---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Meet Your Delegate: Episode #4'
tags: [Meet Your Delegate]

---

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tags: Meet Your Delegate
---

# Meet Your Delegate: Episode #4

## Agenda

- [0:09](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=9): Introduction
- [00:56](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=58): Presentation of MakerMan
- [9:14](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=554) : Questions
- [33:17](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=1997): Conclusion

## Video

<https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0>

### General Introduction 

#### Payton Rose

[0:09](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=9)

- Hello everyone and welcome. This call is the fourth Meet Your Delegate meeting. My name is Payton, or @Prose11. I am one of the governance facilitators here on MakerDAO. I am joined today by MakerMan, who is here to give his platform as a Recognized Delegate, and other Maker people who might have questions on what that platform consists of.
- I will turn the floor over to MakerMan so that you can tell people what you care about and why you are seeking to be a Recognized Delegate.

### MakerMan

[0:58](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=58)

- MakerMan: You can look at my delegate platform on the forum. I am following that. I started in Maker in November 2019, just as they were flipping from the single collateral DAI in the multi collateral DAI. I came with questions about liquidity and ideas. I came into the forums solidly and threw out a fair amount of ideas. There are a lot of posts and a lot of ideas from me.
- The basic issue was looking at the system from the stakeholder's point of view. I am big on sustainable and scalable systems. I am really big on sustainability: if you do something, you want it to last in the future and not just be a flash in the pan. With Maker and everything online, you want it to be secure. My other big thing is using data to drive goals. If somebody has an idea, they want to do something, you can try to do things, but if you do not have data, you are guessing. 
- I was around during Black Thursday and was sitting and watching when we were going to go into emergency shutdown. Everybody was sad. During the event and after it, I realized all these Vault holders were losing half for nothing. The system gets nothing; they get nothing. I started a forum thread. This was me thinking about the system for lots of different people, not just people working in the system or doing it as a job, but the DAI holders, the Vault owners, the DeFi ecosystem using the DAI. It is my big deal. It seems like Maker is using me as an advertisement because we made a billion. I watched Maker go from 150 million down under 100 million on Black Thursday, and then ETH six million and have to struggle to recover from that. Two years later, and we are six billion and pushing. I see the next logical step as a trillion.
- The real question is: how do you get there? Because I analyzed this. Unless crypto becomes 100 trillion, Maker is getting 1% to 5%. It has 1% or 2% of Ethereum, 10% of USDC, and close to 10% of Bitcoin. Where do you get it from? How do you do this in a way that is secure for everybody and grows the ecosystem? The way you get from 2.2 trillion right now, which is almost all crypto, is to bring on RWA and other stuff. Somehow we have to grow, and it cannot just be by organic money growth pouring into crypto. That would be great for everybody, but I do not see that as the real path forward to diversification portfolio strategy. I have pushed these ideas before and have not gotten a lot of traction. I looked at what happened with DAI in the ecosystem. We were pushing a high peg, a lot of people were arbitraging that or trading that, and we did the PSM. Different people credit me with the idea of PSM because I was the one to suggest that we use USDC as an emergency measure to back DAI during Black Thursday. After all, we had nothing else. It is trying to look forward in terms of how we do things. 
- Once Compound came online, and the farming was why the DAI Peg went so high, I thought we should raise rates and throw some of the DAI that we were getting into these farming solutions, so they can chew on the return. Everybody responded with, "no, we have to mint more DAI." I think we should compete there. I think we should do with Maker our reward and use that as another vehicle to communicate with Vault holders and potentially to give negative rates, should we ever need it in the future. We had a real struggle and debate over how to do negative rates or whether we could do it. It is a viable vehicle for many reasons to compete and create a new economic circle and cycle, as well as a thing. Maker is worth money. We can make Maker artwork money too. 
- I happened to look at the ideas and comment on them. Generally, I look at things from an analysis side. I am looking at the whole economy and the system in general. I am trying to understand how whatever is being proposed can work or what it means to the risk in the system and DAI. That is where I am coming from. It has always been a struggle because Maker can consume time. I hope someday we can get compensation for delegates. People working in the system should be compensated reasonably. This system requires a lot of head, space and power, and difference of opinion—different people with different views, different backgrounds to help grow the system to that one trillion. I do not see any other way that we can get a completely transparent world currency. Maker is completely blockchain transparent. DAI represents a claim on collateral. There is no other currency that is like that. We can debate it and discuss it, and maybe there are some things out there, but when you look at the world's landscape of countries printing their currency. Dollars used to be backed by gold and silver; DAI is backed by collateral. That can be the new meme for the future where we do not just get to one trillion; we get to 100 trillion and become the dominant player in the space. There are a lot of possibilities for that. I see that can happen. I would like to be a part of it and be here to help make that happen. 
- That is my platform. I am going to turn it over for questions and discussion. That is the basic deal; that is where I am coming from. I hope I can solicit some of the Maker players out there to put some weight behind me to have some weight with my views, have people listening, and maybe get some things done.

#### Questions

[9:08](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=548)

- Payton: I like what you have to say about keeping an eye towards both microcosm and macrocosm and all the different stakeholders in the world of MakerDAO. You said you look at this from a top-level, are there any areas where you see weaknesses that you are particularly concerned about?
    - MakerMan: I see this as a general DAO thing related to the quality of work: people contributing to the DAO and either getting compensated too much or too little. How they can burn people out or make it so that they get so much, they walk away. How do you make a DAO sustainable? The microcosm of the DAO is how that evolves. It is a real dynamic space right now, and people are approaching it. I want to finish my [work on rewards thing](https://forum.makerdao.com/t/pre-mip-discussion-incentives-to-align-interests-of-maker-workers-with-mkr-holders-around-burning-mkr/5162) because I have a completely different model that can encompass all the different models that I want to unveil. I have not had time to do it. There are too many things going on in my life to throw that one out. I wrote two other ones. This was in OneHive. I have not pulled them over because Maker is uniquely suited to this. I think Deep DAO networks will be the new future, which is where one DAO cross invests into another DAO. You cannot just make a website and a token. You can throw a lot of the stuff up, but you cannot make a real community in a real dynamic ecosystem that you can then build into a DAO Network. One of the ideas I had that I have never really thrown at Maker is this idea of a DAO Network and how you cross invest, share talent, and build treasuries that cross invest into these other DAOs and stuff. It is a larger space, which is how you build sustainable value in conjunction. That is the macrocosm, DeFi, and even the greater space of traditional finance. The microcosm: how do you nurture and sustain the individuals within the communities in terms of right, sustainable, fair rewards. These are all tricky topics, very deep topics. They are all important. It is a tough space. I hope I can get to a point where I can finish my work on rewards and show you guys or show the world unless someone else finds it first. I have spent 30 years searching for this, and blockchain was a key requirement to make it happen. It is a way to think about what work is. Once you wrap your head around that, you understand the idea; you can get the rest of it easily. I am protecting it because I feel like it has value, and I do not know how to read that value, and I also want to finish it. At some point, either somebody is going to find it, or I will reveal it. I see those as all important topics, and that is why I go micro and macrocosm. You can look very myopically at one thing, like the people in the space or something, or what Maker does, but if you do not look at what Maker is doing, and DeFi or traditional finance, in terms of growth, you miss the bigger picture. Maker could go away if you miss these pictures. If you do not pay attention to the microcosm, you can have your people go away and go somewhere else. You cannot have that. Maker is an important piece of this. We want to keep those together, leverage our positives, diminish our negatives so that we can become *the* major player. We already are one of the major players, but to be *the* major player with DAI in the space.
- Payton: I have seen many similar programs in the space suffering from the fact that whenever you put money out there, people will come. You can quickly get into a situation where you have many people trying to make low-effort contributions. I thought CommDev did a really good job helping either say "no" to those or help people find places where they could create value—looking forward to this new scheme that you are cooking up.
    - It is sitting on my computer waiting for me to finish the math and do the edge cases. Make sure that what I am going to present is going to work. I have spent 30 years, so one more year is nothing. I have traveled the world, and I have paid my dues in giving my time freely to other types of DAOs, intentional communities, and different groups of people that are trying to do things differently. They have very real struggles on managing their internal funds, and people are contributing fairly, how you bring people in, and how you get rid of problem people, which is probably one of the biggest issues in DAOs. You have one person who can be anti-everything, yet they think they are doing the right thing. They are not malicious, but they crush the energy of that community. Those are really hard issues. When to know that you are not a positive contributor in the community and to move on. It is one of the hardest issues, personally and as a community. All these are interesting things in the space. I have spent a lot of personal time traveling to see what other people were doing and get a handle on the issues by participating materially. It was one of the reasons why I came to Maker. I thought it was an interesting space where I could contribute. In the end, you want it to become something material, so you can spend your life doing something interesting and material and be compensated appropriately for it. At some point, my wife was saying, "you are not getting anything from Maker. You are frustrated, you are upset, and you are not with us. Take a break." She was wondering why I was doing that: taking time from them and getting nothing. So I see all these issues and a big way. At some point, I got burned out on Maker, took a break, tried to do some other things, and got some ideas by doing that. Sometimes it is important to take those breaks. A DAO needs to make room so that people can have that space. LongForWisdom gets beat up; that guy is so great. I want him to be able to have three months off. So he can recover and come back. And if he is going to go somewhere else, we have a model where other people can step up, and he can move up. 

[17:18](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=1038)

- Payton Rose: In your last response, you said something close to our sheet, which is thinking about protocol expenses. Our revenues have tipped a little due to rate cuts and a few other factors, and we are onboarding more and more CUs. Our expenses are quickly catching up with our revenues. I was curious if you had any philosophy as a delegate. Are there spendings that you feel should be prioritized? Should we be looking to spend on growth or security maintenance?
    - MakerMan: That's a good question because. Maker is still new, and it is growing massively. One of the big things that I was pushing for a long time was a kind of Treasury. I wanted to pull DAI out of the surplus and set it aside as a secondary surplus and a contingency for the primary surplus. Next time we had to eat six million, we could pull it out of the secondary surplus.  Also, to have that secondary surplus or Treasury, be the thing that is there that is the expense pad. It is the money you have when you make contracts with your contractors that they know that they will have income into the future. I still stand behind that. I was thinking today about how our CUs actually could be our secondary buffers. If we do them right, they should build up cash. They can guarantee salaries for at least key people, and it is up to them to manage that. I am willing to let them do that. There might be a point where we have to go rate zero, and then we will have nothing coming in, and we better make sure that we got a way to pay these people. I want to segregate bonuses from salaries. The way the setup is right now, they are coupled. We have a real expense that is huge. If we add salaries to Maker, I think we are very close to tipping the scale here when you look at those numbers. What is prioritized? The key people? It is ultimately the CUs that I want to have managing their teams and money. Inherently, it is operations first. You got to have people around who are watching the system. You do not have to grow when you do not have revenue. If we are SF zero, growing does not mean anything unless you get SF on that. We have to get fees. Otherwise, your growth is just time and productivity that is eaten for nothing. You could see it as future growth. When it comes to what to prioritize, I always come down at operations. If you have to pull in, you pull in of the growth side, and you make sure that you are flat covered one way or another, by hook or by crook, even if we have to sell MKR. We have to make sure operations are covered, and things are secure. The other side is you do want to grow, but you need to bank that surplus. When I see Maker run, it runs hot, and then it runs cold. Somehow, you have to figure out a straight-line trajectory, like with any operational system. You will have abundance and deficits, and you need to figure out how to manage those. Right now, the key issue is that everything from the Foundation is being lumped on a decentralized DAO side. We see the expenses come up. I have been requesting a report from the Foundation forever on what was the real expense run. I never got it. I do not have a handle on what it was, so I do not even have a comparison. In a year, we will have a real comparison on whether our expenses are ramping up or whether we are coming high and our CUs have extra cash, and we can start coming down and get a real run on our expense rate. It is going to be a difficult ride to figure out how that works. I look at the numbers, and the only thing that seems out of control is the compensation in Maker. The salary levels are high, but it is reasonable given that they are all contractors and have to pay other stuff that if you are an employee, you do not pay. It comes in as perks with your whole package. I also want to isolate future expenses against the past because people are asking for stuff in the past. We can blanket this in two different ways versus mixing it up. I want to isolate what we need in Dai as a salary to be competitive, and then I want Maker compensation as a bonus. I have been working on this; I want it to be concerning the amount of DAI the protocol earns as a net profit. You can buy MKR with it, and then you can take half or some fraction of that MKR and inflate it to burn or slate it for compensation. Everybody is going to ask for compensation, and they will have all these approved packages. Let us say that totals 9K/year, and you only made 5K of MKR. You portion out 5K of MKR into the 9K that is requested. That way, it is sustainable. When you bank more MKR, say the ask was 9K for compensation, but you made 20K, you bank that MKR. So then you can dole it out in the future. I mean, we have 84K MKR as our bank. Those are the kind of issues and the ways to approach them. I want to trust the CUs. I am really big at giving people authority, responsibility and seeing if they can manage the deal. Looking at the whole CUs as our secondary bank of Dai because they will build reserves to manage their people into the future. 
- Payton: I would be remiss to say the delegates are trying to slam their heads together, solve some of these problems, and think them through anyway. For the recording and other folks, if you want to sound off your thoughts about the delegate time commitment. Not specifically, compensation that comes afterward. But many delegates are obsessed with Maker and comment on every thread, and others are not as aggressive. As you said, you took a break. So maybe you can sound off on your opinions about time commitments for delegates?
    - It is an important point. Without compensation above my current employer, my ability to work will be limited to what is strictly necessary to steward over the Maker system. I am just going to manage it against it. I am currently making six digits. I am an older professional; I'm not independently wealthy. If I was independently wealthy at being here, I would manage my time, according to whatever my time goes into. I have to think about it in terms of my salary. I like the idea that a delegate is a part-time job that the real demand should not be more than a couple of days a week. I want to write a proposal for an Institutional Vault thing. Some delegates are bounding on the work of CUs, and they are doing it with extra time. I do not know how to handle that, and much less compensate for it. My job is, like I said, to pace myself. I have a lot of ideas. I want to work on stuff. I spent a lot of time on stuff that I wanted to finish, but I realize this will be a full-time job, and I'm not going to get a full-time anything out of it. It leaves me in a tough place: I want to do more, but then I give up. I do not want to burn out, and I want to be compensated appropriately if I do that kind of stuff. I do not know how to handle it. I do not want to be a delegate that goes to CUs and says, " I am not accepting your plan because I think there is a better one." They will ask me to reveal my better plan. That would mean I would have to put in another 40 hours to do their job. That is a really hard place and a really hard thing to deal with. I do not know how to deal with it, other than what I have just said. I think I will manage it as a two-day thing and really pick the places where I think there is important stuff and then figure it out. 
    - I am just going to log my time, you know, so that, at some point, maybe I can get compensated for my log. I did it with the grant that I did for the black Thursday report. Main Ridge was kind of like, dude. We got what from, you know, what you did for us was cheap, you know, when he's right and then basically for leading the committee, you know, and compensations like me, I'd hundred twenty hours and fifty an hours.
    - It's like, it would call those were way more than that. But, you know, I guess that I've done a lot of free time in many places to try and help things be better. And that just never really materialized because Maker can't come. Get, couldn't get me—a hundred plus an hour. So I'm just going to manage it from that perspective, which is how much time do I have to give? Can I do what's the most critical and so from there, you know, but inherently, I think the two-day week thing is a rough idea of a good number.
- Payton: I'm curious to get your thoughts on delegation, so I keep thinking about that story I was heard in grade school. I don't know if it's true that George Washington said something about had some warning against political parties and all of that, and I keep thinking about that with the launch of delegation. Do you have any concerns about the implementation of delegation, do you see any risks being introduced there that you're worried about or what are your thoughts?
    - Well, I have a friend who's a went to a professional politician, but he has been in politics, and we're trying to what we're learning. Are that parties? It's the kind of suck. You can see the reasons for it, right, for how voting works, right? And, and that's kind of what leads to party formation, right? Is, how do you get governance things to pass? And so, you know, ideally our I had an idea a long time ago, creating a different system, where basically, there were parties were not allowed inherently that you Had to stand on your platform as a person, right? And then all you had to do was get enough support to be considered a delegate or a for a political position. Right? And if you got that sufficient support, you were in, and so inherently, it didn't matter. What mattered more was what your platform was versus whether you were going to gang up with a whole bunch of people on having a political.
    - When it comes to governance, you want to get things done; that's the question that I've been wondering if they see use or facilitators to get stuff through governance; I think delegates do like the ones to kinda help accelerate some things. Like, there are certain things at certain count delegates might want. I mean, in one Hive, there's a swarm idea that anybody can do anything and that's powerful in some ways, but it also, Its issues and Maker, you know, delegates, I think are there to tap on the brakes and to be the responsible system quality assurance, right? We are not usually the ones that handle it necessary to make the case to sell something. And several delegates are trying to also in the CUs. You Are right. And I wonder about that whether it has its conflicts of interest, but right now, I don't see issues with it. But I think these are interesting ideas to think about in terms of parties. I just that will sadden me. I'll be independent, I think. And that's the way I've always been.
    - I want to stand on my views, and I think it's something that's sorely lacking in the world as people who are actually can stand on a view, whether it's good or bad, and make their case. And that's my biggest problem, is that you know, you can throw I might have a view and a lot of information. I can change that view, and I think that's what sorely lacking in politics. And in general, those people who have a backbone can look at data stand up, with real tangible, logical arguments, but also be willing to change in the face of new data and better arguments straight up.

### Conclusion 

#### Payton Rose

[33:17](https://youtu.be/Cm0Qy8PTEf0?t=1997)

- Payton: Awesome feel this has been a super enlightening, half-hour and I appreciate you taking the time to let us know who you are and what you stand for there maker man 
    - MakerMan: I hope you guys will delegate some Maker to me, though; the few that are here spread the word, and then this is good; I have my video now, thank you, Payton and Maker, so that people can look at and listen to me and my platform and decide whether they want to delegate Maker to me, I hope you do and to that, like if I can see what's coming up. I keep thinking about this delegate thing. It's like what I want to do is kind of post my thoughts on votes before they come up. So that if anybody that's delegating to me, you know, when my delegate thread they can make an argument give data, right? If they think you need to be changed, I'm sure we'll do that in Threads, but I think that's important, and it's one that I consider important in my platform.
    - I hope people think about that; I will try to do that so that we can get engage in discussion before I vote, and then even after, because things can always be changed, anyway, that's it. Thank you, everybody. 
- Yeah, and as a final note, where can people who might want to engage on some of these topics where best can they find you?
    - Okay. Well, it's on my platform. So there are different ways to get a hold of me in Rocket Chat,  @MakerMan, and the forum, and then I had because I couldn't get MakerMan an email. I have DaiMakerMan@gmail.com, double pun. And you know, so it's in the forum's, in racket chat, or by email.
- Excellent. Wow. Thanks again, and I appreciate everyone attending. I'll probably close us out here; by the time you're watching this on YouTube, MakerMan, delegate platform should be live on our voting portal. So if you wish to delegate, some of your MKR  to do that should be easygoing for you. Thanks again for attending, and I hope everyone has a great rest of the day. Thank you.

## Common Abbreviated Terms

`DAO`: Decentralized Autonomous Organization 
`RWA`: Real-World Asset
`DeFi`: Decentralized Finance

## Credits

- Alejandro Fernandes produced this summary.
- Artem Gordon produced this summary.
- David Utrobin produced this summary.
- Gala Guillén produced this summary.
- Everyone who spoke and presented on the call, listed in the headers.