First of all thank you to all ACI member for what you all did in the past and going to do in the future. And also thank you Marc for posting this status quo on the Aave DAO.
I have said it multiple times that the creation of ACI was the turning point within the DAO. From a good protocol but bad DAO to the best and by far biggest lending protocol and the best DAO ive witnessed from a delegate perspective in multiple DAOs.
The numbers are speaking for themselves which can be checked here, visible to anyone: Aave Analytics | TokenLogic
Now talking about the improvements for the future.
L2 landscape
I completely agree that in the beginning months and years it was crucial to deploy Aave on as many L2 as possible that seemed to be bringing additionally revenue to the DAO.
But this landscape has changed a lot, there are now hundreds of L2 with little to no upside or benefit to the DAO. Most of these are just VC cashgrabs, where founder exit after their token unlocks after their vesting period ends.
These L2 often do not add any significant value, user or TVL to their chains and do not have that one PMF to justify their existence unlike some exceptions like Hyperliquid.
Therefor I am supportive of winding down business on all L1 or L2 that simply do no generate enough meaningful revenue to the DAO.
This will free capacities and give SP room to focus on other ventures that benefit the DAO.
More insights on how I see new deployments happen will be shared in the upcoming proposal.
Friendly Fork
The friendly fork model had a good intention but bad execution where the DAO was too friendly towards these forks, allowing the DAO only little upside.
Im not saying its bad overall and there is a business case, also there have been great examples of good FF, but overall it needs a revamp. I tried it a few months ago and realized that the proposal also wasn’t good, and needs more work.
Insights on how I see the FF model can be seen here [ARFC] Strategic Opportunity Framework for Friendly Forks and Whitelabel Instances, although like I mentioned, there still needs to be a complete rework. As ACI is preparing something, I will wait for now and share my ideas and comments there.
Service provider alignment
This is something I have been thinking for a while now. Anyone who is willing to push Aave and the DAO to be number 1 all the time, deserves a “bonus”.
In the past the DAO had many good and bad examples of SP.
The bad ones left for competition and now pay the price for it, by getting less than what they would have gotten from the Aave DAO. If there was a KPI bonus back then, they would have not gotten it for sure.
But given that the current field of SP is absolute peak performance, they can monetize their hard work. The better their KPI, the better the payment.
Its a WIN WIN situation, as likely everyone will work even harder for themselves and thus also for the DAO.
By adding AAVE vesting schemes to this, any SP is even more focused on making Aave great and also (hopefully) the token as well.
I do have some questions here, but again, I will ask those on the respective proposal.
From a Low-Margin Business to a High-Margin Business
Continuing focusing on GHO is definitely the right choice, even if costs are huge to bootstrap big marketcap size stablecoins, its a natural match to the lending business.
I do also agree with @stani there there are likely also other ventures that can be pursued to grow the DAOs revenue like vaults with pre defined Defi yield strategies. Even if these strategies could be very simple and likely be more on the safer side of risk/reward it could boost revenue.
Basically a one click solution that deposits collateral, borrows against it based on the choosen strategy with partners like Pendle, Ethena, etc.