GIP-128 Should GnosisDAO fund Gnosis Ltd with $30m/ year?

[ernst]

@Sam_Trust

Additionally, the DAO now holds funds that originally belonged to Gnosis Ltd, though it’s unclear to me why these were transferred in the first place—perhaps for legal reasons.

So, the Ltd belonged to the founders (Martin, Stefan, me, Consensys) and was a for-profit company when we conducted the token sale. Initially, this wasn’t a concern because the token sale was for $ 12.5m – but we kept most of it in ETH and benefited from the market, ultimately leaving us with a very significant treasury, not just 2-3 years of runway. It was clear to us that all value should accrue to the GNO token, not equity, but it was not clear whether we could turn the for-profit company into a foundation-like thing (from a legal point of view) and if so, when. Legally, by that time, we had built everything promised in the white paper and could have dissolved the company and distributed the holdings to the shareholders. So there was no necessity to divest to the DAO, but morally, it was the right thing to do.

That aside, we also welcomed having more direct input from GNO token holders. We worked on futarchy concepts for the DAO – as always, a bit ahead of time. Bringing that back is absolutely still in the cards. There are currently vanilla prediction markets about Gnosis on futarchy.fi, decision markets will come at some point, too. Futarchy.fi hasn’t launched officially yet, so it’s early days!

@Sam_Trust

Additionally, it’s still unclear how the various projects feed future value back to GNO holders. It would be helpful if the founders could provide more detail here. For instance, is Gnosis Pay 100% owned by Gnosis Ltd?

There are Gnosis Pay companies that belong to the founders, since interfacing with licensed businesses and applying for licenses requires a UBO list without ICO-era crypto companies. However, there are legal provisions in place that ensure that no value can be taken out of these companies by the shareholders, and profits accrue to the GNO token. So technically, the answer here is no, but factually, everything belongs to the DAO.

@Sam_Trust

Has the DAO officially agreed to fund Gnosis Labs? (To my knowledge, no proposal has been made.)

So far, the Gnosis Labs research has been funded by the Ltd, not requiring a DAO proposal. IMO funding Gnosis Labs makes sense for one, to grow the AI scene on Gnosis Chain, a very relevant proportion of payments on Gnosis Chain are actually agentic in nature (relevant dune dashboard). Other projects that the team is involved with is making documentation better/ more interactive, and prospectively helping with customer service automation technology, some sort of robo investment adviser etc.

@Sam_Trust

Gnosis Ltd is no longer a startup, and I would assume its current structure includes inefficiencies or redundancies that could justify a ~20% cost reduction without major losses in effectiveness. This kind of cost optimization is fairly standard for companies that are 8 years old and have never undergone serious external oversight. It’s hard to judge whether the proposed budget is reasonable based on the limited information, but some trust is inherently part of the equation.

This is a bit tough to respond to, because at a high level, your point is of course valid. I am sure there are some costs we could curb, and we actively go through all our expenditures regularly and re-evaluate them. I would argue that the budget is commensurate with the number of people and the scope of the project. Optimizing for the last $ here without impacting founder and team agency, is tricky. I would be happy to have select trusted people with experience in company operations review the budgets with us and share their insights and potential advice. But you’re right in that some level of trust in us is needed here.