[ARFC] Gauntlet <> Aave Renewal 2023

[Gauntlet]

Hi @MarcZeller, thanks for your feedback. We have some thoughts to share here-

@MarcZeller

Most Aave DAO service providers know what it means to be on the frontlines & sitting in a war room.

We have been key contributors to many war rooms, including the USDC depeg and the most recent security incident. We apologize that we did not include you in these war rooms - that was a miss. In addition, we have been actively informing the community with Gauntlet’s Aave market alerts telegram channel and making risk mitigation proposals for TUSD, MAI, and V2 Deprecation. 24/7 coverage of market risk is a key component of our service, and we aim to provide the highest quality and most in-depth analysis in a short time frame.

@MarcZeller

What was Gauntlet’s contribution to this? They provided an analysis on the public forum about how the pause could create bad debt in Aave. This kind of analysis is valuable for making informed decisions in a war room context and should be published in a post-mortem disclosure after the events. Publishing this in a public forum during events could have created more panic than necessary and is a behavior we consider unfit and lacking strategic vision.

In DAOs, we recognize the importance of balancing public and private information. It is rare for everyone to always agree on what should be public and what should be private. We shared our analysis with Aave tokenholders and delegates and directly asked if they would prefer seeing this in the public forums to inform transparent decision-making. There are also additional workstreams we helped drive in war rooms, such as a detailed analysis of how long a grace period should be for the security incident.

@MarcZeller

Gauntlet is also by far the slowest service provider.

Certainly, speed is a relative metric for the community to judge. Through high-priority market risk events like the USDC depeg, we believe we have responded quickly while maintaining the high quality and accuracy of our analysis.

@MarcZeller

With the ACI, as with every single service provider, we proposed to Gauntlet to co-author proposals with us to encourage collaboration and synergies in the DAO. We must share that working with Gauntlet was not our preferred experience, and the recent AIP-371 fiasco is a prime example of this.

Regarding Gauntlet’s joint proposal with ACI on weth interest rates, what’s most impactful to the DAO is that the changes to the interest rate for weth are now executed. Unfortunately, mistakes do happen in governance. We take ownership of the recent duplicate and are making changes in our governance process to improve and avoid duplicate AIPs going forward.

@MarcZeller

Regardless of the outcome of this proposal, the ACI, except in the context of Skywards services, does not wish to collaborate with Gauntlet in the future.

This is unfortunate. We are open to collaborating with any service provider the DAO chooses because that’s how a professional organization can function effectively. Recently, we’ve collaborated on the stablecoin interest rate proposal with Monetsupply, implementation of the Killswitch mechanism with BGD, joint v2 deprecation proposals with Chaos, and more.

Summary

As always, we value all thoughts from the community and continuously aim to provide more value to the DAO. With differing opinions in the DAO, it is up to each community member to independently judge the quality of our work. We pride ourselves on our risk output and value added to the DAO. Managing Aave’s market risk is, first and foremost, the highest of our priorities, especially during market stress events, and we will continue to focus on risk modeling and simulation going forward.