A key element that hasn’t been covered in this discussion is the actual budget of the proposed foundation; This temp check mentions a single sentence to ‘ballpark’ a $15 million dollar budget per year which adds significant colour to why this temp check has received the engagement and concern it has.
Given current market conditions across the industry and Ethereum it needs to be acknowledged that this is a monumental budget. This budget would cover “ENS Labs, service provider program (SPP), and public goods and ecosystem initiatives”, based on previous data this would mean ENS Labs would consume ~65% of this budget ($9.7m), this budget was more than doubled from $4.1m following this proposal where the justification for this increase heavily leaned on building and budgeting for Namechain.
Earlier this year ENS Labs announced that the Namechain L2 development was being deprecated, something FireEyes (and the wider ENS ecosystem) fully supported, because the core development of the ENS Protocol is something ENS Labs developers are extremely well versed in and are trusted by the wider community to manage.
However, should this trust mean ENS Labs should get unfiltered access to the DAO treasury and appoint their own accountability structures? Or is the assumption that ENS Labs could make compromises around budget? This seems prudent given market conditions and the decline of ENS protocol revenue.
These are exactly the kind of multi-million dollar questions that beg for strong accountability structures. If the proposed funding model does not involve a DAO-wide vote and instead relies on a 5-person board to ratify funding decisions for more than 10% of the DAO treasury in a year, we need to be very sure that this structure is robust and representative.
So with AVSA is stepping down this means Katherine (ENS Labs), Nick (ENS Labs) and Validator (ENS Labs) will be selecting and going through the ‘hiring process’ with 3 potential foundation directors. This foundation will then be the only direct accountability mechanism to ENS Labs budget and spending.
This may read as an attack of the productivity of ENS Labs, but we genuinely believe ENS Labs are making significantly more impact to ENS than any other contributor. However, regardless of the impact made or expected in the future, it is irresponsible as a DAO and protocol to hand the foundation a blank check without a serious examination of the proposed spending.
Perhaps a productive next step here (to address the concerns shared by many comments in this thread) is to divide the proposal into stages:
- Ratify the Foundation structure (expansion, board makeup, responsibilities, etc)
- Ratify the Foundation budget for the next funding cycle (breakdown of proposed spending between Labs, SPP, working group/s, etc)
This would allow delegates to independently approve the proposal of a streamlined and expanded foundation (which we believe is something there is directional support for especially with a more open dialog around foundation directors).
Then once this is passed (with or without revisions/changes), the newly appointed board can propose an overall budget for the cycle, covering Labs, SPP, working groups (if any), and other initiatives.
This process gives the DAO a true right of refusal over it’s own capital, as opposed to the ability to claw back a proposed budget after the fact, as it becomes more clear where that capital is being allocated and how these decisions were reached. Rather than a single ‘catch all’ proposal for $15,000,000 dollars and a restructured foundation.