This is really valuable feedback @midapple, and definitely pointing to a clear inefficiency on asset’s onboarding that must be addressed.
To give some extra light on how we see the problem from our side:
- Asset listings are probably the type of governance proposals that involve more contributors: risk (2 entities @ChaosLabs and @LlamaRisk ), technical (1 entity, ourselves BGD), growth (depending on the case, but generally 1 entity too with @ACI) and sometimes, even treasury for things like incentives (@karpatkey_TokenLogic). This coordination usually is not a big blocker, as all entities have communication channels between themselves and the DAO itself.
- It is true that TEMP CHECK at the moment is too asynced with following steps. Usually the blockers are 1) important amount of candidate assets for listings, 2) assets type/morphology makes them very different from each other (e.g. listing an LRT is totally different from a governance token, different to a decentralized stablecoin, etc 3) technical dependencies on “how” to list an asset (e.g. now with Liquid eModes, becomes simpler).
High-level, aspects that could be improved are the following:
- As commented, establish a strict upper limit for full evaluation, or at least, disclosures of any blocker. This should be very conservative, because at least from our perspective, on the current state of Aave, fullfilling very strict deadlines on new listings should not create overhead for the rest of fields, like risk maintenance or development of the protocol itself.
Still, an upper limit to address them of let’s say 2 months before AIP sounds perfectly reasonable. - Better communications. This could be solved just by applying the first suggestion of stricter deadlines. From our side, it is definitely a field we see we could improve on.
- Iteration on the on-boarding framework, for example, making it more specific depending on the asset type. New asset types appear quite frequently in DeFi, so changes on the framework should be almost continuous; but this seems necessary, for both the sake of Aave and the teams looking for listings.
It is important to understand that still the DAO deposits certain trust in its service providers when evaluating assets, but this is also a very strong characteristic of Aave, assuring global quality on all aspects, not only listing.
From our side, we will coordinate with the other service provider to try to improve this flow, including doing the adaptations required on ourselves, BGD Labs.