ENS DAO pays 8 Service Providers a total of $4.5M annually. The Ecosystem Working Group offers a weekly slot on Ecosystem calls to share with the DAO what they’re building with those funds.
1/9 - 5/8 (Pre-SPP vote conclusion): 1.47 presentations per week 5/15 - 11/6 (Post-SPP vote): 0.44 presentations per week
This isn’t to say the number of presentations makes a quality service provider, just an observation from the past few months, but it does raise some questions for me.
Does this suggest that of the 8 service providers, only 1 of them has had a update to mention in the past 9 weeks?
Why did presentations drop 70% once the vote ended?
Is there a structural issue with the program due to there being no person you directly report to?
I’ll focus just on NameHash here. We have a many exciting updates that are already shipped that we could present anytime in the Ecosystem calls. All our work is public in GitHub. Our communication emphasis lately has been in direct updates to other teams already building on our work.
We have several key milestones coming within the next month that are more generally applicable. As these come we’ll be requesting a presentation slot
And we’re always open to feedback on our external comms and what people find most valuable there.
Appreciate all work towards holding providers accountable, thank you.
For Blockful, as we are working with a focus on the DAOs governance, we have been presenting on the metagov calls.
Not sure exactly how many times we’ve presented this year, but given a few recent exceptions with me being OOO and conflicting times with other agendas, I have been there biweekly showing what we are working towards.
We are working on specifications across Interop (7930, 7828) and AI (8004). We are very active in those respective conversations, and post on the ENS forum as/when appropriate.
Additionally we are actively maintaining and iterating on Unruggable Gateways, working with Labs, and the Base team on these efforts.
Happy to discuss on calls if helpful, as requested. e.g. @simona_pop asked for updates on ICANN/Namescon, and I was happy to oblige.
Our approach has always been to only share on calls if we have something useful, or valuable to share. We didn’t increase our presenting cadence pre SPP - we hope our work speaks for itself.
The eth.limo team has been through hell this year. Between FBI agents knocking on our door, federal subpoenas and being forced to testify in a public trial, it’s been quite a ride.
Despite all of that we’re still here and on call 24/7/365 maintaining critical infrastructure for everyone who depends on it and providing technical support for individual builders and large projects across the ecosystem. We’re constantly iterating and making backend optimizations, most of which are quite boring.
We’ve been running eth.limo for many years at this point and we recognize that infrastructure work isn’t “sexy”.
There’s a lot happening behind the scenes right now (including collaborations with other SPs) and we plan to present once everything is finalized and ready to share.
Thank you Limes, for your dedication and everything you do to keep the ENS ecosystem moving forward.
I didn’t mean to turn this into a list of what everyone’s working on, but we have a great place for that during eco calls!
Last term we had a problem: Unicorn and Wildcard Labs checked out. They stopped working but kept getting paid.
While it’s not an SPP requirement, in any normal business relationship you would report monthly minimum. That’s basic accountability for high 6 & 7 figure contracts.
But SPP doesn’t have overseers, we rely on SPs volunteering information. To me, the eco call with 30+ attendees is the natural venue for that.
I’m not saying SPs aren’t doing work, but without regular updates, we have no way to know.
Valid. Blockful has been reporting often on MG calls
Because you guys work on infrastructure, I’d venture to say most people on this forum have no idea what Unruggable does. A regular presentation couldn’t hurt!
Jokes aside, I think this speaks to a bigger problem of accountability. Rarely a builders/service provider program goes without so much lack of supervision as this one. And this isn’t the SPs fault, but the program itself. My bold guess: No one wanted to burden the awkward “accountability” issues to avoid the political implication of it. The result? People truly building, but lack of awareness.
If you take OP governance grants (similar in amount), everyone gets assigned a point of contact, the milestones are required to have a date and those are revised based in the dates provided by the grantees itself. It’s not about being a police or micromanagement, it’s about those 4.5m who are being giving away, to have meaning, you can milk the cow, but do it ethically and transparently haha.
