I would like to speak on the matter of reporting, I’m a professional financier and I think that reporting is very poor. From what I understand reporting standard has been set many years ago, and was never modified since, somebody is just pressing “renew” button every month, without giving any consideration to what is really happening within the DAO.
I already pointed to the problem before:
That’s been half a year ago, response? - zippo!
Additionally we now have every service provider posting their own reporting, which is not integrated into the “whole” picture in any way. Also we have this ENS Working Group Spending Summaries - #8 by Limes
Its a total mash of information, there is no single source where reasonably well educated reader without financial background can go to and understand where the DAO is standing and where its going.
Judging from documentation by Steakhouse, reporting was created on Jan 5, 2023 and was never modified ever since. I can understand that first iteration cannot be comprehensive, but much has changed since then. ENS accounting page contains several outdated reference links to the point that some of that don’t work.
I distinctly recall that some people on the calls were asking to create some sort of manual perhaps, or additional materials, which would help to better understand those reporting materials. We have some brilliant developers within the community, but they are not that finance savvy to understand all this stuff. If they can’t understand it, then who is this reporting for? Nothings been done in that direction.
Initially when the manager was appointed the idea was to hire someone from the DAO community to make sure, manager’s work is deeply aligned with what’s going on inside the DAO - that assumes that someone dives deeply into DAO affairs and reflects it all in the form of comprehensive reporting.
My intuitive understanding is that community feels the gap and trying to fill it to the best of their ability, for example @clowes.eth posted this Toward Accountable and Strategic Funding in ENS. While it’s great to see that someone is putting effort into this, it’s not their job to do this. We need some adequate comprehensive reporting which would support the growth by giving clear understanding of the situation.
All I’m seeing is constant copy pasting of outdated framework. This situation reflects poorly on DAO and protocol as a whole. We as ENS should be accessible to the external world. Anyone without any prior knowledge of DAO affairs should be able to access information in a single place, read it and see what’s going on, right now it’s not possible. Nobody is going to go through that confetti of links I posted above and try to make sense of it, at best they will just give up, at worst they will think that DAO is disorganized doesn’t know where it is going.
Here is the perfect example of how reporting should be done - Arbitrum Token Flow Report - May 2025 - Page 12. Notice that this report is not static, Regen financial is continuously evaluating the developments within Arbitrum and reflect all those changes in coherent easy to read manner. We had this chat with @AvsA at some point, he mentioned, that those report were meant to be boring and predictable - true, but if it gets to the point where nobody can read and understand them and they start to create more confusion than creating more clarity - it doesn’t take a genius to see that its done wrong.
Arbitrum DAO is evolving, and so it Tokenflow report. Initially when they started doing this they set the framework, but all the subsequent reports reflect changes, things like implementation and analysis of Multisig support service, creation of OpCo recently among other things and so on. So their report is up to date and comprehensive. They are not just throwing a bunch of numbers into the reader, but create a story, with flow and comments - helping user understand the situation. In case of Steakhouse it’s a bunch of copy pasted slides with diagrams.
To be honest I don’t think we should be
That would go against the idea of capital preservation, and brings us into the territory of taking additional risks, that’s not why endowment was created.
In my opinion we should hire properly qualified auditor, who would slap all those moving parts together into a single document and present coherent picture of what’s going on inside the DAO. That would be a proper starting point for such discussions whether we should launch “additional alpha seeking fund” and so on. Just to highlight the point - I’m not advertising here Regen, I’m not affiliated with them in any way, it’s just a solid example of reporting which I saw across the ecosystem.