[TEMP CHECK] Aave | Flipside Proposal

[Flipside]

Aave | Flipside Crypto

TLDR:

• Flipside is requesting $125,000 / 6 months for a contributor role
• Flipside will address the following problems:
  • Lack of coordination among contributors
  • No education or path toward engaging more users & the governing base
  • How to introduce and engage third-party organizations
  • Data availability and open-source tooling
• We will deliver on four key verticals; operations, infrastructure, data, and governance

Background

Flipside has invested in Aave since the near genesis of Governance. We started as a passionate token holder before delegation existed – engaging under the profile @Fig.

We formally applied as the second delegate ever, and received a delegation from 10+ delegators, delivering value beyond voting and adjudication (see ‘Past Work’ section.)

We received a grant in June 2021 for data work, empowering community members to build explorers, tools, and analyses for Aave. Soon after, we were asked to join the grants team for our work, serving for 1+ year.

And now we’re here – driven to continue our investment in Aave and share our unique expertise, illustrating a path of maturation and growth for the future generations of Aave.

Current State of Aave

Aave’s DAO today exists as a hub-and-spoke model, with industry-leading contributor organizations servicing needs across the following sectors:

• Risk
• Growth
• Development
• Audit
• Grants

The following is a visualization of the Aave’s contributor ecosystem today:

A key responsibility that seems to be missing in this graphic is the coordination among different contributors and with the Aave community, leading to friction:

1. Contributors & delegates wake up to lofty Snapshot quorum requirements as a surprise
2. Asset additions are written concurrently, creating duplicate work
3. Risk contributors have to lobby votes to enable changes & reach quorum

Additionally, more teams want to get involved with the protocol, via integrations. Aave has been a place to signal legitimacy and propel the growth of assets, networks, and grant recipients.

—

Aave is like a living organism, with a permeable membrane that is expanding:

Flipside helps to facilitate ownership at all levels within the Aave ecosystem.

We have been the osmosis and it is time to present Aave the opportunity to invest in this kinetic energy.

Mission: A More Efficient DAO

It is time to level up the DAO’s operational efficiency to fit product expansion - improving how teams participate, and creating clear objectives among contributors, voters, and builders.

If not now, the DAO is left fighting over what they individually deem most important; is it GHO? Is it V3? Is it RWA? Don’t know – but don’t want to see the aftermath…

Flipside’s goal is to make Aave the most professional, sustainable DAO which exists today.

Doing so creates more clarity through simplification and allows contributors of different talents and experience to come in and engage, encouraging folks to feel empowered – not disgruntled.

It’s a mission to make Aave more accessible and more democratized; with as many people in the DAO as possible, not just controlled by a few voters.

How do we achieve this?

Facilitation is done best by understanding the group of stakeholders. We believe we share a perspective and a tenure that leads toward this understanding:

1. Share relationships with stakeholders: contributors, delegates, and token holders
2. Long-standing participation within Aave, the witness to change, successes, and failures
3. Industry-wide perspective, working within other networks, protocols & DAOs

A range of contributors we already work with

Risk:

• Gauntlet, Chaos

Oracles & Price Feeds:

• Chainlink, Pyth, Redstone

Development, Growth, & Governance:

• ACI, Llama, BGD, TokenLogic, Butter, Aave Companies

DAOs, Protocols, & Networks:

• MatterLabs (zkSync), Stargate, Scroll, Celo, Centrifuge

Grant Teams & Other

• AGD, Xenophon Labs, Messari

Audit:

• Certora

Current and Future Services

Investing in Flipside’s expertise provides builders and the community with the tools and focus needed to grow. These benefits take form in both current and future services:

1. Aligning DAO Strategy, Vision, & Execution

Flipside will deliver on Coordination by:

• Establish a multi-chain expansion strategy and deployment prioritization
  1. Allow for third parties to more closely align with Aave’s growth
• Poll, identify, & align strategic visions across the entire DAO (quarterly)
  1. Balance initiatives across growth, risk, and protocol development
     First two weeks → Organize calls with delegate and contributor teams, polling their priorities and goals for Aave
     Third week → Synthesize findings in a central document
     Fourth week → Discuss with contributors together on a call, rank priorities via JokeDAO or off-chain polling, & present to the community for execution
     Monthly, thereafter → Evaluate the accomplishments of this
• Minimize work duplication among current contributors
  1. Build templates to outline 30-day goals and work by EoQ3
• Coordinate with the delegate base to execute needs based on competencies

2. DAO Operations & Community Resources

Flipside will deliver on Infrastructure and Operations by:

• Create scalable Governance structures that enable the introduction of GHO alongside current Aave protocol operations; discuss and evaluate Governance schedules
• Experimentation around motivating a greater diversity of delegates/delegators
• Empower contributors to engage across both Aave and GHO:
  1. Frameworks & code of conducts
  2. Quorum updates and Snapshot refinement
  3. Delegation & incentive alignment
  4. Establish monthly recurring community calls for more streamlined communication among contributors and the community
• Attract and integrate 2+ new delegates from stablecoin protocols like MakerDAO
• Ensure adherence to the Governance process by proposing teams, notifying and assisting proposers

3. Governance and Proposal Development

Flipside will deliver on Governance by:

• Coordinate and submit Snapshot votes & AIPs on-chain (for free, for anyone)
  1. Extending the ACI’s “Skyward” offering across a wider range of participants; access to prop power
• Actively participate in Aave’s governance discussions & votes (abstaining in instances that votes are proposed by Flipside or data partners)
• Vet and advise on prospective proposals by third-party stakeholders
• Advise on new Governance structures and integrations
  1. Work towards further enabling Risk Admins
  2. Experiment with the development of Optimistic Governance
  3. Integrate aTokens as a votable asset in Optimism by EoQ3
  4. Report on and evaluate the success of “private voting” via data analysis
• Whitelist compliant Recognized Delegates for Snapshot proposal creation, further eliminating spam proposals and working alongside the ACI
• Refresh the list of Snapshot admins
• Query and identify delegates in adherence to the Recognized Delegate Framework for proposals such as Gas Fee Rebates; enforce the Delegate Code of Conduct
• Support and execute revenue-generating proposals such as deployments (Base, Zk Sync Era, and Linea), asset additions (FRAX & ARB), et al.
• Create running Governance RFPs to engage new participants and delegates
• Enforce contributors’ focus on core competencies vs. extracurriculars

4. Data Analysis & Research

Flipside will deliver Insights and Analytics by:

• Create custom Aave data tables for contributors to be accessed via API
• Curate and maintain open-source Aave-specific data tables (Snapshot, GHO, v2 & v3) enabling cross-chain analyses and comparisons
• Provide insights and recommendations to the Aave community, analyses provided in comments
• Maintain and build dashboards to judge and evaluate key initiatives:
  1. Aave governance (participation, token holders, delegation)
  2. GHO growth and user base
• Analyze the results of Governance focused proposals and initiatives; measure and recommend changes toward increased voter participation
• Create greater educational and marketing resources via community analytics
• Report on the efficacy of asset additions and use across different V3 markets
• Enable Aave ecosystem developers using the Flipside API

Flipside is one of the few DAO contributors which maintain open-source data sets across key networks. Many current service providers rely on our data as well.

Flipside is the only crypto data infrastructure built on top of Snowflake schema allowing for more advanced data analyses by data scientists, enterprises, and a budding community of analysts.

About Flipside Crypto

Flipside has been a longtime supporter of Aave, acting as a community steward, governance advocate, delegate, developer, consultant, evangelist, and impassioned forum participant.

Flipside Crypto helps blockchains and protocols succeed. We produce free, curated on-chain data to empower a community of over 38.7k analysts passionate about crypto.

We build and maintain open-source tools for builders such as Badger, MetricsDAO, scored apps like Axel Score, and a myriad of data science tools.

A few examples of our past work in Aave:

-Tools and Dashboards:

Butter Election Tracker & Analysis
Recognized Delegate Gas & Participation

All community-generated dashboards are found here: Flipside Crypto - Search Term: “Aave”

-On-Chain Proposals:

Add cbETH to Ethereum Aave v3
Add LDO to Ethereum Aave v3 (on behalf of Llama)
Add UNI, MKR, SNX & BAL to Ethereum v3 (on behalf of Llama)

All three of these votes have passed with 99.9% votes in favor.

-Governance Proposals and Snapshot:

Deploy Aave V3 on ZkSync Era
Aave V3 Deployment on Base
Whitelist Stargate for V3 Portals (on behalf of Stargate)
Community Preference for Supply Cap Limits for LSTs (on behalf of Chaos Labs)
Private Voting with LBS, Michigan Blockchain
Gas Fee Rebates for Delegates
A Framework to Avoid Quorum Failure
Flipside Crypto CEA | Grant Overview
Upgrading Snapshot Quorum
Add ARB to Arbitrum Aave V3
A Framework for Recognized Delegates
Delegate Code of Conduct

-Other Qualifications:

• An individual reviewer on Aave grants, with 1+ year tenure
• One of ten “Regular” Trust Levels reached on the Aave forum
• Second oldest delegate in Aave behind @PennBlockchain

We are past grant recipients, working closely with teams currently servicing the DAO such as Llama, Chaos Labs, Gauntlet, Cetora, and ACI.

Flipside has been intentional in its commitment to Aave, focusing on this product as the only lending protocol within our coverage.

Cost

We request a streamed budget of $125,000 USDC (or GHO) for 6 months to support Aave-focused initiatives, resource development, and team operations. This budget will instantly help us:

• Sustainably continue our current work, activating 38,000 community analysts
• Cover operational expenses and further invest in Aave, including tools, human capital, subscriptions, and infrastructure required to support our work
• Maintain an active presence in other DeFi DAOs, representing Aave’s interests and exploring synergies with other actors in the ecosystem

By supporting us, Flipside may more closely invest in the future of Aave, growing Governance, efficiency, and empowering a myriad of delegates and stakeholders.

Next Steps

To better equip the community with our services and intentions, Flipside will solicit feedback from delegates and community members.

[jengajojo]

Glad to see @Flipside taking the initiative to steward the mission:

@Flipside

Mission: A More Efficient DAO

Given the history of engagement and contribution @fig has shown so far, I am confident about their abilities to execute on this mission and generally in favor of this proposal. In addition to the Governance priorities outlined here, I’d suggest working on expanding the recognized delegates program to include a diversity of opinions in order to optimally leverage experience and knowledge of the broader crypto community.

[0xkeyrock.eth]

Thanks for this extensive proposal!

We have taken notice of Flipside’s work and believe this is a very reasonable proposal with a lot of value that will scale the organisation and reputation of the DAO even further.

[maxholloway]

Max Holloway from Xenophon Labs here .

We recently went through the Aave Grants application process, and Fig was extremely helpful. The Aave community really stands to benefit from Flipside’s contributions, and I’d love to see their continued participation.

[AndrewA]

I believe @fig and the Flipside team are well positioned to serve as meaningful contributors to the Aave DAO.

As I see it, DAO governance is usually made up of only a handful of unique perspectives. For Aave, you have the giant, ever-present voices like @MarcZeller, @bgdlabs, and @AaveLabs who have been part of Aave all along. Also, the more specialized contributors like @Gauntlet, @Llamaxyz, or @ChaosLabs who are tasked with a specific duty, and then a plethora of university clubs and others that show up to share their thoughts on the direction of the protocol.

Flipside stands out from the bunch. They’ve been here ever since governance launched, they’ve pushed the protocol forward without a defined role for multiple years, and, most importantly in my view, they come with a fresh perspective that’s not informed by prior employment (e.g. didn’t work for Aave companies) or role-specific limits (e.g. they aren’t focused on a limited scope).

With a fresh perspective and years of experience working alongside other DAO contributors, I believe Flipside can prove itself valuable in the proposed scope. In fact, my only criticism of this proposal would be that the outlined scope is so broad that it could be difficult to track outcomes. I see Flipside’s superpower as them being an outsider to the DAO that’s learned the ropes and ready to improve the DAO for others.

I would love to see the proposal specify maybe a set of three prioritized outcomes from those listed in the “Aligning DAO Strategy, Vision, & Execution”, “DAO Operations & Community Resources”, and “Governance and Proposal Development” sections of the proposal. Flipside sharing what work would be the most important from their perspective would make this proposal easier to digest and the outcomes easier to measure.

Also, given the potential overlap with @MarcZeller 's ACI proposal, I’d be keen to hear any thoughts he has.

[fig]

Hey @AndrewA, thanks for your kind, honest words.

We’ve enjoyed working with you and others – across a range of capacities. Nice observation on the broad range of scope and outcomes; it’s designed to be flexible and encompass the work we’ve done.

It’s a lot and a reminder of our contribution and abilities to the community

IMO - the three things which seem like the most important to Aave:

I. Continued education, guidance, and further integrating Web3 organizations and products.

How:

cbETH, ARB on Arbitrum V3, Stargate, zkSync, Scroll – and proposals in development
Allowing folks to access voting & proposal power for free - across a range of sources

Why:

Added revenue to Aave & more sustainable future (increased runway)
More agile partnerships and empowered stakeholders

II. More sustainable frameworks / infrastructure in the Aave ecosystem.

How:

Clearer communication, greater enforced standards, increased accountability
Working with contributors to allow them to be most effective as possible - while engaging the community

Plus new, refreshed perspectives – and added diversity into the forum

Why:

Activating the best participants – which leads to future-forward policies and products

III . Open-sourced solutions and tools; a greater activated community.

How:

Quantitive analysis, data-driven decision making
Maintained, public, and free data lakes for ecosystem development (vs. opaque, inaccessible ones)

Why:

Further engage the community, expand libraries, and create new tools for increased distribution

---

In addition to these contributions above, supporting this proposal may reveal the values Aave hopes to embrace. Is it a diverse, range of expertise and skills within service providers?

Is it a path of natural pro-bono, value-centered engagement?

We’re excited about voters’ opportunity to signal their opinion on Snapshot.

[OriN]

Fig and the Flipside team have been fantastic to work with, and their governance contributions and voting over the years have consistently reflected Aave’s best interests. Fig’s critical thinking and unique perspective add great value to governance discussions and community decision-making.

Given their long-lasting history and track record, I believe the DAO will benefit from having Flipside and Fig extend and formulate their contribution.
However, as mentioned here by @AndrewA , there is some overlap in scope between this proposal and the ACI engagement, as well as some with the Llama engagement outlined here.

@fig - It would be great to hear your views on this overlap and how Flipside plans to work alongside the other contributors in the overlapping areas.

Looking forward to your continued contributions and future collaborations!

[fig]

Hey @OriN – thanks for your reply and generous compliments. Chaos and yourself have done equally strong and impactful work for Aave and its growing user base.

Happy to address your comments about overlap.

For ACI, we have done much of the same work prior to their [ACI’s] service provider proposal. I applaud Marc as he was shrewd enough to define, label, and market these services clearly.

The difference, IMO, is ACI is more technical, invested in the finance and the development side of Governance, and hence can charge a premium. This realm is not included in our scope.

Flipside hopes to empower him to continue with this expertise and high-value work. The area I worry about is “extending Skyward” but candidly we have done this for free, before - without issue.

It’s a very different experience working with Flipside and we hope to create a range of user experiences.

Also, it’s to note – much of this is to continue to support ACI as we have done in the past. Some line items include; whitelists for Snapshot, Recognized Delegate enforcement, querying participation, etc.

For Llama, we think there is a small overlap. Let’s take a look at their proposal:

We’ve already done this – and is a core business to develop these assets. As a company whose tenure is to do this, it is expensive, arduous, and a multi-year investment.

Key differences in our data –

• Open-sourced, able to be used for free by anyone
• Software libraries & APIs, enabling builders to integrate Aave data across different use cases
• Snowflake warehousing, allowing for more robust and performant analyses / data science tools
• Snapshot data, the only provider to offer this off-chain data key to DAOs
• Distribution, a network of community analysts and enterprises who are already curious about Aave

We do this service to activate a community, grow and serve as ballast for Web3 organizations, helping them succeed. This is only possible due to our data.

This data is also what has powered our perspectives for the past two years.

[Michigan_Blockchain]

Thank you @fig for the proposal, and for the great work that you’d done for Aave. We’ve had a great experience collaborating with Flipside on blind-voting and delegate reimbursement. We have two questions:

@Flipside

Create scalable Governance structures that enable the introduction of GHO alongside current Aave protocol operations; discuss and evaluate Governance schedules

Is this saying that GHO governance is different from current Aave governance? Why and How? What kind of changes do we need to make to the governance structure because of the launch of GHO?

2. As a general point, when deciding whether to add new service providers & contributors, our treasury manager should give a financial evaluation of how the additional costs would impact Aave treasury and whether it’s sustainable. We came across a rather concerning Messari report, “State of Aave Q1 2023”, that contains the following table. It shows that Aave’s DAO expenses has exceeded protocol revenue by more than $41 million cumulatively from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023. We’d like to hear some thoughts from @Llamaxyz, @MarcZeller and @Messari.

[fig]

​​Hey @Michigan_Blockchain –

Thanks for your inquiry. For the first question, it doesn’t need to mean a new, separate infrastructure. Instead, we hope to identify and work with folks like yourself to develop robust solutions.

We hope to point out the fact that Aave doesn’t know yet – and that here are differing opinions-- is an opportunity to create more clarity; GHO will spur new, added decision-making across all stakeholders.

For #2, nice catch. There are growing expenses for Aave.

In line with past analogies, I’ve enjoyed using – it is not the $17 appetizer that breaks the bank but instead the big purchases; this may be true for DAOs and its contracts.

We are confident this is a fair price.

In comparison to other contracts – this proposal is .5x the size of ACI’s, .10x the size of Llama, .18x of Chaos Labs; those are only the smaller ones too.

We believe we have already added revenue and value to offset this contract due to new asset additions (cbETH), in-progress V3 deployments, and other partnerships.

This investment allows Aave to continue to execute this work and erode a budget deficit.

[fig]

Hi all – thanks for the questions and feedback thus far.

ICYMI, this proposal is now live on Snapshot for voting.

The vote ends in a little over 24 hours. We’re excited to see the voter’s opinions and the result!

[eboado]

Some thoughts from my side.

First, personally, I have interacted with @fig in the past both in the context of BGD Labs and as an independent participant in the community, and like everybody else in this thread, I think his/Flipside involvement has been quite notable for a pretty long time.
So I support having some type of contributor-onboarding Aave/Flipside.

That being said, I don’t think multiple points of the proposed scope make sense to the Aave DAO for the following reasons:

1. I simply don’t think that Flipside (or anybody) should act as a “coordinator” of the DAO or what resembles more like having some “executive” power. First of all, because progressively this coordination is improving organically, second, I don’t think it is desired.

   To go more into the details on the current “problems”:

   • Contributors & delegates wake up to lofty Snapshot quorum requirements as a surprise. Both Contributors and delegates should follow more, especially delegates.
   • Asset additions are written concurrently, creating duplicate work. Currently, teams can contact ACI if looking for guidance on listings, or if more from the technical side, they can do it directly with BGD. It is true that in practice it is not always the case, but other contributors should just redirect to the appropriate places.
   • Risk contributors have to lobby votes to enable changes & reach quorum. This is a problem for vote participants: to be a delegate, obviously following proposal and participating is a must, if not, delegators should immediately remove delegation from the inactive delegates.

   The DAO vision at the moment is whatever the aggregation of its independent parts produce, but it is not the right moment to bureaucratize more, and definitely not for a single party to act like some kind of global product owner. The owner of the Aave ecosystem is the thousands of AAVE holders.

2. I think “growth” on the expansion of delegates set is an important topic, together with helping to redirect external parties to the proper DAO contributors. So supportive of the high-level points of DAO Operations & Community Resources.

3. Multiple items (almost all) on Governance and Proposal Development are already tackled by other contributors or should be by external teams. E.g. expansions to other networks (external teams should initiate the process and the rest of the flow depends exclusively on Snapshots + technical evaluations + on-chain governance proposals), governance technical optimization (highly technical topic), and Risk Admins (technical + risk). It is simply not optimal for the DAO to engage an extra entity for the same.

   And again, Enforce contributors’ focus on core competencies vs. extracurriculars, definitely, should not be up to Flipside or anybody to do; it should be up to AAVE governance voters to or 1) signal that a project is not needed or 2) cut a contract with a contributor. If not “efficient”, it is a desired consequence of the decentralized vision of the community.

4. On the topic of Data Analysis & Research, Aave has invested quite a lot of resources via grants (hundreds of thousands from what I’m aware) or directly engaging contributors (e.g. Llama) on this. It is time to start evaluating which value is all of this bringing to the table, instead of keeping increasing the scope.
   I agree that open source indexing should be a MUST for the DAO to really own their data flows, and maybe it is not the case at the moment, but still, a really broad topic.

---

So, even without a doubt Flipside and Fig have always been really good contributors to the community, and scope like the current one touches incredibly “deep” aspects of the DAO and sets precedents of oversight by an external party.

So in the current shape, AGAINST, but supportive of Flipside if coming up with a different type of engagement.

[MarcZeller]

The Aave-Chan Initiative (ACI) has consciously refrained from commenting until the TEMP CHECK concluded to avoid any undue influence on the governance process. As we now approach the ARFC stage, we feel it’s appropriate to share our perspective:

1. Flipside is a top-tier delegate platform for our DAO, and we’re proud to count them as part of our community. Their selection for ACI’s Orbit program is a testament to their value.

2. We find ourselves in agreement with most of the points raised by @eboado, so we see no need to reiterate those here.

3. Timing is a crucial factor for this proposal. The protocol, in its current state, isn’t equipped to accommodate a service provider of Flipside’s nature. Should the ARFC not pass, we would encourage Flipside to apply for Orbit funding, which we’d be honored to provide. In a quarter’s time, we anticipate that the DAO will have better frameworks, GHO & Portal revenue, likely improved market conditions, and a more defined global DAO budget.

4. The ACI is currently on a cost-cutting trajectory, making us hesitant to approve expenses that are neither technical nor safety-related.

5. This proposal doesn’t extend Skyward; it’s essentially Skyward without the coding component. Given that Skyward includes the technical elements that form the core of AIPs, our suggestion is simple: “just use Skyward.”

6. While having a contributor who isn’t a co-founder or Aave OG is a positive sign of decentralization and maturity, Flipside isn’t particularly community-supported. Most, if not all, of Flipside’s voting power comes from a single well-known entity. This doesn’t represent the delegation diversity needed to ensure independence.

7. A recurring theme in the current proposal is “our budget is only half of ACI’s.” However, if Flipside aspires to half of our budget, they should be prepared to provide at least half of the services we do, which is significantly more than what’s currently offered.

8. We still hold the view that Flipside meets our expectations for a delegate platform. We believe delegates should be held to high standards and fairly compensated as such. However, the path to sustainability should be achieved by remaining a delegate platform, not by becoming a service provider just for the sake of sustainability.

For these reasons, the ACI doesn’t currently support Flipside’s onboarding onto the Aave DAO service provider budget. However, we believe that in the short term, we’ll establish a more suitable DAO framework and situation that can sustainably accommodate this type of onboarding and/or offer fair delegate platform compensation. We invite Flipside to accept Orbit support, and if that stream is deemed unfair compensation, we encourage the Grant DAO to support Flipside again.

[fig]

Hi @eboado – thanks for your comment and feedback.

We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and perspectives.

It seems like your general feedback is on the “Coordination” scope which we are happy to discuss.

To be clear, a large motivation for us posting the coordination scope was inspired by conversations we had with multiple stakeholders across the DAO.

There’s growing frustration with the volume of proposals moving through the DAO lacking clarity in strategy and execution. Additionally, it has inhibited 3rd-party partners and infrastructure development.

As long-time contributors, we agreed with this sentiment and thus included this as a result.

We are confident in our ability to set up neutral processes of coordination that facilitate a more open governance process without centralizing control in any one entity.

[fig]

@MarcZeller , thanks for your input, as always.

ACI has shown how a delegate platform can grow into providing greater resources and a range of services beyond what is normally expected of delegates.

Flipside has worked for the opportunity to do the same.

Furthermore, you’ve illustrated that working for Aave in its best interest – the sort of work that we’ve done for years, omitting AIP development – is worthy of a contributor scope.

TO YOUR POINTS DIRECTLY

Cost Comparisons: The cost isn’t marketed to be half of yours, but instead, a simple comparison to show our commitment to finding savings in Aave. This is a good deal for the DAO — a size we would support as a voter (already offset by our work) and from the recent Snapshot vote it seems like others agree.

Community-Support: Saying we are not community-supported is disingenuous. Flipside at its core is community supported; we were here before the delegation doing work – next to you – and we hope to continue contributing deep into the future.

The comments above (and the vote) express mass community support from other delegates and service providers. Our contributorship drives the continued decentralization of work away from founding team members and prior AC employees.

This is an opportunity for you to endorse and encourage that healthy evolution. In that light, a six-month opportunity to deliver on much-needed areas of development for the DAO is justified by the years of work Flipside has devoted and is a low-risk investment by the DAO.

FOR PERSPECTIVE

When Marc created the ACI and first joined as a delegate there was hope to work towards a shared solution for impactful work – both big and small, old and new delegates.

At this time, Flipside had already drafted a paid delegate construct with other delegates and presented it to Marc as an opportunity to collaborate. Instead, unfortunately, he created a proposal to pay himself (and voted YAE on it) and has recently conjured up a private program, Orbit, as a life ring.

There is an extreme danger with a private paid program, especially by the leading delegate. It creates a perverse relationship if Flipside is paid by ACI vs. the DAO as you are incentivized to align with the ACI to ensure continued payments. That’s not healthy – nor does it spur new talent, as it is subjective.

Thus we have declined this pay. We believe this is our moment to bring value to the DAO to help shape the future for a truly decentralized, open governance process. And importantly - to create frameworks, which lead to a more diverse range of resources, people, skills, and perspectives contributing towards Aave and doing so harmoniously.

This diversity is crucial for the evolution and ongoing success of the Aave protocol.

FOR REFLECTING

We caution against the focus on purely technical skills within the DAO — this is a great way to ignore other key functions and expertise. There is much too much reliance on this “requirement.”

It’s highlighted by both you and @eboado’s replies: there needs to be effort and focus on specific areas around DAO functionality and budgeting.

Some soul-searching is required:

• How can the DAO prioritize this if it only compensates only developers and security teams? Who is supposed to do this work?
• Why would we only empower technical members to be making these sorts of decisions?
• How can the DAO incentivize the introduction of new talent outside the founding AC team?

These are major questions facing the protocol and require a deeper level of thought and conversation to ensure we continue to innovate around the core protocol (and GHO) with dedicated resources.

IN CONCLUSION

Flipside is presenting the opportunity to address core issues facing the DAO while preserving Aave’s values. We’ve had candid conversations and supported the DAO in every capacity. We have assisted in ushering in talent, advised on prospective proposing teams, consulted with key partners, and formed relationships outside of Aave with developers, institutions, and beyond.

Marc, we’re committed to iterating on this to find a sustainable future. A majority of key stakeholders in the DAO understand the value we will provide and have signaled their support.

It’s your choice what the “future” looks like and we are hopeful for a positive outcome shared by all stakeholders, service providers, both current and future.

[eboado]

@fig

We caution against the focus on purely technical skills within the DAO — this is a great way to ignore other key functions and expertise. There is much too much reliance on this “requirement.”

It’s highlighted by both you and @eboado’s replies: there needs to be effort and focus on specific areas around DAO functionality and budgeting.

Some soul-searching is required:

• How can the DAO prioritize this if it only compensates only developers and security teams? Who is supposed to do this work?
• Why would we only empower technical members to be making these sorts of decisions?
• How can the DAO incentivize the introduction of new talent outside the founding AC team?

These are major questions facing the protocol and require a deeper level of thought and conversation to ensure we continue to innovate around the core protocol (and GHO) with dedicated resources.

Agree this is important to discuss, and highly encourage other community members to participate in the discussion. Some extra thoughts of mine.

First, currently, the DAO is not only compensating developers and security teams. Those are compensated because Aave is a software system, so it is pretty obvious that development and its security are pretty core components.
Apart from that, the DAO has engagements in marketing and grants (Aave Grants DAO), risk (Gauntlet, Chaos), broad growth (ACI, Llama), and treasury management (Llama too).

Now, I have a hard stance against the type of prioritization suggested because:

1. Innovation comes from the technical side of a protocol like Aave, and there is no future if having a party that has not enough technical knowledge to decide what should be done in a software system. And this is not about the specific Flipside proposal, but about anybody.
   In blockchain and smart contracts, the way things are implemented matters, that’s the whole point of it.

2. Point 1) doesn’t mean that only technical contributors should have a say on the DAO direction, and let’s be clear, it is not the case at the moment. There have been several technical developments in the past that have gained more priority due to the needs of non-technical contributors, like risk (e.g. risk stewards), treasury management, expansion to other networks, etc.

3. Personally I don’t see any current problem at the moment with the “introduction of new talent outside the founding AC team”. Let’s analyze case by case current engagements:

   • BGD. In the past, some members were part of the Aave Genesis team, but completely independent of any other entity at the moment.
   • Aave Companies (retroactive on v3). Part of the Aave Genesis team in the past.
   • Gauntlet. Not part of the Aave Genesis team.
   • Chaos Labs. Not part of the Aave Genesis team.
   • Certora. Not part of the Aave Genesis team.
   • Llama. Not part of the Aave Genesis team.
   • SigmaPrime. Not part of the Aave Genesis team.
   • ACI. In the past, some members were part of the Aave Genesis team, but completely independent of any other entity at the moment.
   • Aave Grants DAO. Not part of the Aave Genesis team, but close to Aave Companies at the moment due to operational constraints (which should change).
   • Multiple delegate platforms. From my understanding, none was part of the Aave Genesis team.

   Arguably, at least 5 completely independent engaged entities had no direct/indirect involvement with the Genesis team, which I would say is quite remarkable in a totally decentralized DAO.

   Also, I struggle to see which is the big barrier to contributing to “development”. If anybody wants to do it, it is as simple as opening a discussion thread on this forum and gathering feedback from the community if it makes sense, obviously considering ongoing projects and direction.
   And it is also possible to 1) create a proposal payload 2) get an 80k AAVE delegation 3) propose it for AAVE holders to vote on.

4. I see repeatedly mentioned the concept of the DAO having some type of big problem, but I simply think that doesn’t apply. One thing should be clear the Aave DAO is not a company, and should not be “run” as such.
   Also, I have problems understanding the concept of “stakeholders” pointing out problems. If that is the case, they can come here and comment on them.

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So, in my opinion, we should not try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
I fully agree that certain “soft” components are obviously required for the DAO to improve, like establishing frameworks, supporting internal/external people to follow them, and tasks of the sort.
But from there to global coordination is a big step that I think should not be walked.

[fig]

Thanks @eboado – your feedback is noted and well received.

We are working on an updated scope which hopes to eliminate the concerns around "Coordination," while still delivering value to the DAO.

Thank you to the community for their patience as we refine.