Hello, this is my first post on this forum, but I have been reading for while
I am known as “iammeeoh” on the MakerChat.
I have not affiliation whatsoever with the Foundation. I am just a community member and a (very) small MKR holder.
I was asked by a community member (LongForWisdom) to write down some of the comments I typed today in the chat, to improve readability, and there we go!
I want to express general concerns about the status of the governance in the last few months.
Specifically, about the Governance & Risk calls, and the roadmap to MCD.
Point 1) The content/length ratio of the calls is, in my opinion, very low.
In other words I have the feeling that often people deliberately “talk about nothing”.
This is far from an accusation or a negative feeling towards anybody. It’s just how I see the episodes.
For example, from the last call, the first 20 minutes (Rich and cyrus) can by summarised without any loss
of information with the following two lines:
- it was important to decide how to vote on the shortlist of 7 tokens, done on the forum with 3 options.
- we need a short list so we can focus on some specific tokens, because each token will require a lot of time. Vote should happen next week.
Point 2) At the same time, the participation seems very low: e.g., 21 people voted on the last poll on the forum, just a few people watch the youtube videos (accordingly with Youtube data), etc.
Point 3) Having few people (but committed and well educated!) in the governance could actually be a good thing. Faster and better development.
However, to the contrary, I have the impression that the discussion proceeds in an extremely slow way. For example, a blog post (https://blog.makerdao.com/multi-collateral-dai-collateral-types/) on the 27th of June announced a vote on some collateral, for discussion.
This vote got delayed about two weeks for technical issues.
Then there was a forum poll to decide how to properly phrase the questions
Then the vote should finally happen next week.
All of this for what will just be a way to discover interest and sentiment among MKR holders. I.e., the vote is not committal in any way.
Did we really need almost 2 months to vote on this? Given that the (active/voting) community is extremely small, wouldn’t a poll in the forum just do the job more quickly?
Also there are some aspect I don’t really understand. “We” decided to spend time voting on how to properly phrase the questions, but the lot of 7 ERC20 tokens has been decided unilaterally by the Foundation.
Point 4) Regarding progress towards MCD, and the selection of collateral. Cyrus clearly said that it will be a long and difficult process. I don’t doubt that but:
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what about contacting academics and people from economics/finance (PhD, postdocs, etc, surely interested in the project)
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what about producing a template and asking directly to other Crypto project with large ICOs (e.g., BAT, Golem, CIVIC, DGD, among many others) to do their own scientific analysis in order to be added to MakerDAO? Why do everything “in house”?
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Is it really necessary to spend months on this? As discussed in this forum, most people agree anyway on launching MCD with ETH as principal collateral and a few other ERC20 included with VERY-VERY-SAFE parameters. These parameters can always be adjusted with time and demand.
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Without having any informations on the release date of MCD, is it really worth analysis a token like, e.g. BAT, in mid 2019 when at MCD release (for example late 2020) its ecosystem might have completely changed/disappeared/boomed?
Point 5) All in all, I have the feeling that in the last few months, after the peg-emergency solve, we have just “bought time”. It’s like “playing the DAO” when in fact the real action is elsewhere.
Things that are critical and not discussed enough are, for instance:
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Status of MCD: it’s obviously important to understand if we should expect MCD for 2019, 2020 or 2021. The landscape is going to change.
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MCD and KYC: how will MCD deal with KYC requirements, if any? We have no idea (as far as I could follow in discussions in chat and reddit)
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Status of the Foundation and its partners: what is the involvement of the partners, like a16z ? Last year you devoted a few governance calls explaining “how amazing” this partnership is/was. What have they done for MakerDAO (not for the Foundation) so far? What do they thing? What do they like, don’t like? When will they start to participate to the governance?
This is very important, more (IMHO) than the risk evaluation of a token like BAT having 1% of marketcap of ETH and (likely) higher risk profile.
Similarly, will MCD use centralised stablecoins?: do we plan to include USDC or not, for example? What does CoinBase say about that?
- Quoting: “The Foundation is dedicated to radical transparency. We want to give the community information as it comes. The problem is that there are a lot of moving pieces and because of that making predictions about release dates and other time-specific information is hard. We can do our best, but the expectations need to be set accordingly. We will soon be posting some dates about things that will need to happen pre-MCD launch, and it is important to understand that this information is subject to change: dates will be moved, things may be removed or added, etc.”
where is the radical transparency?
Point 6) To conclude, after the purple-pill drama a few months ago, those of us who accepted to stay around have implicitly accepted a more “authoritarian” lead of MakerDAO via the MakerDao Foundation. So I am not complaining about this. But the narrative was that, by cutting a lot of side-activities and focusing on the key tasks, with a clear leadership (Rune), the development would accelerate and efficiency would increase.
I frankly can’t see that at the moment, and I still have no idea on when MCD could be delivered, nor I have any idea of how the institutional investors around it are moving/preparing.