can see on the Snapshot the amount is at 50,000k GTC, from this post I can still see the requested amount is 100,000k witch differ and I do think we did not had enough time to deliberate.
Itâs not clear on how or where the funds will be used.
Wonder token has not launched yet so there is no guarantee.
Ideas: Why donât we just do a token swap at this point once you guys have launched your token? Why do you need 100,000k - 50,000k GTC?
In terms of editing the proposal, Iâm actually unable to edit the amount since a certain amount of time has passed since I posted. I apologize if I missed something and if any of the Discourse admins can change the proposal amount that would be great!
From my understanding the Developer DAO partnership is similar in that the Developer DAO governance token was not released yet.
As mentioned in this thread comment and in the proposal, the tokens will be used for meta-delegation through 2024. This proposal was made with the intent of forming a long term partnership
In that case since deliberation during this proposal lead to the proposal being changed perhaps a different post with a new proposal would make sense. I would also ask @Pop here. But I believe the process should start again.
That is true. And imo that was a mistake. I strongly believe token swaps should happen only if both tokens are live.
I voted against this proposal because it is not at all clear to me how it benefits GitCoin. Itâs clear how it benefits the recipient, but not GitCoin.
after much deliberation, I decided to vote against this proposal in its current form for 2 reasons:
Proposal needs closer review - as some stewards pointed out, and as @ceresstationnoted in his post here we need a formal process for how we conduct swaps. Iâd like to take this chance to bump up in priority the call for a mutual grants review committee and include Wonder as our first candidate for review. this is to ensure Gitcoin remains credibly neutral and have an unbiased approach to conducting these token swaps as we are not only committing to help provide funds to the project but also to become a partner in each othersâ journey through governance. Iâd like to work with @Pop and @ceresstation to make this a reality as soon as we can!
Procedural - per the new governance rules, after stewards have given comments, an updated proposal needs to be available on the forum and then finally be posted onto the snapshot. this is to ensure consistency and as part of keeping processes open and preserved for posterity.
a path forward would be to 1) engage the Wonder team for a revised proposal 2) update the proposal by working closely with stewards that volunteered to be on the mutual grants committee 3) post on forum and proceed with the voting process
I think the issue we discussed in the Steward Council yesterday is that the governance flow requires a proposal to be up for 5 days and have 5 stewards commenting. I know it a technicality but I think this is one point.
The second was around the lack of a token at present that a few of the steward council brought up - not without merit in terms of implications for the DAO. I think establishing a committee to evaluate, vet and recommend suitable proposals based on an established matrix would be incredibly valuable.
Also - an escrow contract should be established for any such mutual grants. Both parties would put the tokens into said contract - this is especially important in this situation where the $WONDER token doesnât exist yet. So then the GTC swap would only activate once the $WONDER token is also in the escrow. Does this make sense?
Thank you everyone for your feedback! Really respect the Gitcoin community and this is definitely a great example of DAO governance working
@Pop@Fishbiscuit weâre keen to work with your suggestions on more due process and creating an escrow contract for when our token is live. We assumed the token swap would only happen when our token was live, but would want to formalize that in the proposal to make it clear.
In the meantime, weâre planning on working with the DAO tooling work group to use Wonder for setting up per-project bounties/tasks so we can get some feedback there as well!
