I understand the emotional baggage. To be transparent, I invested in Gnosis at the time because I believed in the products (Safe, Cowswap, Gnosis Chain, Gnosis Pay, etc.), investments (Flashbots, LiFi, 1kx, Monerium, etc.), and the ability of the founding team to steer the whole organization in the right direction by making financially educated decisions, including hard ones, if the situation required it.
The reality we have today is very different:
- Gnosis Ltd spending is off the charts, non-viable, and unjustified by any growth trajectory. There is no headcount that large in any other established blue-chip crypto company.
- Seeing that their funding was going to run dry, the management decided to request that the treasury manager add 250k GNO held by the Ltd on behalf of the DAO (or to the benefit of the DAO) as circulating. He obeyed. No GIP, no discussion. When I asked about disclosure (see Request for Governance Disclosure - Gnosis Ltd's 250,000 GNO, NAV Methodology Change, and the Relationship to GIP-128 Funding - #9 by Wismerhill ) all we received was a vague answer. And this has multiple implications: can they vote with it? If yes, that’s a permanent right to fund their pet projects with the DAO treasury. Did they disclose that they already had ~$36M in employee compensation packages available when they asked for a $30M funding? Absolutely not. So they actually spent $66M. Does that sound fair to you?
Gnosis DAO gives tokenholders the right to vote for governance and decisions. It’s certainly not an investment company, but neither is it a charity.
I completely respect the work that has been done by the founding team until now, but their gross negligence in making Ltd viable and lack of management or execution skills over the past year is concerning. You don’t start taking hard decisions when the company bank account is empty. The change that is needed at Ltd is much bigger than we all think.