gmgm! This is mrtdlgc. I have been involved in crypto in general since late 2017 when I got assigned to translate an article on how blockchain could help solve corruption through transparency in the now outdated forms of organizations/governance practices as well as enabling the inclusion of non-privileged communities (namely the global south) into the financial realm. I have discovered DAOs in 2020, right after the DeFi summer as you like to call it, and have contributed to DAOs such as 1Hive, Agave, Token Engineering Commons, and learned how to find my path in the dark forest. Hence, I have been contributing to the then xDai, now Gnosis ecosystem for the past 4 years to build better forms of governance and transparent structures mainly through public goods funding and tools that everyone can use without prejudice to their backgrounds mainly in comms/marketing/community support roles.
Delegate Motivation
As someone who has already contributed considerably to the development of the Gnosis ecosystem, and as someone who has always tried to be the voice of the community, my main motivation as a delegate will be to encourage transparency, promote a positive-sum approach, and ask for better accountability. I am committed to not withhold myself from voicing concerns around proposals that do not fit into the core values of Gnosis (most importantly around credible neutrality, community ownership, and censorship resistance). I believe the intrinsic value of blockchains is in their ability to enable everyone in the world to participate in any interaction with other peers without the restriction of any arbitrary authority or any middleman. Let us make GC cypherpunk again.
Areas of expertise
Governance
Public goods funding
Humanities (post-structuralism)
Literary theory
Communications
Conflicts of Interest
Right now, I am not part of any organization that would put create a conflict of interest other than informally contributing to and participating in discussions at 1Hive and Gardens communities (yes 1Hive is still alive )
we are throwing our full support behind @mrtdlgc. Their critical feedback and reflection on all manner of issues presented to the DAO in recent months has been invaluable. Though we do not always directly agree with the positions taken, we respect @mrtdlgc’s thoughtful contributions, and recognise them at the forefront of our DAO’s governance.
Proposal: GIP-99: Should Gnosis Guild steward GnosisDAO Governance?
Voted: For.
Rationale:
It is obvious Gnosis DAO governance is in dire need of improvement , allowing more stakeholders to participate. Although, the initial iteration of the deliverables does not directly address the more important drawbacks of why I believe the governance is not working as intended, I believe, as a first step, Gnosis Guild deserves a chance to work on some improvement. However, I will be closely following the performance to see the extent of the positive impact. Due to the somewhat high cost to the DAO, might appeal for the discontinuation of the service.
Proposal: GIP-108: Should GnosisDAO honor the original rewards for GnosisVIP before the distribution schedule was modified (this proposal does not reward additional nodes with the same withdrawal address)?
Voted: Against.
Rationale: The main reason this proposal has been put forward was due to a program run by the Builders team, which acted without any accountability to the DAO after securing funding. Both the initiation and the sunset of the Gnosis Validator Incentive Program were decisions that were not decided by the DAO. As I believe it would set a bad precedent for future proposals that asks the DAO to rectify issues as a direct or indirect result of executive bodies with limited or almost no accountability to the DAO itself, I am voting against this proposal. However, this should also be seen as a call to action to fix the organizational drawbacks of the Gnosis 3.0 vision and how it should not keep repeating the same mistakes that led to the creation of this proposal. I would advise the proposal creator to establish direct contact with the entities responsible for what caused the discrepancy. All in all, the DAO had no say in how the program was initiated and how it was discontinued.
Gnosis Core agreed to have the program handed over and this should come with the commitments that were made.
Gnosis Builders has sought funding anonymously, with support from key Gnosis figures who said to know them. It would be impossible to “establish direct contact with the entities responsable” as you suggest without passing through those who supported Gnosis Builders, and it would be unfair for Gnosis to avoid accountability by delegating funds to anon teams.
Even if the entities responsible could be reached, the funds they had obtained from the DAO were returned to the DAO. Arguably it could be said that the DAO holds the original GnosisVIP rewards “in trust” for the entitled participants (look up “constructive trust” under English law).
I absolutely get the “in trust” holding of funds argument. And I believe the situation has not been well handled. However, your argument also holds that “key Gnosis figures” or Gnosis Chain twitter account represent the DAO, which in my view absolutely not and basically one of the main reasons why I have applied to become a delegate, to correct this discrepancy. At the very best, I could have just abstained in this vote, but I wanted to take an active stance to vote against, and this is not specifically about your proposal, but in general, about the general practices and the confusion around what constitutes or should constitute the actors/pillars of Gnosis 3.0 vision.
Proposal: GIP-126: Should the GnosisDAO Renew its Long-Term Partnership With Nethermind for Gnosis Chain Maintenance?
Voted: For.
Rationale: As the supermajority client, providing assistance during hard forks as well as maintaining the chain, responding to issues promptly through hotfixes and all, Nethermind team has already proved to be a reliable partner for Gnosis. Considering the amount asked is lowered compared to the initial grant three years ago, I fully support this proposal.
Proposal: GIP-128 Should GnosisDAO fund Gnosis Ltd with $30m/ year?
Voted: For
Rationale: Gnosis LTD has pioneered the creation of visionary apps, and they are asking for funding to continue operations for another year. Without an alternative entity to keep the Gnosis vision alive, it would make no sense to turn this into a contested vote. However, there are certainly simple ways that could be improved in terms of accountability and transparency, which has been committed to be worked on through the discussions on the forum.
Proposal: GIP-133: Should Gnosis DAO extend the Gnosis Pay Cashback budget (GIP-110) by 2,000 GNO?
Voted: Against
Rationale: As I mentioned elsewhere in the forum discussions, I am not supporting any proposal coming to subsidize Gnosis Pay unless they provide accountability to the DAO in terms of their revenue, company structure, internal affairs, projections, and so on. Especially in the case of this proposal, I am voting against because it is simply contradicting the previous contested proposal GIP-131 where the Gnosis Pay teams clearly admits that the current setup of the cashback is simply not sustainable. This proposal is asking to burn another 2k GNO for a clearly unsustainable program let alone fulfilling other transparency obligations.
Proposal: GIP-135: Should Gnosis DAO grant RaidGuild a 50k stipend to fund the audit of an Euro pegged CDP stablecoin on Gnosis using Liquity V2 + liquidity agreement in exchange for 15% of governance token
Voted: For
Rationale: A CDP has always been vital for Gnosis Chain. Friendly Liquity v2 fork is a best choice for that. If successful, gEURO could indeed be a great truly decentralized alternative to Monerium’s custodial EURe. Raid Guild, as a team, has proved to be capable of delivering complex protocols. And as the proposal is mainly asking a grant to cover audit and legal costs, I fully support this proposal as it would simply signal the DAO’s endorsement of the protocol as well.
One thing to note, this proposal clearly shows that the DAO should have already allocated a budget for grants as this small with sufficient oversight or just utilize a Gardens like conviction voting framework to pass this small proposals without requiring a crazy number of quorum on Snapshot anyways.
Proposal: ​ GIP-134: Pilot a Gnosis Growth Fund for small scale, community-led ecosystem funding
Voted: For
Rationale: Gardens is a great framework utilizing conviction voting. As a conviction voting maxi, it is no wonder that I would support this initiative. Also, if Gnosis wants to explore and utilize bottom-up governance and to fund small initiatives, having a conviction voting community pool is probably the best practice as this kind of governance has proved to be useful by keeping 1Hive as decentralized as possible even to this day and enabling the incubation of a lot of projects, some successful, some not, with limited funding including Agave, Honeyswap, and Gardens protocol itself.
Proposal: GIP-132: Should the DAO pay out a bounty for a disclosure regarding a consensus discrepancy on Gnosis Chain?
Voted: For
Rationale: This kind of bug bounty doesn’t even have to go through governance process, hence delaying the payment of the bounty. It should have been covered by Gnosis LTD within the allocated budget for the development and maintenance of Gnosis Chain. It clearly shows that it is imperative to have a budget for bug bounties. If it was up to me, I would even propose a bigger payout for the bounty to encourage whitehat disclosures. The whole practice of going through governance is not really appealing to hackers.
Proposal: GIP-134: Pilot a Gnosis Growth Fund for small scale, community-led ecosystem funding (Re-Do)
Voted: Abstain
Rationale: As voiced earlier regarding redo votes on Snapshot regardless of failure to reach quorum or failing to pass with a majority of against votes, I do not think redo proposals should be encouraged. Especially in the case of failure to reach quorum, a discussion that can hopefully result in a clear solution is vital for the health of the DAO. Hence, despite I love the idea behind Gardens, seeing it as an important experiment for Gnosis DAO, and having voted for the initial proposal, I abstain from voting in the redo, sadly.
Proposal: GIP-136: Should GnosisDAO support maintenance of the Gnosis Explorer (v1 + v2)?
Voted: Against
Rationale:
As it is specified clearly in the Governance Tutorial article,
Therefore, due to the forum poll ending with a majority result with make no changes, this proposal fails to fulfill the requirement for moving to Phase 3, aka. Snapshot. The clear solution here is to amend the proposal based on feedback and go through another forum poll. Only in case the forum poll enables the proposal to move to the final phase, it can be posted on Snapshot.
On the other hand, I am very well aware that in the Governance Process article, this requirement is simply reduced to a suggestion. However, I prefer to follow best practices.
Proposal: GIP-138: Should Gnosis DAO fund the maintenance of NodeSentinel?
Voted: For
Rationale: While still working at Gnosis LTD and providing assistance to validators in the Gnosis Discord, I have heard great feedback from node runners around NodeSentinel. especially considering that Gnosis has a lot of home stakers, it is vital for them to be notified about any outages relying on their home connection. We should have provided a grant for this way long ago. Finally, the DAO has the opportunity to make it right and fund the maintenance of a product that is useful to validators. Not only just fund the maintenance, but Gnosis can and should also amplify the product to assist it reaching more users as most validators might not even be aware of the existence of NodeSentinel.
Proposal: GIP-129: Should GnosisDAO establish Seldon Inc and appoint a Gnosis VPN Committee to support the Gnosis VPN project?
Voted: For
Rationale: Ideally, I would have preferred Gnosis VPN to be a headless organization without any legal entity. However, the rationale in the proposal has compelling propositions for the establishment of an entity for practical purposes. Given that the ask is not huge and I see Gnosis VPN as one of the most significant ventures under Gnosis, I have full support of this proposal. Additionally, I should also emphasize that this proposal should create a pre-requisite for other entities under the DAO that enables at least a DAO representative to oversee and participate in the day-to-day operations of projects entirely funded by the Gnosis DAO. This is an example proposal for the future.
Proposal: GIP-139: Should GnosisDAO support ProbeLab to produce network performance and security metrics for the Gnosis Chain P2P network?
Voted: For.
Rationale: Even though I do not see myself capable of calculating the budget, I do trust @armog’s soft endorsement. And Gnosis Chain always needed better tools to identify network performance and have an educated idea about the validator base.
Proposal: GIP-137: Should Gnosis DAO renew the Delegate Program?
Voted: Against.
Rationale: Probably one of the participants in the initial program with the highest participation rate both in the forum and snapshot, I still do not feel the delegate program was able to solve the underlying issues in Gnosis decision-making. Especially the failure to meet quorum even with the delegate program on GIP-134 and the main implication I have got from the Q3 report from Gnosis LTD in connection with GIP-128 made me lean to the idea that Gnosis DAO most probably prefers a unified structure instead of encouraging diversity of voices or empowering long-tail bottom up innovation in the new Gnosis 3.0 vision. Hence, there’s no point in pretending to care about the voice of the community and call it a day, and let the large GNO holders shape the future of the DAO.
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