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

[OPUser]

thank you for the feedback, Alex.

[L2Maxi]

This overlap is bad in my opinion the reason for committee is to achieve having diverse set of individuals having the same person twice is not a good way to get expertise in committees. i was thinking of forming a committee here but was late sadly.

[L2Maxi]

yes you seem to be a good candidate. after looking at the other members wallets and backgrounds i dont see much defi experience though i see wallets with less than 200 days creation and not any defi interactions i would see myself as a better candidate.

[AxlVaz]

This point is debatable, many candidates have several wallets and some do not want to give their address. It is natural to see in Defi that users use a public wallet (e.g. with ENS) and a private one.

[OPUser]

@L2Maxi

This overlap is bad in my opinion the reason for committee is to achieve having diverse set of individuals having the same person twice is not a good way to get expertise in committees

Agree on your expertise part but would not it make more sense to think that one person might have expertise in more than one domain, or may be its not one person but they represent a team, a team of many motivated, knowledgeable individual. Then its not bad idea, right? or is it ?

[L2Maxi]

not fair because they are taking a spot of someone else who could have been good for the committee. not to mention they will put in less effort and collect two payments not fair.

[MinimalGravitas]

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!

[OPUser]

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.

[AxlVaz]

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

SEED Latam - Delegate Communication Thread

Today, we have formalized our participation in the formation of Governance Committees proposed for season 2 of Optimism governance. Currently we’re part of two committees proposals as reviewers, details below: Committee proposal: DeFi, lead by @OPUser We will be working alongside the following reviewers: Dhannte, MinimalGravitas, ScaleWeb3. We feel very comfortable with our team, as each and every one of them has had an important presence in the governance for Season 1 to have culminated w…

[Gonna.eth]

@jackanorak

the stated purpose of organizing committees in the first place is to ensure that the most qualified, specialized people look at the proposals that best suit their expertise. of course that would entail people who currently work on defi protocols, as they are the ones who would best assess the likely value-add an incoming protocol would offer in terms of growth, composability, etc. questions of conflicts of interests simply are not relevant in this case; they are addressed by other means.

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.

[jackanorak]

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: https://docs.velodrome.finance/security. 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.

[ScaleWeb3]

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

[Gonna.eth]

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

[jackanorak]

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.

[alexcutlerdoteth]

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.

[OPUser]

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.

[daoism]

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”?

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.

[shridhar.eth]

Nice job team…keep it up

[Prometheus]

@jackanorak

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.

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.

@jackanorak

I don’t see any particular defi expertise represented here but many other kinds of knowhow and ways to contribute.

That said, Good luck with Season 2.

[jackanorak]

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?