We’re excited to see alternate proposals for DAO focused investor relations and reporting as it ultimately leads to more value creation at a better price for the DAO. That said, we feel this counter proposal is hastily put together without a deep understanding or experience in this type of work. There are several questions left unanswered and clarifications we’d like to make as it pertains to our proposal:
- Who will be writing these reports? Has DL produced long-form reports geared towards financial reporting or governance-specific analyses? Having spent the last year doing this for over 30 top protocols we can confidently say that this is no small task that any outsourced contributor can take on but requires sector-specific analysts whose full-time job is creating these reports. For example, we have dedicated:
- Governance analysts working on Messari Governor and having done several analysis for Optimism (ex 1, 2)
- Protocol Services analysts that solely work on DAO quarterly reporting
- Data scientists building out underlying subgraphs
- What does the distribution look like? It would be helpful to see how much less DL’s distribution is to gauge the value. While Messari has one of the largest crypto-native audiences we’ve also gone through the incredibly extensive diligence processes from Bloomberg, S&P, Refinitiv to ensure that we’re not only informing the crypto ecosystem but the broader corporate and financial world as we aim to grow crypto well beyond the small portion of global economic activity it is today. These firms are starting to expend more time and resources getting smart on the space and increasingly participating on-chain in protocols they have institutional grade research on.
We are aware our distribution channels may be lacking compared to our competitors, but we aim to make up for it by open sourcing everything related to our reports, including all the code that we use to generate the data, as well as maintaining any dashboards we develop for it.
- All Messari data will be open sourced (Optimism Subgraphs and Dashboards) as well so this doesn’t seem to make up for the lack of distribution.
We are aware that by doing so we’ll rug our own moat (after all, why keep paying us to make reports when you can just generate them)
- The value in the reports is not just the surfacing of the data but the contextualization which can not be easily replicated. In the same way companies report their financial statements but there’s still a huge industry for equity research to turn that raw data into valuable insights for stakeholders to consume.