I strongly agree with @Powers point that the details of the Omen Partnership need to be established. I have a lot of questions here. In response to the same post in the DXdao forum, a member cut right to the chase in asking how would DXdao benefit? At the moment, I don’t see a compelling answer to this most important question.
For context, I work full time for DXdao. I don’t work directly on Omen but I am in close touch with the DXdao development team working on it. Those who have followed Omen for awhile might remember my pre-launch post about Omen from April of last year. Something I think most people don’t know is that my company Level K did some development work to prototype a Futarchy App, receiving a grant from Gnosis in 2018, and a pair of grants from Aragon in 2019 to continue the work. This futarchy app was built on the first version of Gnosis’s prediction market framework. My relationship with Gnosis goes back to Devcon 3 in 2017, as does my familiarity with their work.
In looking at this proposal I think any DXdao member (DXD and/or REP holder) should ask how would DXdao benefit? I have some observations that I think are important to note as the communities digest this proposal.
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DXdao funds a product development team that consists of one full time designer/product manager, 4 front-end web3 developers, and part time support from several others on product testing, communications, and operations.
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Omen is built on Gnosis’s Conditional Tokens Framework. If you look at the contributions to the codebase for this framework, you can see it has mainly been developed by Alan Lu, who, fun fact, is also credited with inspiring Uniswap’s constant product market maker design. Alan Lu is also the main developer behind the AMM used in Omen. Sadly for Omen and for Gnosis, Alan has decided to move on from crypto and has left Gnosis. He will be greatly missed! And his shoes will not be easy to fill. Maybe the number two contributor to the Conditional Token Framework, @StefanGeorge, will brush off the old keyboard
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When Gnosis has aided Omen with front-end work in the past, it has been via funding a third party development shop, Protofire, to do the development work. This was important in developing the MVP of Omen that I wrote about back in April of last year. However, even then, this development shop was under the design direction of the current Omen designer @corkus. Protofire’s lead developer, who had the most relevant experience, moved on and Protofire hasn’t worked on Omen in many months. And finally, DXdao could always hire a development shop on its own.
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Over the past couple months when I have asked Gnosis how they would hope to contribute to future development of Omen, I have heard two answers.
One is via the “upgrading” of the Conditional Tokens Framework to use ERC20 tokens rather than the ERC1155 tokens it uses now that even Gnosis isn’t convinced about, and to use Balancer contracts instead of the current custom Balancer-like AMM. While the Conditional Tokens Framework is potentially quite powerful, enabling chained “conditional” prediction markets and potentially futarchy, the current version of Omen utilizes only categorical and scalar markets. It is worth noting that the original version of Gnosis’s prediction markets enable both categorical and scalar markets, and do it with ERC20 tokens. This needs more exploration, but if the only upgrade is to enable ERC20 outcome tokens, then I think the best approach for DXdao might simply be to swap out the original framework for the Conditional Tokens Framework. Additionally, I believe the old one is actually quite a bit easier for developers to understand.
The second answer is by helping with an integration of Gnosis Protocol V2, which will enable limit orders. Most DXdao members are familiar with the first version of Gnosis Protocol, as it powers Mesa, and most understand that this protocol has not received adoption for trading. With new scalability solutions and with ambitious plans for Gnosis Protocol V2, Gnosis may realize a vision of beating DEX aggregators on price and user experience. And in this case an integration with Omen could be quite useful. I would argue, however, that it is very much in GnosisDAO’s interest to support this integration, whether or not there is a partnership agreement regarding Omen. And therefore, this does not strike me as a unique value add for Omen.