I want to focus my feedback and opinion on 2 separate parts: the finishing Phase I and this proposed Phase II.
Phase I
The ACI initiative founded by @MarcZeller appeared in a pretty critical lifetime of the Aave DAO: multiple service providers were already engaged but in quite localized fields: development, risk, security, and treasury.
However, DAOs are really complex bodies, and there is an underlying (and sometimes hidden) massive amount of heterogeneous “tasks” that don’t really belong to almost any field, as they are not so technical in character, or not part of a precise scope.
I believe the presence of so heterogeneous tasks is far from ideal, and over time they should be compartmentalized into precise scopes, but the work @MarcZeller and ACI have done to holistically tackle them and put in place frameworks to define them better, has been high-quality.
This reflects on items like Skyward, or multiple governance proposals coming directly from ACI and touching on aspects like growth via caps modification, interest rate updates, deprecation efforts on pools, compensation of delegate platforms, etc.
In summary, Phase I has been clearly a success from my perspective.
Phase II
Even if generally I don’t really have complaints about Phase I, I think Phase II is in the right direction by trying (or so I understand) to put more focus on the BD and growth side of Aave, which at the moment requires more support compared with the operational side.
Items I think will be valuable are:
- Focus on the external representation of Aave. Especially important, as ACI is uniquely positioned (and well known) to act as a point of contact for Aave-related topics, for any type of external entities: teams looking to use Skyward, relations with other DAOs, or even relations with teams behind networks where Aave lives in non-technical matters.
- Work more on the delegation side of the Aave governance, following what has been started with Orbit, but also creating new initiatives that, apart from increasing participation, will improve the role of contributors like the delegate platforms.
Let’s not forget, governance is core “business” of the Aave ecosystem. - I would also like ACI to get more involved in holistic documentation of the Aave ecosystem. At the current moment, Aave and its governance have a lot of moving pieces that, even if not so bureaucratic, can be overwhelming for newcomers.
It is true that almost everything is documented, but sometimes the information is too scattered.
In summary, I think ACI has shown its commitment these last months, and given the expertise, the price is fair. Additionally, I can also say that @MarcZeller is probably one of the most compromised people regarding Aave on the whole ecosystem, which even if difficult to measure, has big value.
Support from my side.