Thank you @aurelius and @mrtdlgc
Lets talk very openly.
Is this a "real" proposal?
History
So, indeed, unlike the spinoffs of CoW and Safe the situation of Karpatkey is different. While certainly the beginning of Karpatkey can be traced back to Marce having a role within Gnosis (actually to work on “Open Ethereum” (the parity client successor that Gnosis maintained for a while) and starting to set up treasury managment as a “side task” - he quickly decided to found Karpatkey and hire a team around that. So, it is very clear that this very early “contract” with GnosisDAO was extremely beneficial and reduced the risk to build Karpatkey as its own new entity greatly - but there have certainly been times where Karptakey had spent more into building their team than the contract with Gnosis earned them.
Also, I think it is important to note that this was at a time when the idea of “DAO treasury management” would basically not exist yet - so it was not like Gnosis had much choice and despite paying significant fees - specifically in 2020/2021 the fees where purely performance based and thus Gnosis would certainly get more out it than basically all other DAOs at the time that did not do it.
With that history Karpatkey certainly does not need to ask GnosisDAO for approval to issue a token. On the other hand - Karpatkey still has a significant interest in a mutual beneficial relationship. The core pieces are:
- an existing economically highly relevant contact
- reputation (or as @aurelius puts it: “rubber stamp”)
So while not explicitly on the table those two things are negotiated here. So of course GnosisDAO could come to the conclusion to demand e.g. more ownership of KPK for those two things.
Is this already a "done deal"?
If the Gnosis founders have already signed off on this behind closed doors, then fine—go ahead.
Yes - we had discussion before and I personally consider this a fair deal. However - I absolutely care about opinions of relevant community members. I also think the way it was brought to vote without prior discussion was wrong. In the case of HQ we obviously also had prior discussions with the team, but at the same time I hope it became clear that we took feedback serious and worked on finding a proposal where DAO members could get behind.
So the time for everyone to suggest changes to the proposal is now!
Is Gnosis paying Karpatkey too much?
First - it is important to understand what K. is doing much more for Gnosis than treasury managment. K. has essentially build up the Defi ecosystem on Gnosis. Now, one can ask critically - is Defi on Gnosis flourishing? How many of the funds in Defi come from GnosisDAO itself?Here I would say: yes, it is clearly not yet flourishing in the way we want it - but still - there are very solid fundaments.
- best onchain liquidity between $ and €
- Spark and Aave available with attractive rates
- sDAI available in a very attractive form and deeply integrated into the onchain liquidity
- start of liquidity for RAW
A more exhaustive list of K. activity can be found here.
Those things sound easy but I can assure you, it did not just happened by accident but rather the result of a lot of work. Has it payed of yet? The answer is “no” - user and usage numbers are still too small to give here a yes, but certainly we laid the groundwork and if we are able to attract users to the chain they find attractive opportunities on the chain.
Coming back to K. related questions.
IMO the questions should be: how much does GnosisDAO want to invest in building a DEFI ecosystem on the chain? Should K. be the only partner for this? What activities in the past have been effective? Which one have been ineffective? What is missing?
I can assure that the Karpatkey team cares about having a mutual beneficial relation to Gnosis. Karpatkey clearly has skills useful to Gnosis. So it should be possible to have a mutually beneficial relationship. However - if there is doubt about that - then this should be addressed!
EDIT. @StefanGeorge was faster, had not seen the response - anyhow - I think mine is still useful to open up a potential discussion.