[DRAFT][SO2 Committee Proposal: DeFi: Group C]

🏛 Token House Governance Metagovernance
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Guilty. I’ve used a whole lot of different wallets for various Ethereum shenanigans, I the two oldest that I’ve still got access to are from 2016 and I certainly wouldn’t want those linked to my front facing identity. I’ve got another couple of more recent ones that are used for most of my DeFi activities and half a dozen more that are just used when I want to try something that I’m not completely comfortable with. Oh and another just for POAPs.

I’d be really surprised if using multiple wallets seperated out by TC [sadface…] or whatever isn’t the norm amoung users!

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we do see things differently then, I think that if one entity is capable and able to fulfill its duties, then we should support them rather than waiting for someone. I am not in favor of spoiling the present for a hope of future.

with your effort comment, I dont know how long you have been here but I would recommend to read our past communication thread and you will see that each team member was able to review all the proposals in season 1, every single proposal with proper due-diligence. Being part of two committee is less work compare to what we have done in the past.

Even if they choose to join all the committee, I would support them because of their past involvement. we can definitely criticize them if they are not fulfilling their duties but that is yet to be seen.

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Regarding this, we were working on a statement. You can even see our public process on the discord channel.

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I think one DeFi committee should be constituted by experts in the field yes. But having their own DeFi protocols makes it a huge conflict of interest and the second committee should be from outside any DeFi protocols running on optimism or mainnet. There’s no guarantee you will approve any competitor from velo.

It’s also worth mention you are engaging here saying this committee is a bad idea because we are not professionals, but when you were asked to disclose Velo code and make it open source you said no, so how can we know you are an expert if we can’t review the code, the whole idea of the crypto space is not to trust a human yet here you are saying “trust me but not this committee” who has been 100% open.

In the future constructive feedback is more useful than just saying what you think is wrong, keep it in mind for future project you will have to review. If you think we are not DeFi qualified then ask DeFi questions you think we don’t understand and you’ll get your answers. I’m a heavy DeFi user since the beginning of it, I’ve been part of many VC research groups and hedge research group yet this is outside my background because it’s not my main job, just a math hobby for me.

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i’m sorry to see you adopt this stance.

as mentioned above, if being aligned with a protocol leads to intolerable conflicts of interest, protocol team members would have no business being anywhere as delegates. however, we are significant stakeholders, and our voice does in fact matter and simply offers much more perspective than even the most power users. we talk to several other protocols daily. we know who’s doing what and where key frictions and missing defi legos are. In the meantime i don’t see anyone here complaining about lito coen, kris caczor, or other protocol affiliates forming a tooling committee.

as for my own case, i would be only one person on my committee, so i’m not sure how i could be flagrantly self-serving in a group with others known to OP. I was asked to join because others - who in many cases have argued against me! - thought i brought a useful perspective.

i’ve weighed in exhaustively on other proposals - please feel free to surface an instance where i’ve done anything other than speak my conscience. if i had to abstain from anything that velodrome touches, i wouldn’t be able to weigh in on anything. we’re a dex. we’re central to defi on Optimism.

Not sure where you get your news but velo code is open source (and always was exposed on etherscan from day one). repos, audit docs, and everything right here: Security – Velodrome Finance. let’s try to keep this conversation truthful and relevant

In the future constructive feedback is more useful than just saying what you think is wrong, keep it in mind for future project you will have to review.

Members of your own group conceded that DeFi expertise wasn’t your key selling point, it was your level of activity. That’s great. I made a suggestion to be a committee for another vertical more aligned with your backgrounds. i’m not really sure how i could possibly be more constructive.

I love EthernautDAO. Was talking about it yesterday with a colleague and wanted to see about engaging you all. What you do is great, and there are many ways outside defi your particular expertise can be brought to bear. tooling, community, devrel, infra would all benefit from your perspective.

Our jobs here are to help Optimism thrive and win – that might not necessarily come in the ways we expect. i recommend you take my suggestion productively and reconsider your position.

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I see the Velo team (@jackanorak + Alex) keeps spamming this thread and acting in bad faith.

Both are things I do not like to see when engaging with proposals and I would ask you to stop once more. The aggressive, unconstructive approach demonstrated is the exact behavior from “ecosystem thought leaders“ that will be mirrored by communities and ultimately turn off quality contributors.

Re: Defi expertise, importance of building new things & committee fit.

Let me simply summarize your Velodrome Finance project

Project itself

  • It’s a copy paste project: you forked Solidly ve(3;3) with all its complexities
  • DEX should be for most efficient trading, it should not be about
    • amassing large amounts of liquidity (Unnecessary Total Value at Risk for Velo investors & the Optimism protocol which gains less from ineffective TVL(!) than it risks today)
    • adding 3 layers of complexity with voting & (manual!) bribing which takes 50%(!) of the fees from LPs (LPs take IL risk, others receive money?!)
  • Obscure token economic & governance model
    • Velo’s initial token distribution has been a disaster and made it really hard for Optimism investors. Due to the setup, the only way the project will be successful is when Optimism sponsors incentives such as liquidity mining and trading incentives.
    • Your implementation of Solidly is even more obscure than the original and will likely lead to an unneccessary redistribution of wealth from unsophisticated investors to insiders (Red Flag) and many investors are at risk of loosing a lot of funds through “wrong positioning“ in the money game, an exploit of the large TVL, dilution or LPing.
    • Running a ve token model offers some long-termism and creates some token sink but it makes little sense for projects without serious revenues. (hence, also not interesting for Convex-style ecosystem projects)
    • Having a non-aligned set of holders (for example other protocols & whales) decide on revenue distribution for pools is a pretty bad idea for the project as the most important pools get less bribes than they should (Ask @Solarcurve, Balancer will need to change this; at least pre-select pools & allow only small parameter changes)

Your involvement in Optimism

  • You asked for an incredibly high amount of OP tokens (3M!) as a microcap (Red flag)
  • You received a large amount of Op tokens from Op foundation – even though you had already a completely messed up token distribution & incentive design for new investors on Optimism (why?!)
  • Due to Op incentives, you were able to grow TVL & veVelo
  • Your team engages in bad faith when talking to potential competitors (2x afaik)
    • Aggressive Curve response across channels (whose veModel is the basis of your project)
    • This thread
  • Your team member steals funds in public (very bad look on judgement) - props on quick solution!
  • Little quality governance involvement in Optimism until today

Is Solidly bad?

  • Solidly optimizes token sinks & long-term alignment when implemented well
  • Solidly can bootstrap growth
  • The Solidly/bribing model requires smart parameter choice, risk management & well-aligned partner protocols, then it can lead to flywheel for a quality ecosystem (Revenues are needed!)
  • Token economics & incentive design should not be mixed up with efficiency of a DEX protocol

Conclusion:

Instead of making random claims and swings at valuable contributors to Optimism, I’d recommend

  • improving Solidly (soon 1 B AUM – a nice hacking prize pool!)
  • acting in good faith in the Op ecosystem as you should be eternally grateful to Daddy Optimism
  • helping the Op ecosystem grow by onboarding & welcoming stakeholders

@ all other delegates and community members

  • Feel free to ask us any questions regarding the proposal, our expertise or whatever interests you and is relevant to pick a committee.
  • I encourage you to take an active stance when seeing bad faith actors as that costs a lot of energy and will result in us & others not contributing anymore to the ecosystem (–> Code of Conduct)

Enjoy the weekend, stay optimistic :red_circle: :sparkles:

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Thank you for considering joining the Ethernauts, I hope to se a mentorship from you anytime.

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Come on now. Disagreeing with you and making a principled argument explaining why is not acting in bad faith. Responding to arguments is not spamming. Alex jumping in and making a great point (maybe committees should bring in outside experts) is not spamming.

I said this is a good active team that doesn’t need to be a third committee in defi because their unique selling point, that they are active in governance, applies to all potential committees and that in most cases their expertise lies in other areas. The goal here is to get the best people weighing in on the right proposals in a way that doesn’t stretch anyone’s time.

Not sure how listing out lazy presumptions and outright falsehoods about our protocol (and about me - i never posted in the curve thread) is relevant here. I’m not going to muddy up a thread on how your group can best contribute to Optimism by rebutting these claims one by one, though feel free to join our discord so you can learn more about what we do.

Hope people reading this thread recognize what the level of discourse must be if Optimism is going to make it as an experiment in collective governance.

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Heya - I made one comment suggesting that the DeFi committee incorporate some leading DeFi voices with deep subject matter expertise from across the ecosystem and you accuse me of spamming and decide to go off topic to try to slander Velodrome?

TBH this does not seem like the behavior of someone who should sit on one of these committees.

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  1. It is clear that some of us are not supporting this committee and they have raised their concern on this thread which is just fine. Governance is all about listening to different opinion.

  2. From my side, we will not pivot our direction from DeFi, we will listen to everyone’s feedback and will try our best to incorporate those feedback. Feedback and governance is an iterative approach and we believe in that.

  3. I think there is no point in escalating this any further, we wont divert because of your “opinion”.

  4. Its not yet decided that our committee will be final, I think there will be voting on snapshot too, we are showing our interest and willingness to contribute, we are not making rules.

  5. Just because we are part of this committee, its does not mean we will only focus on DeFi, we are here and will jump in and try to contribute where we can, Growing OP Ecosystem does not mean just DEFI, you will see us(well at least I will be there) in other domains too.

I am happy to answer any other question that anyone has.

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Hell ScaleWeb3/Julian,

Would you like to elaborate on this tweet and perhaps expand on why you are so keen to participate in a “meme”?

https://twitter.com/jrmr92/status/1554477843354210309?s=20&t=KLHAZk6XVnNP-ONWjNB10A
https://twitter.com/jrmr92/status/1554477843354210309?s=20&t=KLHAZk6XVnNP-ONWjNB10A1208×372 63.5 KB

Also, you may wish to review the first three points of the Code Of Conduct. I’ll quote them, rather than link:

  1. Make a positive impact on the community. As a Collective, we understand that positivity is the driver of healthy growth. Be excellent to one another.
  2. Err on the side of extreme civility. The Governance Forum is a place for constructive feedback about the Optimism Collective. There are lots of places to sling mud, this isn’t one of them.
  3. Keep discussions on-topic. This is a forum for discussion about the Optimism Collective, Optimism, Ethereum and projects within these ecosystems. Unrelated posts may be removed.

The post I am replying to exemplifies disregard of the CoC, and the committee should not be approved if this represents future level of communication. Suggestion: OPUser find an alternative reviewer to ScaleWeb3 in order to maintain support.

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Nice job team…keep it up

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I’m sure people reading recognize how everything started and how it evolved. Neverthless It’s only the consequence of having committees… if no one wanted committees this kind of diminishing debate wouldn’t happen.

That said, Good luck with Season 2.

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I’m sorry @Prometheus I don’t understand exactly what you mean.

Are you saying that because people want to be on committees, it’s inevitable that debate will fall short of respectful discourse?

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let’s recap…

Meanwhile:

Diminishing people capacity, expertise, ability to work in a specific committee was completely pointless in the first place. I didn’t need to read all this BS but thanks. Now I know I don’t want to be part of this kind of DAO.

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i read through the talk here and i can see where he is coming from on a few point. this is quoted from the team leads bio

Apart from this, I have contributed to two projects on Optimism, I was alpha tester of Lyra platform and the second project is Layer2DAO where I participated at the initial step of their Phase 0 proposal.

Finally, I like my cute bunny pfp. Optimistic Bunnies are the very first NFT project on the OP chain and I do hangout in their discord from time to time

not saying this guy isnt qualified but this isn’t much in the space the wallet activity is bad to. on the other hand i do like scale web3 and minimal gravitas only other issue is the jox guy is on multiple committee

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I see absolutely nothing wrong in what I’ve said and appreciate your citing the exact problem, purpose mismatch, I’m helping to address by suggesting what I have.

This group has itself conceded that its value proposition lies not in defi expertise but in active governance, which is applicable and valuable in several verticals. This is brought up repeatedly. I am highly aligned with MinimalGravitas, whose beliefs on climate change, for instance, are in lockstep with my own. I think they are a towering, valuable influence on OP. I’ve looked in this thread and in the delegate commitment section and found not one mention of DeFi in their background. OPUser’s claim to DeFi knowledge was being an alpha tester of Lyra. I’m not saying these people shouldn’t weigh in at all - but where’s the actual argument for being specifically on the DeFi committee?

Rather, members have highlighted backgrounds in gaming (unaddressed vertical), devrel (infrastructure, also unaddressed), and advocacy & education (community, also wide open). I think it’d be great for these members to apply their expertise to proposals in these domains, of which there are already many. This is not a zero-sum situation. Please tell me exactly what is so inflammatory as to invite targeted ad hominem in making such a suggestion.

I am making this same reasonable point repeatedly to increasingly heated, adversarial, in some cases inappropriate responses. I don’t think this has to happen.

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I know you can’t see, nonetheless I (and many people here) don’t need to read 2, 3, 4 times the same thing with different words.

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Weather its feedback and/or criticism, both can be of positive and negative in nature. We can move towards a common goal of sustainable Gov either by taking everyone with us or by dragging someone down just to put yourself first.

You have already mentioned “argumentum ad nauseam”, apart from that common practice taught in B2B is “substitution heuristic”, same goes with political debate as well, rather than focusing on topic of discussion, they focus on opponent either by repeating the same thing or asking the same question again and again in different form just to divert the focus of discussion.

But its all good, its a nature of DAO Gov, beauty of chaotic co-ordination and it will pass too.

We had a chat in past on committee and you know where I stand on this, it has some cons but now with the committee guideline we all need to put the recommendation in written form which might be a biggest advantage so far as it can help counter biases.

I wrote all this because I think you are an active member of this gov from start and we need your contribution, good thing is that our gov is working on iteration and foundation is serious about it so my request to you would be to consider this statement if you were serious about it. If we mess something up, we can fix it in the next iteration but only with your contribution.

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Thanks for sharing this great tweet. Below is the full screenshot. This explains why I’m participating in governance. Why Optimism? See Delegate Committment.

image

Governance is an iterative process, and progressive decentralization is the right path to take.

That said, it needs to be clear what communities and delegates can decide and what is ultimately decided by core teams. Core teams like Optimism should make most decisions and even have veto rights at this stage. Nonetheless, contributors should have a say over defined parts and be able to meaningfully add value - otherwise I’m sure you’d agree that there are better ways to spend your time.

Ultimate goal should be minimalistic governance for key protocols such as Ethereum & Optimism - that we genuinely like, want to support and strengthen.

I’ll just ignore your passive, aggressive tone though I must say the last week made me reconsider whether I + my companies should even support Optimism from here on out :slight_smile: