Given that I agree with previous comments that transparency is a must, I would like to share that I’m part of the set of AAVE holders that didn’t support this Gauntlet renewal.
The rationale is relatively simple, and related to different points mentioned in this thread:
- Gauntlet was engaged for recommendations of risk parameters on Aave v2 Ethereum in the previous period. During that period, and just until really recently, no support was given to important v2 pools like Avalanche and Polygon, even being exactly the same instance of the protocol. Even if risk-wise the profile of the assets listed there was different, this heavily contrasts with how the coverage of Aave Arc was proposed diligently fast. It also contrasts with Gauntlet supporting long-time ago platforms of similar nature on Avalanche like Benqi, which from my perspective disqualifies any asset-specific consideration.
Aave is all the instances of the protocol, not having all of them covered during this period of time is a big minus. - During the previous period, whenever I could share feedback, my main point of focus was almost always the same: it is mandatory to be proactive on recommendations and not reactive. This doesn’t mean being fully conservative, because that is relatively simple; it means having an expert and critical criteria. That is the value of engaging a provider.
Again and again, I perceived this lack of proactivity and I gave the feedback, both in different forum posts here and to Gauntlet directly. The results of the current moment are not enough.
- From what I know, this was only mentioned sporadically once the market was downtrend, and the problem is not really community involvement in that decision. Personally, I can’t say at all which is the “security budget” if I don’t really understand how accurately the underlying system recommends parameters to protect that margin. I said exactly this to Gauntlet and say it again.
Being in this kind of decision situation is just fictional; same as other community members, even if I understand the different mechanisms of the protocol, I don’t have models to even give a reliable opinion on what is correct. Gauntlet should have proposed something in the open, but not when the market was already downtrend, way before. - Specifically, I’m pretty disappointed with the CRV situation. Let’s cut to the chase if a party working on risk and doing continuous simulations can’t detect that the liquidation threshold of USDC is risky, which is the point?
I think Gauntlet did good work on transparency post-event, but as I publicly shared on this forum before, I also fully disagree with the immediate action of doing generalized freezing. The consequences of that reputation-wise for a protocol like Aave are unacceptable; again reactive vs proactive. - I have no problem with the pricing of the proposal. Yes, I’m still not fully convinced about the model based on borrow sizes, but there are arguments to support it. My lack of support is for everything else, in this case, $ more/less makes no difference for Aave; what makes the difference is the quality delivered.
Obviously, there have been multiple positive aspects of Gauntlet’s engagement, for example, I can confirm that given my involvement in BGD, Gauntlet has always been top-notch in terms of professional collaboration. It is only fair to be really transparent about it for everybody to know.
In addition, I would really like to have multiple entities on risk engaged with the community. Right now we have Chaos Labs, and partially Llama in some aspects, but if things would be different, having Gauntlet would have been pretty good. But quality for me goes first.
To conclude, participating in discussions and voting on Aave is both a privilege and an ethical responsibility for me. Yes, maybe I can appear as “hard”, but I consider it gives absolutely 0 value to not being critical of the aspects each one of us consider negative, or not voting against when believing so.
I have no reason to think that renewing with Gauntlet is a good idea unless the scope of collaboration radically changes, and so, my lack of support. That being said, if a different collaboration is presented, I have absolutely no problem changing my mind.