Some points from my side, both high and low level.
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The charade of a grants entity taking care of community growth (via grants per se, hackathons, etc.) together with marketing, events organization and merchandising of a brand like Aave needs to stop.
Events and promotion services for the DAO should be taken care of in a segregated manner from grants, and by an entity that has shown strong capabilities on it, like @AaveLabs .
The situation is so surrealist, that I frequently see sponsorship material like “Aave Grants DAO sponsoring X”: who sponsors is Aave, the Aave DAO. It is even ridiculous to raise the point. -
Currently, there is approximately 0 connection between AGD and the majority of active contributors to the DAO. This could be perfectly acceptable if the grants entity would limit itself to its mandate: support teams/individuals building on top of Aave their products.
The issue is that again and again, grants are given for quite invasive items, conflicting with ongoing (or even delivered) items of service providers. Some examples:- Funding research of Safety Module slashing, while actually, an engaged team like Llama was doing (publishing multiple blog posts here about it!).
- Funding grant for RFPs research (?), having clearly 0 visibility on DAO procedures.
- Proposing projects for hackathons tooling that was built by service providers. This happened with the debt swap feature, even when both myself and even a reviewer pointed out that it was already built. This points to a really serious problem of context and visibility in the leadership.
The solution to this is pretty simple AGD should stop giving grants which have implications on other operations of the DAO.
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Related to the previous, and regarding the point on the proposal of exploring RFPs, again, this is not and should not be the mandate of AGD. A grants committee does not have enough expertise to decide on RFPs at scale. This will degenerate into asking other contributors (like myself, which already happened) to participate in it, which will make the role of AGD completely useless in those regards.
Giving precedents, personally, I’m not really willing to participate with the current leadership, no matter the framework. -
Aave should keep an important budget and presence at events, most probably higher than proposed. The problem at the moment, after like 2 years is that the visibility is low. As other community members commented, it is totally unclear how events are chosen, based on which criteria.
For transparency on an item I was involved in, a service provider (Certora) offered AGD the opportunity of a small sponsorship of the Defi Security Summit, arguably the most important Defi security event of the year. AGD declined, even if actually the community had a presence there (the team I’m part of, BGD Labs, talking about Aave).
Additionally, I have the feeling that Aave promotion was order or magnitude stronger before AGD took control of it. -
In this stage of the market, individual grants should be capped in size with no exception. Aave should not be giving grants to bootstrap projects: the DAO is not an incubator, its goal is to support projects, not to invest in them or pay all their bills.
Having a bigger size requires monitoring for accountability that 1) AGD is not capable of 2) it should not be even targeted, to keep lean procedures.
Most probably, the optimal way could be having 4 grant tranches of let’s say 2’500, 5’000, 10’000, and 20’000, which will even benefit the decision-making by reviewers. -
Arguably, one of the most important benefits to grantees is the exposure Aave provides, in some cases, pretty certainly more than the monetary grant itself. What is the strategy for this at the moment?
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The ask for a quite important sum on ARB and OP tokens raises the question, what exactly is gonna be the focus on that specific side? From my perspective, it feels totally arbitrary.
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The discussion is going into the branches of compensation of reviewers which is totally empty, for several reasons:
- The numbers are pretty acceptable. A budget to holistically run a grants program in a decentralized manner with ~10 people involved for an effective ~400,000-500,000 yearly is acceptable.
- Being a review of AGD in the past, reviewers were precisely the lesser of the problems, with pretty high implications from their side. Operations efficiency was the problem.
- Again, procedures are way more important, with things like: how is the history of reviewers of application X being investors pre/post giving the grant?
Which mechanisms to avoid conflict of interest are in place?
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Regarding the legal entity formation, who took this decision? Who is personally managing it? Which implications this has for the DAO in all senses?
Commenting that things will be “like always” is unacceptable, without explaining in full detail everything to the community.
The problems mentioned of not being able to enter into contracts, etc. on giving grants (?) are simply out of mind: Aave is a decentralized protocol, really serious entities are working with the DAO and never have any problem, but there is a problem to work with a grants entity just supporting developers?
If the issue is on events, the solution is as mentioned: the grants entity should not be organizing events. -
The topic of subDAOs feels not even debatable to me. The concept is lately pushed by MakerDAO as some kind of promotional grift with absolutely no substance. Extremely concerning to see anybody associated with Aave even propose it as an option.
Generally, I have the feeling that the pattern is repeating again and again: a proposal is presented to the community, not even so precise → all previous grantees support for a matter of gratitude and because they had a good experience with AGD (which I’m not denying at all) → fundamentals are ignored.
As a consequence of the previous, I’m totally against the current state of the proposal, it is time to change things.