I do think Sissors raised a valid point: why is 180M suddenly not enough but 270M is? In my opinion valid arguments have to be given by IF for this additional uptake. But I do support Dom’s proposal. The reason is stated in Pylo’s last paragraph: we have to act fast. That argument alone may warrant the extra funds. But again only if IF can explicitly account for it
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Dear communities of IOTA Ecosystem,
as a reminder I’d like to quote Kappy and Dom:
In preparation to the IOTA CommunityDAO, and in order to fully decentralise Shimmer, we will have our own treasury that will be fully governed by the community. (From Kappys Governance proposal the majority agreed on)
A mild increase of the total supply of the network, allowing the community to fund whatever project they see fit could therefore make a vast difference in the adoption and the activity of users and applications in the Shimmer network. (Doms governance post the “Position of the IOTA Foundation”)
After the 25% Shimmer increase passed, all of the sudden a proposal beeing made giving the community funds into the hand of five people. It is mind-boggling how +90% of the community can support this idea.
Why aren’t the funds of the TEA sufficient?
And as for Phylo, I am shattered for this level of bias, which completly contradicts your position as the CommunityDAO lead. Also, it was clear from the beginning the process setting up a DAO will take time, even more with the chosen approach of the IF.
I URGE EVERYONE TO READ AND UNDERSTAND WERNERS + SISSORS POSTS
7 Likes
I can just agree with the other critical voices here. It should be clearly specified for what these funds shall be used, why they are needed so urgently now and why the TEA funds are not sufficient for that.
I have no problem if funds are used to grow the ecosystem as long as this is done in a transparent way.
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In my opinion, this is a major fundamental change that also changes the nature of the 20% vote.
All I’m saying that IF should stick with community opinion on this one, the new proposal changes things and is not respecting the earlier vote.
Community already voted, and now IF is moving goal posts after the shot has already been taken. It has been known since the 20% vote ground work that EVM needs to be in place for the DAO to be operational.
I would understand this push if EVM would be live and nothing would be happening, but the initial 20% split and the grounds of it have not even been given a chance to succeed. It’s up to IF to deliver the framework for the DAO to operate in (smart contracts), not push aggressively a pivot that conflicts with the earlier vote.
Community already made the decision on supply increase and how the funds will be used. This should not change, especially since IF has not yet provided the technical framework the DAO needs to operate in.
IF wants to change that retrospectively and is aggressively pushing this through with very little respect towards the earlier vote landscape.
Those tokens are community DAO tokens and as Dom said earlier, the Community DAO can’t be functional before the EVM support.
In my opinion, and considering the above, IF reps, especially community reps, should not push this proposal forward, but instead pull it back and focus on making the best use of already allocated TEA funds.
Handing over 50% of the treasury should be a Community DAO decision, period.
Token based voting is not suitable for this proposal.
6 Likes
More funding, sooner = more opportunity, more growth.
The only hiccup I foresee is complexity with two funding channels.
Well… economists talk about opportunity cost: what is lost when one thing is committed to at the expense of another. And I think there is some level of clashing going on here in that regard with two funding tracks.
But I think those are abstract and high level and more than balanced out by the opportunity gained by what a quick funding channel represents.
1 Like
Either way, TEA currently owns $14M worth of SMR and wants to have another $7M (50% of the CommunityDAO) without even knowing how much they will need and when they are going to spend it.
If there should be a logical explanatation why the TEA can not be used, which so far I did not see neither by Dom nor Phylo, have a vote, whether people are generally okay bypassing the initial proposal by Kappy (instead 1:1 → 1:3). Then have votes for upcoming funding ideas by the Growth Commitee and release funds from CommunityDAO accordingly. (the ones saying but voting is so slow - TEA has enough SMR to bridge it)
Another benefit not giving 50% of Community funds out of hands is, TEA will need to be transparent. So unlike the IOTA EDF, where since over 2 years more than 4 Ti are missing, there will be transparency (ofc, only goes for the SMR which will be funded from the Community).
** IOTA EDF = early community funded 20 Ti = entity equivalent to SMR TEA
Used to be transparent, but all of sudden stopped sharing where the community money is flowing to.
5 Likes
Ultimately the proposal comes down to this questions;
Do the voters see a larger growth potential for a more decentralized, start-up-focused approach of funding through a community-driven DAO in the midterm? Or do they see a larger potential in a more centralized, industry-focused and IF-driven approach, even if that means that the IF gets a disproportionate part of funding (and hence influence over the aim of funding)?
The obvious tradeoffs are that the idea of a decentralized, community-driven development of the ecosystem is weakend and the IF along with IF-funded projects get more influence in this initial phase, which could potentially be misused and could even have consequences for the ecosystem´s alignment in the mid-to-longterm. Apart from that I also see a loss of trust in community votings if once met decision are reversed so quickly.
Looking at the poll result until now many community members seem to see more growth potential for the second, a bit more centralized approach. This might turn out as a good or bad solution for the ecosystem, but if the majority thinks like that (even if its not a well informed decision) and giving their vote, it is legitimate. And this is how it should be. Even this discussion is a win.
1 Like
I dislike the (successful) attempt of pushing the community into a direction emotionally by creating the illusion of necessity and by shilling the potential great outcomes with nothing to back it up, those are far from rational arguments.
Besides that, i support being able to act more quickly - and i (and it seems like the vast majority of the community) still hold trust into the IF…
therefor i would rather like to see it being done by the IF, instead of having to vote some community members into some small committee (which probably takes a loong time aswell).
Since the IF would greatly benefit from a warchest, i’d prefer finding a way to build that, instead of redistributing community funds for no real urgent reason (at least none has been presented here - God forbid we would get some insight on why this proposal was put up…) after we just went through voting on that distribution.
Overall this leaves a bad taste in my mouth and i hope a better solution can be found.
8 Likes
The liquidity is definitely another problem we’ll face if we dump large sums. I don’t feel it will hit the DAO too much since we decided on selling the operational funds for the treasury periodically to build reserves in stablecoins and take advantage of dollar cost averaging.
Of course I cannot predict the market (otherwise I wouldn’t bother spending my time here 
). But having DeFi and other dapps on board definitely makes the network more interesting for potential investors.
1 Like
I get your point - the current grant committee draft does not consider active proposals like exchange listings and marketing. But shouldn’t the logical consequence be to account for this? To create a new type of grant where the network itself is the beneficiary? The reviewers then would have to check if the risk/reward ration is good and get the community aboard if we are talking about big projects. And as I said, there is still the option to just make it a forum proposal and bypass the grant committee.
I am not generally against doing marketing - I just feel like it isn’t good timing to reach out big before EVM is ready. When people do their research (which whales definitely do!), they should find some more than “soon”.
Of course it is a general problem of good democracy that it takes time. In this case, you can allocate a budget. But half the treasury, 7 million in current value, is a huge budget the community has no longer in control (unless its not fully spent).
Also, as @Sissors remarked, what about the TEA money? Wasn’t that the idea behind this pool to allow IF to approach partners that want NDA? Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
We should definitely discuss that on Tuesday. To the readers, feel free to join the meeting as well - time should be 2pm or 3pm GMT.
I think it is mainly about things that cannot be done publicly. So you cannot tell how much you would pay for an exchange listing if the exchange does not want this to be public knowledge. Same with other possibilities. Some things just can’t be disclosed, and for this, a transparent community committee is not feasible. And yes, the TEA will also spend a lot of its tokens on such things - as described here, but Dom’s proposal is about doing more than the TEA can handle alone.
And in regards to timing, I think Dom knows best how far we are and what is needed now. It seems that partners are on the brink of getting in now, but they won’t do it for free. Also, the EVM will need some essential parts for our builders to function perfectly and provide an excellent development environment for teams (like oracles and indexers). When the EVM launches, these things must be optimally in place on day one. Delays here will delay our builders and new teams again from getting the best out of the network. It is not about funding closed-source software. It is about not disclosing details of contracts and agreements to the public, which is not such an extraordinary thing, I would say.
And, yeah, Tuesday will be a good time to discuss this. The Community Grants committee will do amazing things for the ecosystem. You know how hard I have worked for this to come into existence over the last 18 months. But a community DAO cannot do everything and is surely not the most efficient way of doing certain things, so for me, it is a question of what currently works best for the overall network.
3 Likes
I agree with the proposal, disagree with the fine print, long story short. 1. Since the ultimate goal is to grow Shimmer, the funder should be Shimmer Community Treasury DAO and Tangle Ecosystem Association, and I propose that each contribute 25%, which together is 50% of the proposal (90,681,025.5 SMR). 2. Increase the number of members of the Shimmer Growth Council from 5 to 7, and the decentralized protocol should let more people decide where the money goes, because this is $6.7 million
We should also consider that the Shimmer Treasury was also a “test” framework to be conducted before building the next treasury, the IOTA Community Treasury.
Personally it is hard for me to trust on such a large percentage and would like concrete facts and data to make such a move more assuring and bring confidence. However, I do believe that, though we will make a great committee, and even with the right reviewers in place; still, certain people in the IF have years of experience and understand the intricacies happening behind the scenes that many of us, or even other experts in the industry just don’t deal with on a daily basis.
If the Shimmer Community Treasury was the only treasury then I would be a bit more hesitant. Yet, knowing that we still have the IOTA Community Treasury to support the ecosystem then it helps me put faith and trust in this proposal. Also, I think it will give us good data points to consider when eventually building the framework for the IOTA Community Treasury when that day comes. We will know what the outcome of putting such large funding amounts into the ecosystem will have, and then can better form the framework knowing such information. I would also take such a risk with the Shimmer Community Treasury than with the IOTA Community Treasury personally. And of course, if things play out positively, then it will not only help the Shimmer Network but greatly boost the IOTA Community Treasury.
2 Likes
While I would re-iterate the point you maybe should consider changing the rules/guidelines around the DAO if clearly vast majority here prefers a setup with less restrictions and oversight, I do get that even if you do that, some stuff would still not be suitable for DAO funding. Yet you still don’t at any point give an argument why the existing 180M Shimmer is not sufficient, yet if you boost that to 270M Shimmer it will do far more than merely doubling the Shimmer price! And again, I understand some stuff is NDA, but there should be some transprancy if you want to take so much from the community funds.
I would say if the DAO was the only one this had a point. But yet again, the TEA already has 180M Shimmer. Regarding the IOTA Treasury, come on. We both know that one will be the next one to be raided after this vote succeeds.
And if IF actually needs that money for useful things, well it makes sense. But here the one clear thing is a total lack of transparancy. Where again, I understand some NDA stuff makes sense. But not $22M of NDA stuff! And thats what we are talking about, since apparently $15M money is not yet enough.
Maybe some reading material to illustrate my point, this is what someone wrote a few months ago: https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-s-ongoing-crisis-is-an-opportunity-for-realignment. And yet here we are, where $15M is not enough to spend on things like paying for listings, or what is imo way worse, paying “crypto influencers” to shill it. (And no, I cannot be certain that will be done, but that is how the initial post is written).
3 Likes
I see a lot of great responses and thoughts here.
What I take away from this is, that a wall of text is only enough when provided with detailed information. But I guess this is a learning process for us as a community as well. I get that most people don’t read the wall of text and simply see people responding against such a proposal as “just” a small group of people, but keep in mind we are bringing up valid points to atleast take into account for this proposal.
But we should have learned from past community votes that detailed information, of course as allowed to disclose, should be presented to the community in order to make responsible decisions.
If you can not share NDA stuff, then atleast tell us an estimate of how much is needed to cover the cost. I would even prefer to change the proposal to the Community Treasury putting up the 50% as a loan to the TEA so the Comunity Treasury gets back its funds to have war chest again longterm.
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Absolutely agree that we first have to deliver the full Shimmer upgrade. After the successful launch of the Shimmer ledger, we are right now giving everything to expedite the launch of the execution layer with ISC (support for the “ShimmerEVM” and WASM-based smart contract).
These capital allocations from the ecosystem fund, which we intend to make in the growth of Shimmer, only really make sense once the ShimmerEVM is live.
This post here was meant in anticipation of the ShimmerEVM. As it’ll take several weeks to go through the governance process, now is the time to prepare for what will be.
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Fully agree! I think that TEA, the Growth Committee and the Community Treasury (DAO) should work closely together and really effectively shape and scale up the ecosystem growth of Shimmer.
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50% of the Community Treasury fund would go into the Growth Committee and be managed by a community-elected committee.
The goal of this is to allow the community treasury to be spent more quickly and effectively. We have to take baby steps to setup our DAO and experience community governance, but at the same time we want to quickly grow and scale up Shimmer. I am therefore proposing to use the legal structure of the Tangle Ecosystem Association to empower the community to spend part of the community treasury through it.
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These are just empty phrases to justify easier access to the community funds.
@the community: a community-elected committee of three people + 2 IF member does not represent the community. If the time comes for the commitee to vote on projects, the DAO can release the funds accordingly (have a vote in firefly like before). The TEA funds are big enough to bridge the needed sum for the time beeing. Some weeks ago we voted for DAO and TEA 1:1 and not 1:3. It was known from the beginning it will take some time to set up the DAO structure, all of sudden everything has to be quick. It is not about distrust but about the fact the community is an equal partner with its own important values, which should not get overruled by non specified reasons withhin some weeks. The community must assume responsibility and must not give 50% of the DAO funds out of hands at all costs.
See it as training wheels for upcoming raiding attempts of the IOTA Treasury (allegedly only 50 Ti instead ~65 Ti is left) and try to maintain the funds in community hands, while still supporting the IF!
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Thats the thing you are going for? All questions why you need 270M shimmer instead of 180M Shimmer are ignored. We still haven’t seen clarification on how this would more than double the value of Shimmer (okay is from Phylo and not from you). It is just to help the community treasury by taking half away from it? What has changed since the vote of just a few months ago?
Come on, if you post it here, then at least take comments serious. If the issue is the legal framework for the DAO, why not just copy the TEA legal framework? Considering also the DAO will just be run by a few members, it would be quite similar. And then it would be run by the community, it would be transparant, and the funds have to be used in a way the community decides on.
1 Like