Stewards View: griff.eth
Wow! I am very torn between Avantgarde and Karpatkey. I will need input from my constituents to vote, but will break it down as I see it.
I’ll start with the two answers I don’t like and why, then talk about what i like about the other 2 options:
None of the above
We are leaving a lot of money on the table by not actively managing our holdings… We should pay a professional group to do it, not just yolo with some community members with other roles and priorities.
Llama
Requiring a DAO vote for every change is a nonstarter, honestly i stopped reading after that… but they were already at a huge deficit because i don’t like their fee structure. I would prefer to share the profits to align risk and rewards. Incentive alignment is a thing I care about.
Karpatkey
Karpatkey is THE leader in this space. They have 100’s of Millions of US dollars under management and I love their reports in Gnosis DAO, honestly, I check them on the reg for alpha :-D. They have a lower performance fee than Avantgarde and are using gnosis safes to manage the funds, which reduces smart contract risk, although zodiac does add some extra risk here, its still much safer than managing these funds with Enzyme’s very complex contracts that have not had the same level of TVL in them for as long, which slightly triggers my PTSDAO. I love that Karpatkey’s strategies are focused 100% on defi and also think they are pretty good strategies. It is also a plus that since they are just using gnosis safe, there is a lower barrier to entry to use other options that exist in the market.
Avantgarde
Avantgarde are the OGs of OGs in this sector. They have been doing it for as long as I can remember and Nick.eth prefers them, and I am sure he has done his research on it so this means a lot. They have much less assets under management than Karpatkey which probably means they will focus more energy on us than Karpatkey would. Also supporting Avantgarde helps diversify this corner of the crypto space which is always a plus. And if we open up the allow list we can let the community also invest in this fund along side of us, and frankly, that is just really cool! They also are taking this beyond a service agreement; it is an offer of a deeper partnership as they have offered us a seat on their board and a fat token swap. This is all very attractive IMO.
Portfolio Summary
I love that both Karpatkey and Avantgarde are taking their fees based on the assets they are working with, so they only get a performance fee on ETH if they get more ETH the price of ETH doesnt matter, and the same for stables (obv).
ETH Strategy
Avantgarde is very conservative with the ETH side of the portfolio, only doing vanilla staking.
Karpatkey does a lot of pools stETH/ETH pools and other more flavorful ETH staking options.
Stable Strategy
Avantgarde is taking more risk using centralized services like Maple and Goldfinch to earn larger returns then what defi can normally give.
Karpatkey is taking a more conservative approach, suggesting to put Aave and Compound interest bearing stables in pools to also earn trading fees along side the interest.
Karpatkey is proposing the better portfolio IMO
Personally, I like Karpatkey’s approach more as I don’t really want to support centralized services with ENS, but this is a minor factor in the overall proposal.
Final Decision (Edited)
- Karpatkey
- Avantgarde
- Llama
- None of the above
Karpatkey gets my nod, it was a real close call, Avantgarde is a great team and did a fantastic job promoting themselves during this process, but in the end, their use of custom smart contracts is a little more risky IMO than using Zodiac + Safe. I like Karpatkey’s investment strategy for ETH better and they have a great history with Gnosis DAO.
I was happy to learn more about Maple and Goldfinch and how Avantgarde works with them, I am less worried about those issues after further research.