Proposal: Llama <> Aave

Thank you for your response, @eboado.

It is important to highlight again that my collaboration with members of Llama has been always exceptional, they take really seriously the way they contribute to Aave. So my disagreement is exclusive to the terms of the proposal (scope & budget), not in any shape or form with Llama onboarding with Aave.

We really appreciate your confidence in Llama to serve the Aave ecosystem. BGD has been an important pillar of Aave and helpful to Llama as we’ve engaged with governance. We take all feedback seriously and hope to address them below.

Llama is an entity collaborating with other DAOs, so the collaboration is not exclusive.

This applies to most entities working with DAOs: Gauntlet, Certora, Sigma Prime, and others. Having said that, we take our commitment to Aave seriously - hopefully demonstrated by our past work with the protocol.

For what I am aware, the team is relatively small, and the list of tasks is really extensive.

Demand for our work has grown significantly this year. We have an aggressive hiring plan to keep pace.

Even one of its co-founders is already working close to full capacity as the lead of the Aave Grants DAO.

The role at Aave Grants DAO has been beneficial to gain deep expertise on the Aave ecosystem. We hope to use that knowledge to drive even more value to Aave protocol.

I have no problem with entities like Llama proposing ad-hoc strategies, but I’m fully against having an entity whose role is to optimize these holdings; not at the current moment.

As we have in the past, we plan to design strategies that fit with Aave’s broader strategic goals. Similar to your view, we don’t view treasury management or yield optimization as actions that should be done in silo. We will only propose strategies that help secure and grow Aave, and we will engage with governance and the broader community to discuss and implement any of these strategies.

GHO is approved by the community, but 1) the code is not public 2) is not operative yet 3) it is not possible to predict how its market will look.

Many partners and contributors are already preparing plans to support the launch of GHO. The BAL acquisitions (Aave DAO and Aave Companies) lean into growing GHO via Balancer along with TVL into Aave via Balancer Boosted Aave Pools. As per the Aave community call, GHO has had its first audit and is getting closer to launch. Our proposal is for a 12 month duration and based upon the information we know, GHO is supported by the community. We trust the ARC was posted with intent to launch GHO so it is rational for us to intend to support growing GHO. Increasing revenue through boosting the adoption of GHO is one of the clearest ways to help grow the DAO’s bottom line.

Having said that, if GHO does not get launched for some reason, we still plan to contribute significantly to helping grow Aave through other initiatives. While we tried to be concrete in this proposal, the nature of DeFi and our work involves unpredictability. All we can do is dedicate resources to help grow Aave into a market-leading protocol and be flexible with what that involves.

Aave DAO must not compensate a full flow of assets’ listing, only the creation of mechanisms to support teams working on listings.

We are in agreement here. As mentioned in the proposal, we only charge Aave for risk assessments of specific assets, not for the AIPs and coordination involved outside of the risk assessment. For example, we worked on the MaticX risk assessment on Polygon (Aave v3). We plan to complement the work that Gauntlet and others are doing.

I think strategic partnerships and meta governance are valuable items, and fitting Llama. On risk-related aspects, I think Llama can provide additional value and be rewarded for it. Data around the Safety Module is also an interesting item in the scope.

Appreciate the confidence on these items in our scope.

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