---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Meet Your Delegate: Episode #5'
tags: [Meet Your Delegate]

---

---
tags: Meet Your Delegate
---

# Meet Your Delegate: Episode #5

## Agenda

- [00:10](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=10): Introduction
- [01:40](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=100): Tim Schuppi Delegate Platform
- [11:02](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=662): Question 1
- [13:37](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=817): Question 2
- [15:32](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=932): Question 3
- [16:52](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1015): Question 4
- [24:29](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1469): Question 5
- [28:14](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1694): Question 6

## Video

<https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ>

### General Introduction 

#### Payton Rose

[00:10](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=10)

- Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is up to the fifth Meet Your Delegate meeting. My name is Peyton; I go by Prose11. I'm one of the governance facilitators.
- I've got the honor of hosting Tim Schupbner, who goes by Schuppi or UltraSchuppi, depending on the Maker platform.
- The structure is pretty simple after the recording. We give our delegates five to 10 minutes to let them know about themselves and their platform and share any slides they want to present.
- The rest of the session will be Q&A. We do cap these at 30 minutes to try to be respectful to all delegates. Whether you joined earlier or later on in the process, keep it as standardized as possible.
- If you have questions, feel free to chime in, or you can drop them in the sidebar; I'll be watching the chat. We'll be incorporating things as appropriate; this is being recorded, so be aware of that. We'll be going on YouTube later. Please try not to speak over each other and mute yourself when you're not talking just to cut down on background noise. Without further ado, I'll pass it over to you. 

### Tim Schuppi

[01:40](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=100)

- Welcome to the My Media delegates session. My name is Tim Schupner. I'm 40 years old, married, and have three boys at home, age 10, seven, and five. I'm a German citizen, and I'm living pretty close to the border to France in the southwest. My professional background is in computer science.
- I have been working in software engineering for more than 20 years now. I'm currently serving as a senior engineering manager. Right now did a bit of my background and my relationship with Maker. So I got in Ethereum in 2017. By the time, we hadn't too many projects running on Etherium. I quickly found Maker and found the product very interesting. I opened up a ward or CP at the beginning of 2018, minded some Dai leveraged on ETH.
- I also bought my first MKR token and participated and liquidated through this friendly UI we had by the time. Then I started lurking in RocketChat and the forum for about a year. I think I signed late because if you're just reading, you don't need anything there.
- Around that time, I felt that having MKR tokens as an investment and something that I should use.
- I put my MKR into the voting contract. I participated in every poll, and the executive burnt roughly five ETH already, which is pretty tiring to know. I realized that Aaron was making signal requests in the forum to deal with the parameters of the Maker protocol. He stopped doing his work. It's not working because it's not paid. It's the classic from user to contributor story.
- I picked up this work, and I was bombarding the forum for a couple of months with signal requests. I was dealing with debt ceilings, stability fees, not stability speeds because we already had the rates by the time but basically, many parameters needed to be set.
- That was also why I joined the rates group at the beginning of 2021, which became the Maker Open Market Committee. I'm still a member of, and I enjoy working there. I also had some time in the autonomous MakerDAO working group at the beginning of this year, which consisted of people not on the foundation's payroll or any existing CoreUnits, but interested in growing the DAO.
- By the time I collaborated with Seb, I was on the idea of creating the EuroDai. A Dai currency pegged to the euro and tried to push Core Units to deal with it. So basically bootstrapping, I think, almost a month ago. Being a delegate has always been something I wanted to do. Two years ago, we had a guy called The Drunk Whale in RocketChat. I poked him regarding support to the executive, mentioning we've been waiting for two weeks already. In the end, he sold all his MKR tokens. That's not the first victim I would have for delegation.
- When I decided it would be a part of it, I ditched it for the Maker labs Core Unit. But now that it is over, I can do what I wanted to do in the first place. I think delegation is a great thing, and we are so much better now in terms of being able to do executives and bundle under voting power in the end because voter apathy is still striking me. From my point of view, voting is not optional. If you buy MKR, you need to participate there, or you delegate.
- As Planet X is out, we don't have any delegates outside of the S. My background is different compared to other delegates: I don't have a real background in finance despite working in the Maker Market Committee.
- I think I can bring some non-US aspects into the voting or the delegation crew. Looking at stuff from a technical perspective may help as well. How am I generating my opinions? I spend my time on the forum, most of the time passively, ingesting what I see there, and I observe intelligent people there.
- We lack expertise in certain areas; the decor MIP that we did not pass in the last cycle is a good example of where we need experts. But certainly, I think delegates do not have to be an expert, and you certainly cannot cover all the relevant aspects, but you need experts that you can consult.
- I think delegation should not contain lobbying or some kind of outside representation. In some cases, you probably cannot avoid that, but I would rather have a lobbying Core Unit for dealing with some stuff that we probably need to do.
- I propose myself as a recognized delegate because I have been doing it for more than two years. Probably not all of you have seen my posts on the forum. Instead of having a nice write-down of the core values and stuff like this, it's putting my hot bullet for voting. You can see that I have participated constantly in all the polls in executors for the last two years.
- What's changing for me is that I need to be more transparent about why I vote for or against a proposal. But the added effort is writing that down and probably being more open to communicating with people who may have questions or concerns. I'm not happy with the way I think, which is not that much work because I'm already spending time with the protocol.
- That also means that I'm going to vote anyway, so this is not a warning. I will not change my voting behavior just because somebody is delegating a lot of MKR to me. I'm not doing that for some kind of money that might eventually pop up for recognized delegates. I also don't fear that this will be a full-time job because I already have a full-time job. If it turns out that it evolves in this direction, that's fine. So far, I'm happy if this does not work out and if nobody's delegating to me. I won't feel like I failed.
    - Prose11: Right on time, thank you. Appreciate the platform presentation. As I mentioned earlier, this will move us to the Q&A section. Anyone who's attending is welcome to ask questions. I've got a list of general questions we prepared to ask the delegates; there shouldn't be any silence, so I want to hear from the people attending here if possible as I haven't seen anything pop up in the sidebar. So if I don't see anyone on mute in a moment, I will fire off the first question. Remember, yours is probably a better question than mine. 
- Schuppi: [10:56](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=660)
It would be nice to see your list first. There should be some kind of surprise in yous, right?

#### Questions

[11:02](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=662)

#### Q1: No surprises. Sorry about that. We had it a little more organized on the RocketChat. I realized we don't have the delegates extension anymore at Discord. One of the questions is about delegate compensation. What are your thoughts about how delegates should be compensated? Does that affect how you'll be acting as a delegate going forward?

- Schuppi: The main point about delegates' compensation is that we should avoid this looking like the kleptocracy. Before this goes unchained, we should have discussions, and probably even people from the outside saying how this is dealt with in comparable situations. It would look strange to me to push something unchained as a poll, where delegates could already vote on their salary. I understand that from a different angle we need some compensation for people who spend a lot of time there. I think it's hard to make a good plan, but it needs to be well prepared before it goes unchained. It feels weird to decide on my salary. I think we need something to check people, experts, for example, and we need them, but maybe we just need experts in Core Units that act as working groups proposing or evaluating. The same goes for collateral onboarding. I just looked at the two collaterals that are on the pause right now. I just have feelings, and this is not good and not working. You cannot avoid that you have a gut feeling on a certain topic. But it's better if you have some facts on it, and I cannot provide them. 
    - Prose11: Thanks for that insight. Still no questions.

[13:37](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=817)

#### Q2: I like the reflection in your delegate platform of kind of growth over profits. I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that and share your vision for MakerDAO. What is MakerDAO supposed to do? How does that vision of growth over profits fit into that?

- Schuppi: It's not really that I have a vision for Maker as a product. I think that we are just in a growth stage. We are far away from harvesting; I would say we are still at the very beginning of the hopefully of your hockey stick. Before the meeting, I was working on a new Signal request for increasing this surplus buffer again. I realized that it doesn't matter if we burn MKR or just accumulate a surplus and the surplus buffer from a value perspective and our wholeness. It is important from a PR perspective. Instead, I would pile up cash that we could spend on new Core Units or some crazy ideas, even on experiments, rather than going into harvesting mode early. That's the reasoning behind that.

[15:32](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=932)

#### Q3: Do you anticipate not wanting to be delegated more than an X amount of MKR? For example? Some people don't want more than 10 or 20 MKR. It's a big responsibility. Do you have a certain number that you ideally would like delegated to us recognize the delegate?

- Schuppi: It's getting scary, and at some point, you need to think about how you protect against bribes or against people kidnapping your kids to get something done? I'm not expecting this to happen anywhere, to be honest. It would probably be a good idea to think about this before going into panic mode once this happens. I'm currently not expecting this. I didn't; it's probably not even doable. I mean, the delegation contract we have right now does not have a capping mechanism. I guess.
    - David Utrobin: My understanding is there's no cap mechanism. Not yet.
- Schuppi: I'm going to think about this, but I don't have a clear answer to that.

[16:52](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1015)

#### Q4: Have you looked at what it costs voting on polls in the past and executive in terms of fees? This isn't getting cheaper. Why should everybody who's not doing anything get a free ride while the people who work a lot get nothing? Yeah, I've worked in a lot of. I've also donated my time, and co-ops, and intentional communities. A theme in all of these communities is a lot of people, or I should say, a fair number of people doing 90% of the work, while the other 70% does nothing. I think that's unfair, so compensation based on action is reasonable. I want to encourage you to think about that, and if you want hard questions, I will have to leave; I'll probably have to listen to this later. Here's a couple, the PSM, Tin-in and out going to zero. I want to hear what your views are on that. What's going on with Seb, and how was that approached? We didn't even have a poll on this, and there was a MIP thrown up that we didn't even get a chance to discuss. Before a MIP was thrown out, I think that was very fast, very hard.

- Schuppi: I have been hearing stuff from different delegates of people delegating their Maker kind of levering in on, in the sense that we want to vote as delegates. The way we see fit for the protocol. If we don't have a material stake, maybe it's the case that these people who have the Maker have a correct view, and perhaps I should go along with them, but if I do that, why don't they just vote their Maker themselves? So I have a real heart issue. One of my biggest problems with delegates and political systems is a conflict of interest in voting. I was not just bribing somebody but controlling them with a vote because this isn't a democratic system. It's one Maker one vote system, and if you have 50,000 Maker, you get 50,000 votes, and that is not democracy. I think there's a lot of issues here to work out. That creates a lot of hazards. I'll listen to this later because I have a deficient phone battery left. I eagerly anticipate hearing your answers on some of these.
- Let's start with compensation. There needs to be compensation. My incentive for doing this is because I'm over-invested in MKR. It's unreasonable how much I have acquired compared to my net worth; it's probably not comparable to other people. Compared to what I think is reasonable, it's a way of being good. My main incentive is I want to participate here to make the protocol better. To have this as a good running investment. The gas fees that I have to pay for participating in Governance are covered by this whole square payout scheme I get right now. This is not a good way of thinking; I get power, of course, like money. For me, it feels like participating in an open-source project but with skin in the game. Right now, that's okay for me if I would need to quit my job for doing that. It's not so quickly, the PSM thing. Did I vote in favor of the PSM thing? I'm not 1% sure if that's the right decision, but I think it helps the growth of teams to underline that we have a heart pack, essentially, to the USDC. Or to USD. I think it's worth the effort of trying that if we find out it's not working and I don't know... I'm not trying to come up with a doomsday scenario. If we find out that it's not working, then we can sketch out a plan of how to get rid of that again, as well. So what's the next step? I mean, I think it's in the platform statement; I already said something about I'm trusting my and people that I trust and KPIs, and it's probably wrong. Probably many people already know that I already work for SAP quite frequently. In the end, the Maker's Mark committee, also Euro Dai. So I trust SAP. I hate this drama aspect, but I agree with Rune that we cannot avoid drama in this situation because we are in the worst of both scenarios being not a democracy, but also not we don't want to have stuff closed doors that transparent and open. Could this have been handled better? Of course. Right now, I would not vote in favor of the offboarding proposal because I don't think there's a major flaw in the system we have right now or WhatsApp has been working on. I think it's good training for us as a DAO to go through that. The only downside we have right now that is hurting precisely one person, which is sad. That's a bad situation. It would have happened a couple of months later. Anyway, I have seen this coming to be honest. Since summer, we have had some friction in the river finance area, I would say maybe even earlier, so this is not new. I mean, Sebastian was already saying something like, if you want to remove me, please just propose this sub proposal; I didn't know two months ago at the Governance and Risk meeting. It's not surprising but disappointing. I mean, it's not going to happen before January. I guess there will be some kind of discussion prior to that, and maybe some effects. It's good that we don't need to vote on that today. I would say—private entanglement. Again, I'm not an expert on that. I have no idea if this qualifies as a private entanglement on it. Not, I can just say I still have trust. John, it hasn't changed because of this offboarding proposal. If I need to vote today, I will not support the offboarding proposal. Did I cover all the questions from MakerMan? 
    - Prose11: Those are the three.
    - Schuppi: We are already in a fatal situation there. So the only downside from my point of view of going to zero on the tin is that we are missing out on fees. But if USDC is losing the peck, we will get a lot of USDC onto our balance sheets. That's going to happen anyway. It doesn't matter if we have a point or 10 bits or zero bits; that doesn't make a difference. From my point of view, I'm not expecting a lot of change there because right now, we see a lot of offboarding from the PSMFdaiand not onboarding. So I don't expect there's a lot of change there at this point.

[24:29](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1469)

#### Q5: It might be interesting to hear your thoughts about the challenges between bringing on Core Units and potentially off-boarding them. How do we, as a DAO, with this new structure? Now we've got delegates, another player of power in the system. I'm curious if you have thoughts in the system on how our process can be improved?

- Schuppi: I made my own experiences with a EuroDai fish Maker lapse thing, so I'm biased. I'm not willing to share a lot of details on that.
- I have to admit I'm still digesting that. We have great mechanisms, and I think it's great that we have some tools for incubating teams, which is essentially part of the function of SES.
- When you look at my MIPS 39 thing for Maker labs, there were a couple of things in the comment section that made me think, are we doing this right? Is this SCS the only way of doing incubation? Probably this right now.
- Is that correct? Is that the proper approach? Maybe it is for now, but is it in the long run? There was stuff like maybe make a left should be done within the growth coordinate? Shouldn't we have the goal of having multiple growth Core Units in the end? And is something like prototyping stuff part of that? It's not related to me as being a delegate.
- It was an interesting ride to learn about aspects of how we deal with this. So far, we've been pretty good at onboarding new Core Units. I wouldn't have expected so many by the time the foundation decided to shut down.
    - Prose11: At the beginning of the year, when we had this autonomous MakerDAO working group, Amy told us that the foundation wanted to shut down in a couple of months.
    - Schuppi: What's going to happen? All the teams from the foundation are going to transition over, which is essentially happening. So let's deal with it. That's the way it goes. And it's okay. There's talent and people that already know how the system is working. I mentioned not sure if we are good enough for onboarding external talent as well. I don't have data, to be honest. But this is stuff I'm thinking about for sure.
    - Prose11: Perfect reflection, thanks. Mark, do you want me to get to you? We are coming up at the end of time here. So let's have Mark ask his question, and then we might be wrapping up after that.

[28:14](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=1694)

#### Q6: I just wanted to circle back real quick on the process related to offboarding facilitators. In this situation, we should have some sort of process and structure. In the US, that will employ the generally like, as a business matures and the leadership gets more experience. Formal plans lead to someone being fired; you just don't fire someone out of the blue with no notice. It's just not a good way to run a business. It's not a good way to build the company culture. You want to give someone a chance if they're not doing something or you're not performing up to the standards to make amends and get to the standards. Businesses call them performance improvement plans. I don't see why as a DAO, we couldn't implement something similar and avoid drama. It's unproductive and distracting from the overall mission of the DAO. I want to get your thoughts on that.

- Schuppi: I agree. Again, humankind has no history of running DAO, so we are pioneers here. And, of course, stuff like this is supposed to happen. We should be more professional in that. I'm not sure how this will evolve.
- In the concrete case of Sebastiaan. Definitely, but in the long run, but I guess this is a great opportunity to learn from that. How could we do that better? I think we should have something in place. To be honest, we also don't have anything that finds out that Core Units is adding value to the same amount they get funding.
- This is also something where we lag. We know how much money we put into each Core Unit but do we know how is this spent? Or what some call units are transparent on that some are not.
- It's not a primary problem. We are in the lucky situation of needing to spend a lot of money anyway, or we should do that. Is there a certain efficient way in the long run? No, for sure, and we better prepare for that before it's a big mess. I think the same applies to having a plan for people who are probably not delivering the same way as expected, and we were backed out. We should be better at that, for sure.
    - Someone: Thanks. I think that makes sense, and I think you see some of that feedback. Some of the Core Unit budget proposals for people renewing their budgets, you saw that, like content productions, that, for example, where I think there's a mismatch of expectations between some delegates and holders.
    - That's one major issue I see is, you know, sometimes there's a gap and what the DAO or delegates expect relative to what the Core Units are doing. Sometimes it doesn't even show up in the Core Unit threads themselves until this budget comes up for a vote. Quickly, people can find themselves without funding without being a job. You could say that the onus is strictly on the Core Unit facilitator to maintain the delegates relationship but, I feel that's an area that needs improvement.
- Schuppi: I think it should be taken off the responsibility for Core Unit facilities. This needs to be standardized among all the Core Units anyway, from my point of view. It's not that you get a carte blanche for whatever you want to do with the money you get; there should be some kind of metric or standardized system on how you deal with it. However you call it, OKS, whatever, there's so many tools put in there. But they need needs to be something for sure.
    - Unknown Speaker: I'll have a post that's relative to that subject coming shortly.
- Schuppi: Looking forward to it, I enjoyed the session last week with you about strategy reviews as well.
    - Unknown Speaker: I appreciate that. It's 100%—the same subject. So keep an eye open. 
    - Prose11: It's always exciting to see working collaboration take place on the calls well. Appreciate you doing this for a stem. Take a look at Tim's delegate platform on the voting contract; I will be merging his GitHub pull requests that contain his platform and all that other fun stuff.
    You will probably be able to delegate him if you're watching this back to the lobby live and for the was here with us now.
    - Just wait a little bit. Thanks, everyone, for coming. And I do encourage us to continue the conversations in the forums. Take a look at Tim's delegate platform and engage there further.
- Schuppi: Please reach out wherever you want to forum discord, even this funky email address I have. So I'm really happy if we can have some follow-up conversations here. Even if you're not interested in delegating to me, it's always nice to talk to people with different opinions.

### Conclusion 

#### Payton Rose

[33:55](https://youtu.be/3483QFS4_qQ?t=2035)

- Prose11: Towards the top Hill repost. Well, thank you, everyone, again for joining us. I posted that link one more time. We'll make sure it gets in the video description as well. 

## Common Abbreviated Terms

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

## Credits

- Artem Gordon produced this summary.
- Andrea Camacho produced this summary.
- Everyone who spoke and presented on the call, listed in the headers.
