GIP-99: Should Gnosis Guild steward GnosisDAO Governance?

Governance GIPs
1

GIP-99: Should Gnosis Guild steward GnosisDAO Governance?

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GIP: 99
title: Should Gnosis Guild steward GnosisDAO Governance
author: Alex (alex@gnosisguild.org), Pandy (pandy@gnosisguild.org), and Auryn (auryn@gnosisguild.org)
status: Draft
type: Funding
created: 2024-04-08

Category

Service Agreements

Executive Summary

Gnosis Guild proposes to steward GnosisDAO governance, guiding a new phase of innovation, experimentation, and growth. As GnosisDAO continues allocating resources to Gnosis Chain, Gnosis Pay, and other mission-aligned ventures, our team will drive the DAO’s governance strategy and operations through dedicated R&D, technical implementation, and ongoing stewardship.

While Gnosis Guild has been actively contributing to the maintenance and improvement of GnosisDAO governance since its inception, this proposal will formalize a long-term partnership that prioritizes the following objectives:

  • Improve, maintain, and secure GnosisDAO governance infrastructure.
  • Foster the growth and further decentralization of the Gnosis Ecosystem.
  • Position GnosisDAO as leading innovators of DAO governance.

Through these guiding stars, Gnosis Guild will also address the challenges currently faced by GnosisDAO’s governance. Initiatives includes: (1) designing a new governance architecture and roadmap to tackle the operational inefficiency of its monolithic governance patterns, (2) introducing novel funding mechanisms to address its inefficient capital allocation and lackluster ecosystem development, and (3) progressively decentralizing DAO processes to increase governance activity, transparency, and participation.

The proposal will begin with an Initial Trial Period (ITP) that, upon successful completion of its deliverables, will transition into a two year workstream outlined below.

Our funding request is $38k USDC + $38k GNO (priced at the time the proposal passes and locked for one year), paid monthly to Gnosis Guild.

About Gnosis Guild: Gnosis Guild is a web3-native venture studio with the values of conviviality, co-ownership, and experimentation at its heart. For over three years, our team’s modular tooling and needs-driven development have secured and operationalized the GnosisDAO’s governance and treasury asset management. These include: Zodiac Reality Module for decentralized Snapshot governance; Zodiac Roles and bespoke tooling for karpatkey’s non-custodial asset management; custom strategies for delegation; token locking and distribution systems for CoW and Safe; and support and development for other GnosisDAO initiatives like Hashi and Gnosis Pay.

Service Description

Gnosis Guild will guide GnosisDAO’s governance through strategic R&D, technical implementation, and ongoing stewardship. In response to community feedback and motivated by our commitment to needs-driven development for the GnosisDAO, we have outlined objectives that will inform our overarching governance strategy and initiatives that address key areas for improvement.

Objectives:

  1. Improve, maintain, and secure GnosisDAO governance infrastructure.
    Indicator: Increased utility and adoption of GNO as a governance token through enhanced voting participation and token utilization.

  2. Foster the growth and further decentralization of the Gnosis Ecosystem.
    Indicator: A thriving ecosystem with multiple transparent funding mechanisms and active engagement from top-tier external contributors.

  3. Position GnosisDAO as leading innovators of DAO governance.
    Indicator: Novel governance infrastructure and ongoing initiatives to integrate emerging tech.

Key Performance Indicators:

  1. Improvement in annual total vote weight utilized
  2. Improvement in annual total voter turnout
  3. Increased allocation of annual total resources per approved proposals

We will use the consistent evaluation of these variables on an ongoing basis to measure our impact on our outlined objectives. By measuring vote weight utilization, voter turnout, and resource allocation, we can explicitly measure governance engagement and implicitly measure proposal quality. While resource allocation is inconsistently documented across proposals to date, we estimate that an increase in the ratio of total proposed funds to allocated funds would correlate with an increase in proposal approvals and quality. We will evaluate each proposal individually, but due to the historically significant variation in engagement between proposals, our KPIs will be measured on a yearly time period to reflect macro trends. For example: from 2022 to 2023, there was a 73% decrease in proposals generated, a 66% decrease in total voters, and a 79% decrease in total vote weight utilized. While the causes of changes in governance engagement are speculative, our intuition is that market dynamics, major events (xDai merger), and governance stewardship were contributing factors.

Initiatives:

A new architecture and roadmap for governance

  • Problem: GnosisDAO’s monolithic governance pattern limits operational efficiency and innovative potential.
  • Solution: Develop a new architecture and roadmap to enhance agility and innovation, focused on multiple types of roles, organizational units, and parallel governance processes.

Novel funding mechanisms to foster the Gnosis Ecosystem

  • Problem: Opaque ecosystem funding mechanisms hinder capital allocation and ecosystem development.
  • Solution: Implement novel funding mechanisms to scale and grow the Gnosis Ecosystem, fostering transparency and capital efficiency. Experiment with, and implement, mechanisms like futarchy or conviction voting as parallel allocation methods.

Progressive decentralization of DAO processes

  • Problem: Low governance participation reflects a perceived lack of value in committing resources.
  • Solution: Facilitate progressive decentralization of DAO processes for greater resilience and trustlessness, creating a more automated, efficient, and permissionless functioning for the DAO.

1. Key aspects

A new architecture and roadmap for governance

The current governance process only allows one path for DAO action, namely GIPs. This monolithic structure can be very time consuming and involve significant risk on both the contributor and DAO sides, along with implying high voter bandwidth. Creating multiple types of roles, organizational units, and parallel governance processes within the DAO will serve to decentralize decision-making, reduce bottlenecks, improve bandwidth, and diversify the DAO’s ability to adapt and respond. Safe Guardians, OP Badge Holders, and ENS working groups are a few examples. By effectively delegating clearly scoped responsibilities to autonomous groups, GnosisDAO can improve its organizational efficiency while reducing the governance overhead of its top layer governance. We will develop an evolving architecture, with ongoing innovation and experimentation, to remain agile to dynamic needs.

Novel funding mechanisms to foster the Gnosis Ecosystem

To scale and grow the Gnosis Ecosystem, we will design and implement novel funding mechanisms for maximum capital efficiency. Multiple paths to ecosystem funding would enable more autonomous contributions, with clear directives and expectations. Optimism and Arbitrum have set an excellent example here, and their ecosystem growth is a clear reflection. Frameworks like RetroPGF, ARB’s STIP + multiple grants programs, and Safe’s OBRA are all promising directions. Similarly, innovation in futarchy and conviction voting has shown potential as emerging allocation mechanisms. Based on their successes and pitfalls, we will develop our own mechanism suited to the Gnosis Ecosystem.

Progressive decentralization of DAO processes

By developing modular, composable DAO governance processes, we will increase decentralization and transparency. In reducing any single point of failure, the DAO will have greater resilience and trustlessness. With the development of new onchain mechanisms, we will create a more automated, efficient, and permissionless functioning for the DAO.

2. Service Scope

This proposal is solely for our work stewarding governance of GnosisDAO. Any additional work, such as our contributions to Gnosis Pay, Hashi, and DAO treasury management, would be out of scope.

3. Service delivery

Immediate Improvements

  • Modernize the GnosisDAO’s Snapshot strategy to correctly account for a greater diversity of GNO holders.
  • Enable key delegation features for the DAO: split delegation, transitive delegation, and delegation term limits.
  • Implement spam proposal filtration

Research, Architecture, Design

  • Extensive research of successful DAO governance architectures
  • Continuous gathering of GNO stakeholder feedback
  • Iterative design of novel mechanisms for the DAO’s operations
  • Experimentation with parallel, tightly-scoped governance mechanisms
  • Development of a collaborative roadmap for the DAO’s evolution

Technical Implementation

  • Full-stack and smart contract development of governance tooling
  • Implement novel governance technologies

Continuous Stewardship and Operations

  • Management of DAO governance processes
  • Coordination of calls, feedback, and calendar
  • Active engagement in forum to foster transparent, efficient dialogue
  • Rapid response to emergent issues and risks

4. Support

Gnosis Guild will provide community technical support and ensure we have a rapid response process to any high-risk issues related to GnosisDAO governance.

Pricing and payment

Our funding request is $38k USDC + $38k GNO (priced at the time the proposal passes and locked for one year) paid monthly to Gnosis Guild.

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. The total cost to GnosisDAO will remain competitive with other top protocol DAOs.

Payment Frequency USDC Allocation GNO Allocation
Monthly $38k $38k

(using the price of GNO on the date of proposal approval)|

Service Terms and Exit Strategy

If applicable the duration of the service agreement. Please outline the terms and conditions for exiting the service agreement, including the circumstances under which a party may terminate the agreement, and any other important details.

The agreement between service provider Gnosis Guild and organization GnosisDAO will take effect immediately upon this proposal passing. The terms within the agreement will be valid for two years, unless terminated by either party or updated with mutual consent by both parties. GnosisDAO will assign specific permissions to Gnosis Guild within their treasury utilizing the Roles Modifier to enable Gnosis Guild to autonomously collect payment. Either party may terminate the agreement at any time without cause by giving 90 days of written notice to the other party. Upon termination, all outstanding payments shall be made by GnosisDAO to Gnosis Guild prior to agreement on termination date.

Team/ Organization

Gnosis Guild will act as an Autonomous Core Contributor for GnosisDAO. Through mutualistic partnerships and activist R&D, our team of engineers, designers, and researchers will foster the long-term development and sustainable growth of GnosisDAO’s network. See our contributor list here.

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.

  • Split Delegation: Accounts can delegate their vote weight to any number of other accounts, along with assigning a specific percentage of their voting power to each. For example, Alice could delegate 80% of their vote weight to Bob and 20% to Charlie. Voters could also partially delegate to new mechanisms, like futarchy or agents, as a test-site for new forms.
  • Transitive Delegation: Accounts can delegate not only their own vote weight, but also any vote weight delegated to them. For example, if Alice delegates to Bob, and Bob delegates to Charlie, Charlie’s total vote weight is the sum of the vote weights of Alice, Bob, and Charlie.
  • Delegation Term Limits: Accounts and Snapshot spaces can optionally set time limits on how long any given delegation remains valid. Spaces can also choose which, if any, term limit to respect when calculating vote weights.
  1. 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.

8 Likes
2

I believe that GnosisDAO needs a new and updated DAO working framework. Additionally, utilizing novel funding mechanisms to increase community contribution while distributing GNO to different communities/groups and holders will enhance the DAO’s diversity and facilitate governance participation. What I’m curious about is the modeling of the payment section with examples, in an ELI5 manner. Considering GNO’s high performance, I wonder about the monthly and annual fees for this service.

7 Likes
3

@armog thanks for your positive feedback. I can speak to more specifics on the payment section.

First, we structured this more as a budgetary question rather than determining a specific workload. Our approach is: how much of the DAO treasury should be allocated to the continuous improvement and expansion of its infrastructure? From this perspective, a budget that scales with treasury size makes the most sense. A 0.3% annual budget would be on the conservative side of spending, given the central importance of the DAO’s governance and ops.

In practice, for the past 9 months the payment would have looked like this:

Month Treasury AUM ($USD) 200-day GNO Average ($USD) Payment Date Allocation
USDC GNO
July 2023 264,864,823 111.79 August 1 33108 296
August 2023 232,957,031 111.21 September 1 29120 262
September 2023 235,127,268 110.31 October 1 29391 266
October 2023 253,102,816 108.27 November 1 31638 292
November 2023 386,254,913 116.16 December 1 48282 416
December 2023 405,196,952 130.89 January 1 50650 387
January 2024 420,866,830 144.91 February 1 52608 363
February 2024 732,336,883 168.38 March 1 91542 544
March 2024 730,243,922 212.47 April 1 91280 430
1 Like
4

As an outsider still trying to figure out how decisions are made right now and what’s the relations (and possibly personal overlap) between Gnosis DAO, Gnosis Ltd, Karpatkey, Gnosis Builders, Gnosis Guild and maybe other involved parties, imho first step should be to outline a clear structure of what we have right now.
Only after that I might feel able to judge if and how it might be worthwhile to spend DAO funds to optimize these structures which also require the willingness of all involved parties to go this way.
Therefore I hope to see some statements from these here.

edit: voting on this closed already not even 24h after the post? Again a decision I would like to understand.

8 Likes
6

For sure, creating more transparency and public decision-making is definitely needed and something we’re hoping to address with this proposal.

Gnosis Guild is an independent entity with GnosisDAO as the largest stakeholder (20%). Karpatkey, Gnosis Guild, along with Safe and CoW, are all spinouts of GnosisDAO. There is certainly overlap, but each of these entities has its own governance and decision process. @ernst’s Gnosis 3.0 post gives a good overview of the current structure of Gnosis. Our proposal is focused on GnosisDAO, which is governed solely by GNO holders and allocates the Gnosis treasury.

(The voting closure was an error and is now back open)

4 Likes
7

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”.

4 Likes
8

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.

3 Likes
9

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.

5 Likes
10

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?

3 Likes
11

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!

5 Likes
12

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.

Discussion

  • We think these are excellent items to research and implement. Gnosis Guild’s expertise in DAO infra/tooling is best-in class, particularly evident in the development of the Zodiac module/roles among others, so we believe you are the best ones for the job.

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.

  • Agreed. As mentioned, establishing a defined scope for each entity and articulating clear DAO objectives to understand what’s at stake and who decides what, is necessary to craft an efficient roadmap and begin working toward these goals.
  • This makes sense and can be implemented with short-term funding disbursed upon milestone completion (contingent upon proper KPI/metrics improvement) followed by larger scopes responsibilities. These can be separate proposals or part of a bigger and structured proposal that takes into account these nuances.

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.

Conclusion

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!

8 Likes
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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.

4 Likes
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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.

Modifications to Proposal

Based on feedback from stakeholders, we have made the following changes to our proposal:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  • Split Delegation: Accounts can delegate their vote weight to any number of other accounts, along with assigning a specific percentage of their voting power to each. For example, Alice could delegate 80% of their vote weight to Bob and 20% to Charlie.
  • Transitive Delegation: Accounts can delegate not only their own vote weight, but also any vote weight delegated to them. For example, if Alice delegates to Bob, and Bob delegates to Charlie, Charlie’s total vote weight is the sum of the vote weights of Alice, Bob, and Charlie.
  • Delegation Term Limits: Accounts and Snapshot spaces can optionally set time limits on how long any given delegation remains valid. Spaces can also choose which, if any, term limit to respect when calculating vote weights.

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!

6 Likes
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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.

1 Like
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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?

1 Like
17

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.

18

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):

  • December $135k
  • January $121k
  • February $85k
  • March $73k

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 :sweat_smile:) - 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.

4 Likes
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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.

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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.

2 Likes
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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.