Thanks @Alx for the thoughtful and detailed response. Just pulling some top line comments to indicate what I’m referencing below.
This wasn’t made clear in the post so I’ll amend my original post to reflect accurately. As you identified in DMs, even though these grants were not scoped in the prior PTBR, the funding from the PTBR’s allowed for the bandwidth to apply and work on the grants to meet their requirements and reap the reward. There’s 2 ways to interpret that, 1) we’re paying G9 to do work and G9 is utilizing that payment to fund out of scope work to reap some benefit. Or 2) G9 is operating strategically and although the grant work is out of scope of funding, it’s better for the protocol overall and so it was elected to do the grant work. Seems like the later happened and I previously assumed something closer to the former, I’m sorry.
I’d still wager much of the work is Marketing and BD related and the team isn’t as well equipped for that. New Chains, New Yield Sources, Co-Marketing Campaigns - all BD or Marketing work, that’s a lot for one @tim. Tim is putting in work, but if the protocol is in a secure enough place where we’re ready to shutter governance, there should be more robust support for Tim and the Marketing/BD efforts so we can get the biggest bang for our bucks/POOL while governance is still active.
I don’t have a problem with the definitions of the metrics, I have a problem with the lack of foundation, proof that they will get us the results we’re expecting.
What have these metrics done in the past?
- What did they look like through V5, V5.1, V5.2?
- Any indication what they did in V4?
- Are they proving V4 didn’t perform and/or V5 is performing better?
G9 is selling to the community, and we’re not really being shown how these metrics have done to know if they are all they seem to be.
My day job we run into issues with historical data on an aggregate level all the time - but if we’re going to present something to a client, to make a sale, or to the street you take the data you can find and work it out to present the best guess of historical performance. The blockchain is, at it’s most simplistic, a big database, there’s some amount of historical data out there to figure out some of these.
As a closing sentiment, I want to explain why my candor is so skeptical and biting.
As a community what we’ve been sold isn’t always what we get, a small but critical example:
- PTBR-2: V5 Launch on Optimism, Arbitrum, Ethereum, zkSync and if possible Base
- PTBR 7: Redefine launch to just Optimism
– We’ve paid for launch twice and the second time we paid we got a lot less bang for the buck. And it broke. - PTBR 15: Relaunching to Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, and Ethereum
– We’ve now paid for launch a third time and still got less than what was framed in the original PTBR.
I’m happy to see such a robust scope for a 6 month period. But I feel like I’m being sold golden apples again, and I’m going to end up with a bushel of crab apples to make cider with and drink away my sorrows of unmet expectation.
Do I think anyone other than G9 could do this, probably not. Ask anyone worth their salt, V5 is complex, only experts can play in the sandbox. So like many tradfi businesses, we’re stuck with the maker as anyone else is a breaker.
I’ll vote with the community, but my confidence that what’s outlined will come to fruition is low.