Thanks for this proposal!
I do agree with the need to improve governance and I also think such a proposal of a long term service provider with a pay structure as suggested does make sense.
However - as a step to get there I would prefer to go a route where there are first 1-2 concrete projects with specified goals and budget that should already improve the status quo.
If those are delivered successfully I would be very open to voting for such a long-term “service agreement”.
Agreed with @mkoeppelmann 's suggestion to start with 1-2 concrete projects.
To that end, as a first step I’d suggest that the specific problems outlined in this proposal (quoted below) ought to be more concretely defined and measured.
For example, the proposal states that one of the initiatives is to “introduc[e] novel funding mechanisms to address its inefficient capital allocation”
If addressing “inefficient capital allocation” is the goal, then measuring the current capital efficiency is a logical first step in the process, so that a baseline can be established and any improvements from that baseline can be measured as well… which somewhat ironically/recursively will ensure that the funding of this proposal is also an efficient use of capital. Therefore, perhaps the first 1-2 concrete projects that were mentioned could simply be the establishment of baseline metrics for each of the proposed longer-term initiatives.
There’s a lot of great replies already so I’ll refrain from echoing them. A proposal of this nature coming from the Gnosis Guild, initially a DAO tooling project incubated by Gnosis, makes a lot of intuitive sense. The team has meaningfully contributed to GnosisDAO governance and @auryn_macmillan is uniquely positioned to implement what’s being proposed.
Gnosis is also uniquely positioned to become a leading innovator of DAO governance given its history and deep associations with other major DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem. It’s no secret that DAO governance is difficult. Voter apathy is a behavioral feature of all governance frameworks. Coordinating across a distributed team and listening to your community is hard.
Now is the time to double down on DAO governance. The coordination mechanisms being iterated on now in web3 present a stark contrast to the way that proprietary technology is built, often behind closed doors with private interest having the final say. It gets even more existential if we digress into the AI rabbit hole!
My point is that our DAO governance is a major feature and strength of Gnosis. Our DAO governance could be a lot stronger. We don’t have the capacity currently to iterate on novel funding mechanisms or, for example, experiment with delegating votes to an AI agent that you’ve trained to perfectly represent your personal set of politics. If you believe in a future with co-owned, collectively governed technology, then please vote for this proposal.
I can’t think of another team that is more equipped and better suited to steward GnosisDAO governance than the Gnosis Guild team.
Thanks @mkoeppelmann, glad we are in agreement around the long-term service provider need and pay structure.
We’re definitely open to completing 1-2 concrete projects to start. That said, Gnosis Guild has been contributing to the DAO’s governance for the past several years in this format. These one-off projects, while successful in their piecemeal implementation, have failed to have the more comprehensive impact we seek here. There is also considerable governance overhead for drafting 1-2 short-term proposals, which can often take months to materialize.
Our preferred approach in this case, would be to absorb that modification into this proposal. We would add an initial “trial-period” with 1-2 concrete projects + budget, which upon successful completion would transition to the current proposed model. This could also include establishing baseline metrics like @thomasrush suggested. How does that sound?
I’m just a GNO holder, but I want to get more and more involved in the Gnosis Chain ecosystem.
Having read this proposal and this discussion,
I think the idea of doing 1 or 2 projects as a trial period to let the community judge and vote on the interest and effectiveness of the Gnosis Guild proposal is a good alternative.
Now I totally agree that we need to modernize the DAO governance system, maximize its efficiency and interest for holders
So I’d like to thank gnosis guild for this proposal, and for being able to encourage discussion and debate!
Hey everyone!
Thanks Gnosis Guild for bringing governance to the table. We think this is a well-crafted and well-thought-out proposal. The mentioned problems are known, and the solutions proposed are necessary. Therefore, we are in favor of an initiative like this, as it undoubtedly represents a step in the right direction.
While the proposal outlines governance infrastructure improvements, which is fundamental, it overlooks some of the critical aspects of onboarding and community participation. Proper strategy, onboarding processes and incentives are essential for driving engagement, ensuring better DAO Health and the success of governance initiatives.
Without clear initiatives in these areas (Community onboarding, incentives, transparency, defined scope for participants), there may be challenges in increasing voter turnout, GNO token engagement in governance and basically having real/significant impact.
Having said that, we would like to support this initiative by acting as a working group and core collaborator to Gnosis Guild’s mission in shaping the future of GnosisDAO governance. With our experience in hands-on governance across various ecosystems, we are looking forward to filling that gap, to lending our expertise and contributing to the development of a more resilient, decentralized and mature governance for GnosisDAO.
We strongly believe that this proposal addresses critical issues and offers necessary solutions. Regardless of the outcome of this initial vote, it’s crucial to emphasize that community members and stakeholders are now starting to align towards the long-term success of Gnosis DAO.
Hats off to Gnosis Guild for taking the lead and initiating discussions on this critical matter!
We appreciate your support and useful feedback @SEEDLatam!
I agree that additional support in onboarding and community participation would be beneficial — SEED’s expertise and experience with similar initiatives could certainly fill that role. Collaborating with partners, working groups, and DAO contributors will be critical to the decentralization and growth of the Gnosis ecosystem.
UPDATE:
Since proposing GIP-99, we’ve held off on moving this proposal forward to gather important additional feedback from DAO members. During this period, we’ve also witnessed the growing necessity for a dedicated team focused on maintaining and improving the DAO’s infrastructure, onchain ops, and governance.
Without a dedicated team, the DAO faced several challenges that could have been more easily resolved:
Launching the delegate program was ultimately delayed for roughly nine months while technical issues with the DAO’s Snapshot space and multisig were resolved.
Critical bugs in the voting power calculation were left unfixed for 5 months. The subgraph used to calculate voting weight had multiple known issues that were left unresolved and eventually stopped working.
The GNO subgraph—essential for allocating SAFE tokens to GNO holders—was not fully operational when SAFE token transferability went live, as it had not yet received the required maintenance.
The DAO’s primary subgraph was deprecated and only restored shortly before the final deadline.
For a DAO of this treasury size, this underinvestment in core infrastructure creates considerable risk.
Beyond infrastructure, we see meaningful opportunities to streamline and expand the DAO’s governance, attract more growth-oriented proposals, and increase member engagement—goals this proposal is designed to support. We believe the delegate program was a step in the right direction and look forward to supporting delegates as part of this effort.
Based on feedback from stakeholders, we have made the following changes to our proposal:
Reducing our budget by 26.7%, from 0.3% to 0.22%, to lessen the cost for the DAO and demonstrate the value of the spend. It’s worth noting that, due to market conditions, this compensation is significantly less now than when originally proposed.
Introducing an Initial Trial Period (ITP) with concrete deliverables, including support for split and transitive delegation, as well as a live treasury dashboard.
Initial Trial Period
The proposal will begin with an Initial Trial Period (ITP) that, upon successful completion of its deliverables, will transition into the ongoing workstream outlined above. This modification aims to offer more concrete test projects, addressing the feedback from Martin and Thomas. The ITP will last 3 months and will carry out the following projects:
1. Split and Transitive Delegation
Integration, support, and maintenance of our improved Snapshot delegation dashboard and strategy, enabling split delegation, transitive delegation, and delegation term limits.
2. GnosisDAO Treasury Dashboard
There is currently no live view of the DAO treasury and its wide range of investments. In order to increase transparency and better communicate the value behind GNO, we will develop a dashboard that aggregates and tracks the DAO treasury and its actively managed positions. This will include analytics, charting functionality, open TWAP order tracking, metrics on yield, growth, spending, revenue, and private investments that belong to the DAO.
We look forward to hearing your feedback!
Goes without saying, but I fully support this proposal. Thanks for putting it together, @espina.
I think we have a great opportunity here to push the GnosisDAO forward.
I believe there are significant improvements that can be done on the governance side and am confident the team is capable of delivering them.
However, I struggle to wrap my head around AUM based fees. Given that the team will have no assets under management. How do you even account for AUM when there will be no AUM? You mention using the karpatkey reports, their AUM includes GNO, SAFE, and CoW tokens that are largely sitting idle in the DAO treasury. I simply can’t wrap my head around the fee structure, perhaps you could explain the reasoning behind it?
Thanks @davekpk ! Happy to expand on the rationale behind the AUM-based fee.
We’re approaching it as more of a budget rather than a fixed cost. It makes sense for this expenditure to scale with the DAO’s treasury size, being more lean in periods of contraction and investing more during times of growth.
The other benefit of an AUM-based fee is incentive alignment. Gnosis Guild would have a direct incentive to grow the value of GNO and the treasury. We’ve found that this leads to better long-term partnerships over dev shop-like arrangements.
Lastly, our infrastructure plays a critical role in the DAO’s asset management, both via governance and the Zodiac stack relied on for the DAO’s non-custodial asset management. Our contributions will continue to directly improve capital efficiency and treasury growth.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I disagree on the implied correlation between treasury assets and governance overhead. Governance‑ops effort scales with people, scope, and complexity — not with the market price of the DAO’s treasury. If GNO double overnight, I don’t see how this should change the priorities or workload of governance operations.
Moreover, crypto’s volatility makes cost‑forecasting nearly impossible. I also don’t see why you would want to take on this risk - as it would make cashflow extremely volatile, if we look at the past months theoretical fees (based on available kpk reports and their AUM):
Again, I have to stress the weak link to AUM, DAOs are obviously transparent so the Gnosis DAO treasury assets are well known. But this shouldn’t mean that service providers should charge based on it. They should charge based on the value they deliver (which might well be within or even above the simulated fees I list above).
One practical example; you state:
I completely agree and think it would be very valuable to have this because there are many. But when the DAO receives a large token unlock, i.e. OLAS, AUM and your fees would spike when often these tokens are illiquid and governance work is unchanged. An AUM fee would be an indirect carry on Gnosis VC.
I also don’t think it’s a great deal for you, obviously you’re taking a directional bet which I happen to be aligned with. But if that bet doesn’t unfold you’ll be stuck with low cashflows and have to cut team size, jeopardising delivery timelines the DAO is counting on.
I think there are many ways to align incentives, with a fixed base fee and bonus structures on top of this i.e. GNO call options based on KP| targets. I simply struggle to see how AUM should at all be accounted for here particularly when large parts of it are illiquid.
p.s. I very much value the Zodiac stack and have been an avid user myself (including recovering tokens mistakenly sent to my GPay wallet 
) - but my understanding is that this proposal is not related to those services, in fact Gnosis itself is not really using Zodiac for asset management, but karpatkey the service provider is.
Thank you for the revised proposal. It would be good to see an update regarding Martin and Thomas’s point about "implement novel funding mechanisms for maximum capital efficiency’’ topic.
From our perspective, having Gnosis Guild work on maintaining and improving the DAO’s Governance infrastructure will ensure that the DAO operates safely without Governance becoming an attack vector.
We would gladly work with the Gnosis Guild to continue supporting Gnosis Governance. With their support, we can operate faster without delays.
I agree that a larger treasury doesn’t necessarily imply more governance overhead, but I do think spending should scale alongside the treasury.
If we compare the DAO to more of a tech company, a doubling in cash balance would almost certainly lead to reallocation of budget, priorities, and team size. A scaling fee helps us remain agile in ways that governance is too cumbersome for.
If we were simply carrying out a fixed task, like maintaining a voting dashboard, scaling wouldn’t make sense. Our goal here, however, is to continue innovating and expanding on the DAO’s operations in a long-term capacity. With this open-ended mandate, it’d be optimal to work with a budget to continuously drive value to the DAO. It’s on us to continuously prove the value of our contribution is multiples of the cost, since it can be terminated at any time.
Totally agree on the illiquid assets and we’re good with clarifying that the fee only apply to liquid AUM.
On the volatility side, this is something Gnosis Guild would absorb, partially softened by the Moving Average. This would allow us to strategically manage the budget for the DAO. The other benefit of the guild taking this on is that we can dynamically reallocate team members, as we have a sizable team of engineers (14) working on projects as needed.
Thanks @armog. Our intention with the ITP’s treasury dashboard was to address this point on capital efficiency. Like Thomas mentioned, “measuring the current capital efficiency is a logical first step in the process,” which having transparent financial metrics will enable us to do. Once we have that baseline piece, we can demonstrate how our contributions and mechanisms directly improve capital efficiency.
Thanks for the clarification. That said, I believe this introduces additional complexity. Who ultimately defines what counts as “liquid”? The OLAS tokens were transferable, if that’s your definition. But if the definition depends on the ability to liquidate a position with minimal price impact, then can we truly consider anything beyond ETH and stablecoins as liquid? The DAO holds substantial positions in GNO, COW, SAFE, and others, none of which are truly liquid by that standard.
I want to reiterate that AUM-based fees make little sense for service providers. There’s a limited use case for AUM fees in asset management, specifically where there are actual assets under management. Beyond that, I see no valid reason to apply them.
I definitely think that GnosisDAO can benefit from improvements in its governance. Also figuring out ways to incentivize participation , reward delegates etc. And having a party actilvely push for this makes a lot of sense.
But I want to re-iterate what Dave says that I don’t see how being paid with a % of the DAO’s AUM makes any sense for this.
Hey everyone!
Thanks Gnosis Guild for bringin an update! Here is our feedback for the original post
Some opinions remain the same, particulary this one:
Same goes for the Budget. Aligned with what @dave and @lefterisjp mentioned (not to be repetitive, but it should be seen as a flag, not because the total amount, but due to the structure), charging an AUM flat percentage makes sense for treasury managers because the effort and risk scale with every extra dollar.
For an infra / R&D provider, workload depends on how many features, contracts, users they have to serve (not on whether the GNO price doubles). If the token goes up, the fee jumps even though the number of pull‑requests stays roughly the same and viceversa. Mismatch ends up costing the DAO’s holders.
It also uses as reference resources from 2022 that might be outdated given the development pace of the DAO industry.
- Fix 90 % of the annual budget in USDC as a base reainer. (paid monthly).
- Keep only 10 % as a variable component, set at 0.03 % of AUM and hard capped (e.g. max 100 k USD per year, min 50k). Can be paid in vested GNO for example.
Also for transparency
Milestones & KPIs to unlock payments
Define specific deliverables beforehand (not just introducing them in the future, including x y z). Particularly around Continuous Stewardship and Operations, where the team composed largely of senior engineers may not be ideally positioned to lead on execution.
For example:
What does this entail in terms of development and execution? It appears to represent 1 of the 3 proposed focus areas. Does it corresponds to approximately 300k USD based on the updated AUM? We believe these details should be included given the size of the funding request.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Appreciate all the feedback @dave, @lefterisjp, and @SEEDLatam. Taking your points into account, we’ve decided to remove the AUM-based fee and modify the compensation structure as follows:
A monthly $38k USDC + $38k GNO (priced at the time the proposal passes).
This would ensure we have a stable fiat payment to sustain the pod through any downturns, while still providing Gnosis Guild with a long-term incentive alignment for our work. The GNO portion would also have a 1-year lockup from receipt.
The duration would be for 24 months, able to be terminated at any time.
The team would be comprised of 3.5 guild members including senior full-stack engineers, solidity engineers, mechanism designers, governance leads, PM, researchers, comms, and ops as-needed. The typical team will include 2 senior engineers, one PM/governance lead, and part-time comms/ops, adjusting based on current projects.