xDai team project involvement: past and future

General Gnosis Chain
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a flashback to the time the takeover plans came to my attention first.

The goal of the new management team is to replace everything the former xDai team worked on with new contractors, preferably “blue chips” or organizations related to GnosisDAO such as Gnosis Builders.

I see the point in replacing the current solutions but there is an elephant in the room. The network is drying up in terms of transactions and fees, projects moving out, and new narratives are weak. After a while, we’re likely to see an empty (or with “free capacity” if we think positively) second tier network with a tooling set “just like everyone else”. Instead of spending time on keeping it up and exploring new niches we are offered fast food and exodus.

Yes, the network will very likely have Ethereum consensus with all its advantages and problems, but so will other networks that adapt it in the future. Starting work on the transition to Ethereum 2.0 a year ago was a research, now the plans for merge are already in the main branch of most consensus clients. By the end of this year, junior developers will be running modified PoS Ethereum on Free Tier hosting and sending VC theses - faster, cheaper, with the same level of security as Ethereum thanks to horizontally scalable consensus. With a new token.

Yes, Ethereum consensus is nice, but what’s about such a PoS consensus with 10mm capitalization, with upgradable deposit contract and almost centralized bridge (Gnosis+1) for staking token, managed by a small exclusive group of people? Are 133m in stables (and 200mm in altcoins) bridged to Gnosis Chain safe to be protected by 10mm staked in consensus? I hope the numbers will be different before the swap of consensus.

Consensus itself was not the main thesis of xDai though POSDAO had innovations such as evenly distributed rewards between validators pools, on-chain upgradability, RANDAO on consensus layers, rewards in both stable and volatile token for validators. The move to Ethereum 2.0 consensus was needed for a long-term 5-10 year development program for the xDai network, not for the sister chain narrative that new management is trying to push with replacement of the former xDai team with new coordinators.

There are many questions to ask to the new management and “takeover” is one of them. The merger proposal was mostly about assets such as tokens merge (STAKE/GNO), fees and revenue transition, rebranding (xDai to Gnosis Chain) and tokenomics but not about the future work of teams (who is the CEO? how decisions are made? who has veto power? which organizations do what? etc). That was our of scope of the proposal and should’ve been worked out later. It’s not a surprise to me that most Swiss cheese model checkboxes for teams integrations are set to fail during the 6 months of merger.

According to Harvard Business Review between 70% and 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail. It’s a shocking number, and the one thing all have in common is people. Mergers and acquisitions fail more often than not because key people leave, teams don’t get along or demotivation sets into the company being acquired.

Meanwhile, the token merger was incredibly successful with over 90% of tokens swapped. You can read more about the merger results in the What has been accomplished section. I am very proud that we (former xDai team) achieved all tangible goals of the merger. :white_check_mark:

I wish Gnosis team all the best and will look closely for their progress.

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This whole thing is sad, since I still don’t know what Gnosis actually wants to achieve. Or perhaps I have not read or seen enough. Would be nice if soneone just explained to us normies what the roadmap to where is…

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Would be nice if soneone just explained to us normies what the roadmap to where is…

The roadmap created by the former xDai team can be found here, but it does not reflect the changes associated with the change of plans after the merger. Gnosis Chain | Gnosis Chain
AFAIK there is no roadmap published for Gnosis Chain after the new management is in charge.

Some information on the new management’s plans is available on social media and perhaps this is a way to learn about their plans https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1536446355119431684

  • the merge of Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Beacon Chain to prove utility of GNO token. Without withdrawals, which is the next phase after the merge the token is just a governance token
  • making Gnosis’s wallet a first class citizen on Gnosis Chain
  • help fund and promote another Gnosis’s wallet Circles which is developing Universal Basic Income application, unfortunately with no Income and no obvious plans to get it without donations
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or https://twitter.com/koeppelmann/status/1530572455915438082

  • migrate GBC (Gnosis Beacon Chain) to single slot finality. This entails a risky experiment on a production network. But it’s not new for the new management. E.g. when former xDai team decided to launch GBC some parameters were irresponsibly overridden by the new management without consideration of effects on the GBC nor testing it. Now validators with more than 64 validators per node have ~10 Tb of outgoing data per node which is making hosting significantly more expensive.
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Wtf? Didn’t you design this system you are now criticizing?

As a longtime STAKE holder, YOU really fucked us by merging against the community’s will. Barely 6 months on, it’s easy to see YOU wanted to abandon us and the project. Despite EVERYONE telling you it was a bad idea, YOU went through with the merger. It hasn’t even been 6 months and here you are with your tricks, trying to blame others and quit.

It’s super fucking clear 6 months on that YOU just wanted to dump this on some sucker and find a way to abandon ship. Gnosis was a sucky partner from the start and complete dumbasses but I guess that was important because they were dumb enough to say yes.

This is a rugging. pretending to look like a ragequit. 6 months???

There’s a complete disconnect between:

Igor “ThEy aRe TrYinG tO rEpLacE uS”

Gnosis “we see big value in continuing with the team”

Fuck you Igor. YOU fucking blew it. First sidechain, all the hope of the community, getting overtaken by Polygon and everyone who copied us, timed perfectly for a bull run, and YOU fucking blew it.

Every other sidechain went to billions of dollars, and YOUR shitty management managed to make xDai fail against all odds. Instead of acknowledging your failure and making actual changes (e.g. hiring a fucking marketing department), all we got was this fucking shitty merger, with another company with absolute trash marketing department, and a shitty GNO token worth… checks graph… exactly what xDai’s market cap was.

“AsK tHe nEw mANagEmEnT” ← No, Fuck you, Igor. You rugged us

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Please refrain from using obscene language and engaging in personal attacks.

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Although not agreeing to most of your post this seems fairly right.
I would have preferred to stay as a slow growing, but technical superior project, even if it would have stayed mainly for hipsters like me for some more time. Imho in the long run the upsides would have outweight the drawbacks, but reading the overwhelming complaints about too low TVL and MC in the community discussion (like your talking about the billions of dollars other projects achieved) I can understand the team was looking for another way to go.

Most likely they are just not interested in marketing that much and also not very smart in judging the consequences of a so called ‘merger’, that others saw much earlier as a takeover.

However, it is as it is and I wrote it already before the vote about the ‘merger’: Not sure if this will feel like home for me if too much change too fast (and maybe in a direction I don’t feel comfortable with). I will for now continue running my gbc node, but far from sure about my long term commitment to the gc ecosystem. Will depend on the way they go.

But luckily it’s up to everyone to choose between options and to me it don’t seem the right way to blame others.

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Igor, YOU need to distribute the 6 million dollars (at today’s shitty ass GNO prices) for the old ecosystem fund to your longtime POA and STAKE holders. All. These. Years. Mana. Nifty. Honeybadger. POA. This isn’t YOUR exit liquidity, it belongs to STAKE (and OG POA) holders.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x5e78c09984bd6608f8e913f0924062c043ed6ad7

YOU already rugged us once on POA network for STAKE. What’s the next great project you’re going to take the previous project’s treasury for? Blockscout (of all products, wtf?) ??? So do STAKE holders get Blockscout advertising revenue?

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Seriously, Gnosis needs to get its shit in order, if you’d like less people using obscene language and engaging in personal attacks

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Hey everyone.

First of all, we greatly respect what the xDAI team has built. We had hoped to continue to be working on the chain together - specifically as the chain is decentralized and independent teams can make independent contributions.

Our priorities will be:

  1. Further strengthening and decentralization of the beacon chain
  2. Building a trustless bridge based on the earlier research from the xDAI team on having a light client of GC running on Ethereum
  3. Account abstraction - every user account on GC should midterm be smart contract with the advantages that brings
  4. Erigon and Nethermind - together with these teams we will make sure the chain is performant and can handle even higher gas limits eventually
  5. Circles - several teams are currently working on a relaunch of Circles that ideally can bring a wave of new users to the chain again

We think there are plenty of opportunities to contribute to those priorities, but there are also many options to contribute with independent projects like the “Optimism on GC”. In any case - if you decide to leave the chain, that is a big loss for the chain. In this case, we would only request you gracefully hand over the projects and assets you still control related to the chain. (as you have done it already for most)

Furthermore, we would hope that if the xDAI team no longer directly contributes to the chain, you might at least continue indirectly contributing to the chain by writing open-source software that ultimately also benefits GC (like e.g. Blocksout).

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Same was true for Gnosis DAO and xDAI Chain without a merger/takeover, anyway you prefered the latter.

while I welcome your point 1, 2 & 4 and need to read up about 5 I am not happy to read:

Why not giving everyone the choice to use SC account or not?

Can’t agree more, but as it seems there are some different views how to proceed further together that can’t be solved easily.
If however, there is a way to align the different opinions I would be very glad to see this happen to build the future together.

Wish us all the best, whatever the way will be.

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My statement was misleading. Everyone will have the choice to continuously use EOAs but the idea is to strengthen strengthen the support of smart contract wallets (stuff like EIP3447) and make them so good that they will become the new standard. But we have absolutely no plans to enforce them in any way which would be certainly against the spirit of the chain.

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Please refer to the Gnosis Community Guidelines FAQ - Gnosis

The forum is a public space for civil debate. Please help us keep it that way by engaging in respectful discussion.

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Just want to relay that GIP-52: Should former xDai team be involved in future Gnosis Chain development passed quorum:

https://snapshot.org/#/gnosis.eth/proposal/0x5525ab62fffc1102f46fca9ed629ba9a5cd111b1663bd6bb2cb984472325d191

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Just want to relay that GIP-52: Should former xDai team be involved in future Gnosis Chain development passed quorum:

what’s next?

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Hi Igor -

The intention of my message was to highlight the fact that GIP-52 passed quorum. As such, the Gnosis community has signaled that they want the former xDai team to be involved in the ongoing, future development of Gnosis Chain. My role, in part, is to help steward the governance process here on the forum. That includes communicating the results of on-chain votes. I hope that answers your question and sheds some light on my activity here on the forum.

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What’s about an additional proposal about the details necessary to make the xDAI Team feel comfortable to stay?

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From reading this thread, I feel like there is enough common ground for xDAI to continue contributing, directly or indirectly, to GC. A serious investment of time to hash out the discrepancy in views could lead to a reasonable compromise. The devil is in the details as they say.