HackMDMeet Your Delegate: Episode #12
Agenda
Video
General Introduction
Patrick_J
- Hello to everyone. Welcome to episode #12 of the Meet Your Delegate Calls of MakerDAO. My name is Patrick, and I am one of the GovAlpha team at MakerDAO. I will be hosting the call this evening. We are delighted to welcome two new delegate teams to come and chat with us.
- We have got the London Business School and Blockchain@Columbia. Each team will be given half an hour to present their delegate platforms. Then we will open the floor for some questions. We will see where things take us. This is being recorded and uploaded to youtube following the event's conclusion. Please bear that in mind when you ask them questions and give any answers and try not to talk over each other so that people watching back can see things.
Delegate Introductions
London Business School
Clemens Scherf
- Thanks so much for the introduction, Patrick. Again, thank you for the invitation and for giving us the platform to introduce our Blockchain Society at LBS and the broader LBS community. I will give a brief overview of who we are, what we do, and how we come about.
- Around 15 students came together at the beginning of the school year in September with one mission: to make the blockchain technology more accessible to our peers and prepare our peers for the opportunities we see in Web3.
- Having started this year, we have been very active. We went from a small number, 15 core members, who started this off in September and have grown to a community of around 600 people at LBS who are taking an active interest in blockchain technologies. We also have 30 active members contributing to our ongoing efforts, events, and research articles. We are made up of 15 executive members who meet weekly to ensure that we are sticking to our mission, that we are aligned across the organization, and that our organization comprises six different pillars. We have research, trading, partnerships, Web3 labs, events, and marketing. We would meet every week and make sure that we had events lined up. At the London Business School, we have realized that in a community traditionally catering to the consulting and finance industries, a broad portion of our students work in London or abroad across the strategy consultancies, the investment banks, and boutique hedge funds other financial institutions. It is a good starting point to view blockchain through the financial technology lens. But even though we have this very deep talent in finance, we often have to pick up the students from the ground level. We have been starting our Blockchain 101 series throughout this year, where we try to introduce crypto and Web3 to our peers beyond Bitcoin or Ethereum. For 95% of the students, their knowledge ends there. Over the past year, it has been encouraging to see that we have been able to host a range of events, like the Blockchain 101 series and our first ever LBS Blockchain conference, which we hosted at the end of last month. We showcased eight different speaker events with 20 different speakers to more than 250 students. It was encouraging to see a glow of excitement in our students’ eyes. I think every one of our members had also had that when they first stumbled deep into the rabbit hole of crypto.
- The London Business school is an interesting addition to the MakerDAO community because we are an exclusive postgraduate school. We do not have any undergraduate degrees, which puts us in a unique position because our students have at least one year of work experience. Our early career programs average one or two years of work experience and then up to the Executive and Sloan MBA programs, where you have seasoned industry executives across various industries with decades of experience. That makes classroom participation very interesting and very stimulating. It is also a good starting point for people to plunge into Web3 and crypto. It is a cross-disciplinary field where you need a base understanding of technology, financial markets, and politics. Once you go into the weeds of DAO and NFTs, there are so many different nuances that come into play that it helps to tap into a talent base that is very diverse in their experiences and their professional careers.
- To recap, we are an active community of 600 members. We have Max here, the current vice president of this year, and he will be leading the club going into the next year as I will be graduating in two months. We also have our research team on board, whom we will be introducing to you shortly as soon as Leo joins us.
- Before our Hackaton, our conference in April, I got to attend the Harvard Blockchain Conference as I am aware that quite a few of you have attended that one and the Columbia Lionhack, which was a great event. The Columbia Blockchain Club was a great inspiration for setting up the society here. They were a role model in how we wanted to set up our club. They were also one of the biggest motivators to consider making or participating in these different delegation programs available.
- From day one, our goal has been to join MakerDAO as a delegate. For the past six to seven months, we dealt with the red tape at the university in getting recognized as a club with a bank account. With that sorted and out of the way, we will be a long-lasting part of the broader LBS community. We are looking forward to being able to allow our students to learn Web3 in a very hands-on way by being active in the Maker forum, participating in a decentralized autonomous organization, and seeing what it means to be managing a treasure that is worth hundreds of millions sometimes even billions worth of dollars just through clicks on the computer. That is one of these moments that you do not truly understand the power of Web3 until you have participated in these new forms of organizations.
- I would like to spotlight our research team, which is ideally positioned to take on the Maker delegation role. This is the only team that we have made up of three co-heads of research, and they have ideal backgrounds to be able to provide the most value possible to MakerDAO. We have Bo, who is, unfortunately, unable to make this call and has more than five years of experience working at J.P. Morgan as a portfolio manager. Then we also have Alex, who has been working in the Australian Reserve Bank for a few years doing research, and Leo, who is currently leading the research efforts of the leading Web3 venture per capital fund fabric ventures. I would instead pass it on to Alex or Leo to introduce themselves without getting too far into that.
- Alex Kearney: Hello to everyone. I am very glad to be here. As Clemens said, I spent most of my career working in Australia's central bank. I mostly did economic research focusing on financial stability: cryptocurrencies in blockchain emerged as an emergent risk. Something that was not quite risky enough to focus on yet but something we were interested in keeping an eye on. I did a bit of work there and then decided to come back and do an MBA at LBS, taking on the head of the research role. Leo, Bo, and I have a team of about eight people. Our goal is to contribute meaningfully to the research and analytical conversations around crypto. Each person in our team tries to develop a research topic and something they would like to explore. Then they go from there to preparing a research article or analytical piece. I am finishing my MBA next year, and I will exchange to Columbia in the fall.
- Leo: Thanks for that introduction, Alex. I realized that you are going to Columbia. There is a lot of synergy in this call.
- I am Leo. As Clemens mentioned, I am the head of research alongside Alex and Bo. I learned business school and worked as a research partner at Public Ventures. I am a first-year Ph.D. student at LBS, where my subject area is accounting, and my specialization is in blockchain and cryptocurrency, where I try to study the crypto capital markets and how they work.
- We are coming to how we can contribute to MakerDAO. We have been doing our due diligence on how MakerDAO is bringing onboard RWA and trying to link the crypto-economic ecosystem with RWA and to ensure that MakerDAO has stability, and so does Dai. We could help vote on new proposals because we have combined and have thousands of years of experience in different sectors at LBS. Many people are super interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency. They would be very willing to contribute their real estate experience, supply chain financing experience, and all of these experiences to gauge which kind of RWA you should be onboarding. Similarly, for other key decisions across MakerDAO. I am pretty sure they would have the skill sets to contribute. I can say this because I alone have the necessary skill set. But as combined as a school, we can find a way to contribute meaningfully to all of these proposals. That is the idea we have moving forward. We want to be very helpful in the proposal process, even though we will only be starting with a small amount of Maker and not as much the decisive power in proportion to our shareholding. But what we can offer is a valuable insight into the different projects. That is the idea. We want to integrate the research function at the LBS Blockchain Association with MakerDAO and go deeper into all kinds of research with you guys. I tend to get too excited and talk for too long if I talk about research. I will pass it off now. Thank you.
- Clemens Scherf: Thanks, guys. This was a brief overview of our society and our research team taking on the delegation. I would love to hear any questions from you people.
- Patrick_J: Thank you, Clemens, Alex, and Leo, for that presentation. I will open the floor if anyone has got any questions.
Questions
- Patrick_J: I might have asked this to the last university blockchain club that came to see us, and I will ask both clubs today. I am quite interested in the decision-making process within the delegate group. For instance, if you vote on a proposal at MakerDAO, how does your club decide which way you will vote? Is it a democratic process where all 600 members will have one vote, which will be the outcome? Or is it to the executive committee of 15? Are they the ones making the decisions on what will impact Maker on a date on a week-to-week basis?
- Leo: We have a group of six people. That will be the president Clemens, vice president Max, and the three heads of research alongside Carlos, managing our treasury. We will be the representative delegate who votes on the proposals but depending from proposal to proposal, we will be seeking guidance from experts in the field. There will be many proposals that will be outside of our prior bandwidth. We do not want 600 people working on a proposal because otherwise, there are too many different voices in the picture. We want to offer more specialized support to the proposal process. That is the idea behind our voting process.
- That is great. Thanks very much.
- Payton Rose: Thanks. I am excited to have you guys on here. Would you be willing to take a moment to talk about the top point for your delegate platform? You have been bringing your entrepreneurial perspective to the Maker protocol. I was curious if you would take a few moments to say what that looks like from you and what some areas you think we could engage in better with regards to that.
- Clemens Scherf: Regarding the entrepreneurial spirit at LBS, it is great to see that as a business school, LBS accelerates that is giving people a platform. There are many programs at LBS that cater to this demographic. We have, for example, a class called New Ventures Development, where you develop a venture over ten weeks and present it to a crowd of LBS investors. You generally have a student body that is quite seasoned across different industries, specifically coming to LBS launch expenditure. Having seen how other universities operate and how the student bodies of different universities are made up, having this entrepreneurial aspect and perspective helps give you a different perspective on specific topics, especially once you go very research-heavy. Many researchers tend to get lost in the small details of technicalities, and they tend to obsess over some technical solutions and problems. Something that I have mainly seen as I was attending the Hackathon at LBS and then one month later, I was at the Hackathon at Columbia, which was almost exclusively for computer science students. There is that healthy balance that we can provide through our entrepreneurial community to very research and detailed-oriented questions.
- Payton Rose: Something interesting came to my mind. Our Core Unit operating model, our basic model for funding units and teams in the DAO, is very entrepreneurial. You can propose anything; MKR owners just have to approve it. I see much potential for bringing that mindset and helping us shape our Core Unit across them.
- Clemens Scherf: We are looking forward to that process. That is one of the first items we will have to work on. Make this process, this opportunity more visible. This exciting aspect of the entire Maker ecosystem is still quite hidden in the forum. One of the main purposes of this club is to draw a path where there is none. Because a lot of these students, as I said, are used to structure, they are used to knowing: “if I go into consulting. This is my career, two years, four years, and five years”. The same thing is for finance. This is something that we need to work towards in crypto. Especially MakerDAO being around for so long already is not the ideal position to have the knowledge and expertise to help us shape this path. We want to work with you beyond the delegation to find a realistic and meaningful way and how to integrate new talent into this ecosystem and pretty much create a talent funnel for MakerDAO and other Web3 companies.
- Patrick_J: Leo referred to his presentation about the club not owning much MKR themselves. Is that due to the university regulations? And does the club own MKR that they plan to delegate to themselves?
- Clemens Scherf: To come back to this, as I mentioned, from day one, it was our goal to become a delegate, especially to work with a16z, with their delegate program. We have been in touch with Porter Smith. Since October, we have had the delegation contract in our email. We could not execute that because we were waiting to receive the social status from the university and the bank account. Now without all being sorted, the next step should be to formalize this contract, and we will be receiving the delegate tokens from Andreessen.
- Patrick_J: Okay, but the club itself as an entity does not own any MKR. It will be all external, that is fine.
- Clemens Scherf: It does not at this moment.
- Payton Rose: I could ask some philosophical questions. A big debate was always for makers: this trade-off between preparing for growth and distributing back to token holders. I was worried about where you as an organization felt on that timeline. Should we be prioritizing growth or returning value to MKR holders?
- Clemens Scherf: Maybe before passing on to the experts on the call, the ones that will be overseeing this delegation, it is worthy to note that it seems MakerDAO has made the right choice in choosing stability over rapid growth, especially with the recent Terra Luna debacle, it shows that it did pay off to choose, although you guys were an algorithmic stablecoin, which by definition is already super risky. It does seem that you have made the right trade-off between growth and stability.
- Leo: I wanted to add that I have been passionately following the aggressive growth strategy you put together at Maker. Luca Procida. He is also an LBS graduate. That is why we are also in touch. He told me about how you see growth moving forward and increasing your surplus buffer to make riskier bets, which makes much sense. That proposal and the proposed path are the best way to move forward. When there is explosive growth while keeping the shareholders' interest in mind, protecting the ecosystem from bursting is the best way to indirectly return a payout to the investors. That aggressive growth strategy, increasing the capital surplus buffer, and being able to invest in riskier projects are the best ways to go. That is a brilliant strategy that has been outlined already. I might be biased because Luca is a close friend, and I have looked into it in depth. But it is the right way to go.
- Patrick_J: Thank you for that answer. I feel duty-bound as a GovAlpha member to point out that that strategy has not yet been approved by Maker governance. That indicates which way you might move to that game as a delegate up to a vote. It is quite an interesting insight. Thank you.
- Patrick_J: Then, one of the other big topics discussed at Maker is the burn mechanism. That ties in with what you have been discussing with the growth strategy. As delegates, do you come down on the growth-only side of the fence? Or do you sympathize with the viewpoint that we should learn a little bit as we go along to keep that ball rolling?
- Leo: I cannot speak for the entire school. The strategy would be to stop burning for a while to have a big surplus buffer. We have seen currency issuers explode over the last few days because they could not create the reserves necessary to sustain the explosive growth. Increasing the surplus buffer by halting the burning might be the best way. It will also mimic the banking system because banks usually keep 10 to 15% of the currency they have issued, the total currency, as a surplus buffer to prevent this problem from occurring. The DeFi is completely different, but we still have a lot to learn from traditional finance. I would encourage halting burning for a while and not increasing it. That is my two cents.
- Patrick_J: We have got about five minutes left. If anyone on the floor has any questions, I would be happy to hear them.
- Payton Rose: I want to ask about delegate compensation. The foundational question is: Are you aware of Maker's recognized delegate compensation structure? It does not matter if that is a yes or no.
- Clemens Scherf: I am not fully aware of that program. Maybe Leo or Alex?
- Alex Kearney: No.
- Leo: No.
- Payton Rose: Awesome. That is cool. It offers a great incentive to get involved. But it is even cooler if you want to get involved not knowing about it. It might pivot more broadly if the group does have use on delegate compensation, not just for Maker but ecosystem-wise. What are some good values we should be looking for as we continue to iterate on our structure?
- Leo: That sounds good. Thank you. We were not aware of any compensation. But that is great to have added incentive as a club, even though you were not looking for it. But thank you.
- Clemens Scherf: It will be a great experience to get this hands-on experience. And see from a day-to-day perspective how these organizations work because I think I share the sentiments of many people in our society here that we see blockchain mainly as a governance technology. Seeing a DAO in an action of your size will inspire our members. It will be quite inspiring for our process, where we are currently setting up our DAO for the Blockchain Society and trying to find the right mechanisms and incentives to make it work.
- Payton Rose: That is very cool. I am always down if you need a collaborator or to discuss governance things for your DAO setup.
- Alex Kearney: If you can send us the details after this, that will be great.
- Patrick_J: We are getting close to the end. One more question for me if there is no one else wanting to ask them. I have asked this question before from the university delegates. Are you planning to operate year-round a delegate service, or do things shut down during the academic holidays? Are we going to have you full-time?
- Clemens Scherf: It is great to have the current setup on this call. I will be going out of this community in two months. But I will still stay very actively involved. We have the other three people on the call from behind the scenes, which will be part of the new leadership and the research team. So there is that continuity to bring it over to the summer. There will be a slowdown because we will not have the capacity and power we do during the year.
- Leo: I can add to that. I will be a Ph.D. student here for four more years, and I do not get holidays. I can make sure that there is no slowdown.
- Patrick_J: We have not got any further questions in the room. We will give it 30 seconds or so. We will move on to the next group of delegates.
- Clemens Scherf: Okay, thanks so much for having us.
- ElPro: I am not sure if I should be asking a question. This is Frank from 3F Delegate. I am a delegate myself.
- One of the biggest components of running a DAO, a decentralized organization, and growing it is having key governance areas, such as the governance structure. I am a big believer in risk management and also asset curation. What kind of governance tools are you using? Are you using quantitative tools that will help you determine what any of the stability fees should be for the collateral types and the Maker protocol? Can you give me an example of what you have done in the past, maybe for Compound or Uniswap? I am just calling names out. I want to get an idea of your experience and how you approach that as a quantitative. What kind of tools are you using to determine the direction of any protocol?
- Clemens Scherf: This is our first year. We just set up in September. We have not had the chance yet to become a delegate in any other protocols. For everyone in our association, this will be our first delegate experience.
- Leo: Just to quickly add, Bo Lan, who unfortunately could not join us at the moment. He heads our state capital, which is a DAO portfolio management tool. He has four years of experience in J.P. Morgan digital assets, heading the Onyx team. He is a big believer in quantitative risk management, and he will be helping us set up the risk management you were talking about.
- Alex Kearney: As a general principle, we would be looking to use quantitative tools.
- ElPro: I joined a little late. Maybe I missed that part. Internally on an individual basis, and this is just an opinion from you guys. What is the outlook of crypto as decentralized finance? What do you think MakerDAO should be betting on? What do you see as the future? Is it NFTs? Is it more decentralized finance platforms? Is it getting the institutional players on board? What is your philosophy behind that? As we head into probably a crypto winter and hopefully a bounce back to the positive sum of this game.
- Leo: That is a big question that you got there. Let me break it down into parts. We have already seen crypto winter beginning with Financial Times and others sending out new articles about crypto dying. I see where you are coming from.
- As a club, we truly believe that digital assets are the future, and blockchain is the technology that enforces those digital assets. When it comes to MakerDAO, we perceive MakerDAO to be somewhat of a central bank figure in decentralized finance. We perceive it by looking at it from a currency issuer perspective and looking at it from a lender perspective. We see it as a decentralized bank. That is how our perception is. About the crypto ecosystem, we think that each of the things that are around, whether it be a DAO, whether it be an NFT, whether it be tokens, everything here is here to stay. So, for example, non-fungible tokens give us the means to have ownership through digital assets. For example, now the little ai has the same properties as real AI. That is one of my research focuses, and trying to evaluate it. Now we can see comparisons between digital art and real art. Similarly, what I think moving forward, each part of the ecosystem that is here right now is here to stay. Crypto winter is coming. But honestly, we are long-term investors in crypto, we are long-term believers, and we are here because we think that cryptocurrencies and real-world assets will be the future. We do not believe in having centralized intermediaries to form connections between us. We believe in being able to form direct connections ourselves. For example, even within a DAO, we believe in being involved in every voting process within the organization. As mentioned in the comments, spring is always coming since it is winter. Thank you.
- Alex Kearney: It is also important to separate, uptake, and use cases from where the price direction of things are going. MakerDAO and DeFi have a good use case, and it sits in between two parties that want to make a transaction. Normally, profit-driven centralized authorities would be sitting between them, like a bank or payment operator. DeFi can remove the rents that those institutions take away from any transaction. In terms of the crypto winter joy, if you are a holder, you are probably having a great time, but at the same time, the use case is only going to get better from here. MakerDAO especially has such a bright future in that sense.
- Clemens Scherf: You are just to wrap this up. My colleagues have touched on all the most important points. I always tried to emphasize that everyone who enters this society is overly focused on the price action. There is a very big distinction between the casino happening right now with the prices and the underlying technology. We are the society. We are focusing on the underlying technology and are not too much concerned with the ups and downs of the market.
- Patrick_J: Thank you, Clemens. That is a really good place to end things there. I would like to thank all of you from the London Business School for that presentation and Q&A.
Blockchain@Columbia
Noel Turnlington
- Patrick_J: We are now going to move on to Blockchain@Columbia, who will talk to us and present their platform and then answer some questions. We have got Jamin and Noel Turlington from Blockchain@Columbia.
- Noel Turlington: Great job to the London Business School guys. It is great to hear from Clemens again. My name is Noel Turlington or @CryptoLafayette. We both dox ourselves here. I am a rising senior at Columbia and run our DeFi governance arm. And I have been involved in this space since 2017. And I got involved with Blockchain@Columbia last year.
- Jamin Feng: I will quickly introduce myself. My name is Jamin, as you can see from the Zoom name. My forum handle is Jf123 and at Discord is jam#7798. I am a rising junior, and info sights and econ major. I have had a crypto experience in the past, but mainly through research roles and stuff. I have been in the space for a year, but I can confidently say that it is an addiction. You fall down the rabbit holes and stuff like that.
- Noel Turlington: I will get into a bit of the history of Blockchain@Columbia as an organization. We started in 2017, roughly around the top of that cycle. There was a lot of attention, attraction, and excitement around the club. But there was a subsequent crypto winter that followed. Interest and attendance fell. Over the past couple of years, the club has grown and developed and become more established as a student organization at Columbia. And currently, numbers mean different things to different people. And there is the saying that one good engineer can make up for 1000. But in terms of our Discord, we have roughly 300 members or telegram around 150. And active members that go to the revolving meetings and events that we have are probably 40 to 50, depending on the event, the speaker, etc. We have two really big events that we hold on an annual basis. One is a speaker conference called Ledger Fest. We try to keep that in the fall, around October. Last year, we had to do it over Zoom because of the current COVID situation. We plan to have it in person this year and use that conference as an opportunity for students to learn from different industry leaders and get some more one on one interaction. We like to keep it to the Columbia community or the broader New York community. Then we see the conference one as an opportunity for education and a recruiting opportunity for our speakers and sponsors, representing their different teams’ protocols to potentially hire or hire some of our talent pool at Blockchain@Columbia. That is our big event in the fall. Then we have a hackathon in the spring called LionHack. We try to keep that more to the undergraduate demographics.
- We are not opposed to other people, but we have roughly 18 different schools across the United States and Canada. It was a weekend-long hackathon. And we tried to market it not only as an opportunity to learn and build something cool but also as an experience to interact with a lot of the other exciting students building in Web3. Every week, we have two research groups, Monday and Friday. Previously, Professor Tim Roughgarden led the Monday meeting, but he is taking a leave of absence to run Andreessen Horowitz's crypto research arm. We will have to have someone step in on the Monday meeting. On Fridays, we have a current student who helped build the ZK game, Dark Forest. He leads that Friday meeting.
- But we also try to be education-focused. We will bring in exciting speakers from different projects or funds that we are excited about, and they can come to talk about what they do and present to the club. We will also have technical workshops during the week. We try to have the two reading groups and then at least one speaker or workshop per week. We are also a student organization. We think it is important to collaborate and become a community beyond just our meetings and workshops, etc. We will have once a month or occasionally twice a month club gatherings and socials and that type of thing.
- That is a little bit about the club. I would say our demographics are principally CS majors or engineers. We have some people that are a little more research focus. We are slightly lacking in the finance department. But we will try to increase that a bit this coming fall. We have our occasional degens. Those are the club demographics. I run our governance arm. We currently have a delegation in Uniswap, dYdX, and Compound. Two or three students typically ran Columbia Blockchain in the past. We are trying to grow our governance department. Governance is a slept-on opportunity for students who may lack experience, expertise, or capital to learn more about what is going on in these different DAOs. And then, it is all experimentation, and the best way to learn is trial by fire. And with the governance forums, we are trying to work towards specific goals as a decentralized autonomous organization.
- We are trying to expand our governance arm and specifically use it as an education opportunity. I know Patrick asked if we use it as a DAO or more of an executive committee. And the way Columbia Blockchain approaches it is more of an executive committee. Each specific protocol will have a protocol lead. Jamin is the current Maker protocol lead. I oversee all our different protocols. Besides Maker, we are trying to onboard, Optimism, Element, and potentially Hop DAO in the coming weeks this summer. It is an executive team of 10 members where each specific member, a few have two members, but they are the protocol lead, and they should be an expert on, for example, Maker, everything Maker. And my role is to organize and make sure everyone's voting on their stuff. For example, Uniswap typically they are fewer proposals. There is a broader timeframe for when those can be voted on. In relation to Compound or dYdX, they have had more proposals. It can be more of an extensive role. We are also trying to use governance as a mentor-mentee system. In the fall, we expect to have an inflow of new students interested in Web3. We will onboard ten more members to governance, one for each protocol. For example, Jamin will be mentoring a new student. It is common to say that the best way of showing proficiency in the field is to teach it to someone else to relay that knowledge. Also, talent or people are constantly going in and out at a university as people graduate and move on. We want to continue to pass on that knowledge and expertise about how governance works with Maker and our other protocols. That is, a small breakdown of Blockchain@Columbia, and how our governance works. I may have missed some things, but I will let Jamin say a little more, and then we can go into some questions that you guys may have.
- Jamin Feng: I want to clarify that we are not officially like a Maker delegate yet. Our club currently does not have any Maker. We probably have small pegs around the individual members, but not too much. I wanted to pick Maker for the governance because I think there is a reason the protocol has lasted for so long. Part of that reason is the community and how you vote on changes in the trends in the space. That is what makes Maker a lot more relevant. Stablecoins are necessary for this space. Decentralized stablecoins for sure. And Maker is first in the race for that.
- Patrick_J: That was interesting. Thanks for that presentation. If it is okay with you, I will open up to the floor for any questions if anyone has anything they want to ask.
Questions
- Payton Rose: I will follow up with the kind of compensation. A lot of questions you guys might have been around to hear done on the previous half.
- Noel Turlington: We were both on the call and overheard the question. We are not familiar with how the compensation works with the Maker delegation. We know it is there. Because we are also trying to onboard Element, and there should be compensation, we plan to use compensation if those funds go to the DeFi governance arm. We will use those funds specific to the governance team for happy hour, discussions, or dinners. We want the governance team to be a premier section of our organization. That is how we were planning on using some of the funds. I was listening to the Hasu call. He made a good point that compensation does a good job of incentivizing the delegates to play an active role. In some forums, people vote more often than others. Maker is one of the stronger performing DAOs in terms of things getting proposed, and there are lots of good discussions. I was amazed. I have put the delegate application for some of the other DAOs we are trying to onboard. We got the most responses and communication from Maker. For example, the dialogue has been quieter with Optimism and Element.
- One thing that I forgot to mention. Earlier, there was a question about a quantitative approach or that type of thing. We are relatively new in building out our governance arm. Typically, we do the protocol leads, and we will have a telegram group chat with teams doing proposals. For example, I am thinking of Compound and dYdX. For example, we have a group that, for example, Gauntlet, does a lot of the risk management for Compound. And if there are questions about a specific proposal they might have, we will discuss them with Compound. We have one with Aztec and one with the dYdX team. That allows our protocol to lead. If there is some uncertainty about the proposal, they can ask specifically to get a little more clarification.
- Payton Rose: Awesome, thank you.
- Payton Rose: I guess more philosophically. Right now, Maker has compensation in Dai for delegates. It is tied to your delegate performance. There are many positives there. But we do not have compensation in our governance token, which could be good or bad from a governance point of view. But one objective downside is that it means that you are less tied to the results of your decisions. I was curious if you have thought about how to delegate compensation ideally should work within the ecosystem rather than specifics.
- Noel Turlington: I am less certain on that. It would be cool to have a combination of Dai and Maker. This is me just talking off the top of my head. Maker is a pillar of DeFi. Its strength and longevity speak to what the Maker community has done. A combination of both could be good. When you have it in Dai, if the group wanted to liquidate some of that to use for personal reasons, it would feel much easier liquidating Dai than liquidating Maker itself. A combination would allow people to think in the long term. That is something that Maker focuses on: thinking on longer horizons. But Jamin, is there anything you would like to add?
- Jamin Feng: I agree. A system between Dai and Maker would be good. I want to add that having a vesting system with the Maker allocation would be good. I forgot which proposal it was. I think it was for one of the Core Units' budgets. Something like that would align interest better if that is what you are worried about.
- ElPro: Hey, it is Frank, again from 3F delegate, and a delegate myself. As a delegate, if you are in Uniswap, you go through a lot of drama, criticism, and trolling, which is fun. I enjoy it. Would your Uniswap experience, if you guys had any experience with what happened with Harvard Law that proposed something about a political Defense Fund for Uniswap. How did you navigate through all that mumbo jumbo stuff that happened there? It was back in May of last year. It is the first anniversary. It gives us an idea of how you deal with the forum noise and kill that noise to make sure you govern correctly.
- Noel Turlington: That was before both of our times at Blockchain@Columbia. I am familiar with what you are referencing. I do not know how the club voted. There was much drama around that specific proposal. It is related to the DeFi education fund or something like that. I remember getting much public backlash. And then there was some backlash recently, as in the past six months or so. I think Toby brought it to the public forums and Twitter. It got many reactions. Legal stuff is very complicated. The fact that you guys are on this call now shows that you are very serious about what goes on. The tough thing about working in DAOs is that some members like to voice their opinions but maybe are not as knowledgeable or do not contribute. And that is part of how things work. That was both before our time.
- Jamin Feng: Taking up this role is a big responsibility. Even if there is much noise or backlash against us, the best way to resolve that is to work past it and find a solution. But not to leave. Even if there is noise from the forums, as a delegate, one of my responsibilities is to connect the normal Maker holders with the Core Units and the governance side. That is a problem that Maker is dealing with right now, especially voter apathy. If there is noise, taking those opinions and dissecting and informing people is better.
- Noel Turlington: Before I answer Payton's question. How do we approach our discussion in governance? We have this specific representation of Blockchain@Colombia. But we view it as a voice for our protocol lead. It is a way for them to make a name for themselves in the communities where they work. We will be sure to credit this handle of the protocol lead and the team drafting some of that discussion. And then also, when we vote on a proposal, we will put out a tweet thread. Usually, it can be quite short, especially if something is relatively in consensus. But for example, there was a vote on Compound a few weeks ago, or a month ago, where they were trying to eliminate their top reward structure. It was highly debated. That is where we might put out a longer thread explaining our position on how we will vote on something. I do not want to take away from Payton's question.
- Payton Rose: You mentioned that the group would be open to crafting proposals on your platform, which is awesome. Is there a particular area, theme, or topic that you thought you might be looking to address?
- Jamin Feng: Yes, one of the main things that I have seen, at least on the confessional side, is that many people are unhappy with the governance. There is a disconnect between the normal holders and the Core Units and stuff like that. I do not have a solution right now. But that is something that needs to be worked on before introducing other growth areas. The foundation needs to be a lot more secure.
- Noel Turlington: Jamin probably has a better response than I do. But listening to Hasu’s talk, he mentioned potentially focusing more on growth or maximizing for Maker holders but doing that on longer time horizons. From a generalist perspective, that is a pretty good approach. As Clemens mentioned earlier, as we all know, there was much instability, specifically around stablecoins. Maker as an over-collateralized stablecoin option with Dai shows Maker’s strength.
- Jamin Feng: I want to point something out quickly. Although I am the protocol lead for Maker, it will not be just me. I am here as the head of the governance team. But we have other members of governance. Recently, you have been trying to onboard Fei. And then we also have someone that is delegated to Fei. And there is a lot of communication and overlap between the different protocols. It is not going to be just me handling everything. Although I will be the main person, more discussion is going on.
- Noel Turlington: I would like to echo. We appreciate the Maker community's response when we put up our proposal and the feedback we got to try to onboard for delegation. One question that we had after our community call, we have gone through those steps. I believe we have three other steps. Like Jamin mentioned, we do not have any Maker currently. But we are in communication with a few funds a16z and Jump to delegate to us. But if you have any next steps or advice, we would love to hear that on this call.
- Patrick_J: The next step would be to get you set up as a live recognized delegate on our voting portal. If you have not seen that, it lists all delegates with their delegate platforms and allows people connected with Web3 wallets to delegate. That will be the next step. I will reach out to you over the next 24 to 48 hours to get your profile organized and sorted. Once that is live, then anyone is free to delegate to you. Equally, you can delegate yourselves if you want to. Members of the club could delegate. I will get in touch with you in the next day or so.
- Payton Rose: We are happy to reach out to any of our contacts and let them know that you are looking for a delegation to have talks. It will be on you to schedule them. But we can at least let them know that you are interested. Hopefully, that will help you try to gain MKR delegated to you.
- Noel Turlington: Yes, we would love some intros or that type of thing. It will depend on how much we get delegated from those two funds before. We would love some of those intros. The Harvard Blockchain Conference got mentioned a lot. I lost my Maker logo, but this was the Maker cup that I got. I have been using it a lot. We would love to potentially work with Maker in some shape or form for our speaker conference in the fall.
- ElPro: Also, I gave a recommendation, speaking of the Harvard Blockchain Conference. I was there, and I met the Penn Blockchain folks, and I helped them and gave them push. I told them that even if you have 0.1, which is $150 these days of MKR, you can get your platform go in. You can get on-chain, hit some votes, put some reviews on the platform, and even put some of those comments on-chain. That will help you get recognition. It is like starting a Twitter account. You want to make a little bit of noise, even though you only got two followers. Eventually, hopefully, that builds up. Even if you guys can get 150 bucks, borrow it from Aave. No, do not do that. Getting yourself on-chain works.
- Good luck. Looking forward to seeing you guys on another delegate debate and all that good stuff.
Conclusion
Patrick_J
- We have now come up against a half an hour limit. That was a really interesting discussion. Thank you all for coming along. This will be going up on YouTube. You can share that with your club members. You can share it on your social media accounts. Feel free to reach out to us, Payton, and me from the GovAlpha Core Unit if you have any questions. I will be reaching out to you in the next day or so.
Credits
- Kunfu-po produced this summary.
- Larry Wu produced this summary.
- Everyone who spoke and presented on the call, listed in the headers.
