A decision on an outflow of ≈40 ETH from the Lido DAO treasury to aid in the Sushi recovery

Proposal

Should the 39.798809775 ETH that flowed into the Lido DAO Treasury, as a result of an exploited vulnerability in SushiSwap RouteProcessor2, be sent to sifuvision.eth (the affected party) as an expression of goodwill?

Voting options:

  • No action
  • Send 39.798809775 ETH from the Lido Treasury to sifuvision.eth

Snapshot date:

Thursday, May 4th.

Motivation

Untangling the original post and discussion, it’s clear there are two, largely orthogonal, decisions at hand:

  1. A decision on an outflow of ≈40 ETH from the Lido DAO treasury to help Sushi (this is the amount which came into the treasury as a result of the exploit).

  2. A wider policy decision on whether or not the DAO should ever act as an arbiter between stakers, node operators, and third parties – and if so, how, and under what conditions.

The discussion under the original post has revolved almost entirely around the second decision – yet this has not been made clear within the discussion itself.

To minimize the risk of decisions, on both fronts, being made for the wrong reasons, it makes sense to move these two decisions into separate threads where they can be discussed individually.

Key points

Concerns of the type that Hasu and Misha have raised in the orginal thread are not especially relevant to this initial decision at hand.

In particular:

  • Lido DAO does not a priori need a broader framework to make decisions on what to do about unexpected treasury inflows.

  • Voting in favour of this decision does not turn the Lido DAO into an aribiter or open up a slippery slope that could detract from its neutrality.

10 Likes

Thanks for posting. I propose that funds be returned to Sushi for distribution to Sifuvision.eth so that the continuity within the recovery process is maintained.

2 Likes

The Snapshot started and is active till 11 May 2023 6:00 pm UTC.

1 Like

I think it’s bad idea to so far choose the path of “do nothing, we are neutral middleware”. When the reality is, a lot of this stuff is going to eventually be under regulatory scrutiny.

To where I think, actively self regulating and finding possible technical solutions to not taking part in undesirable kinds of MEV extraction may be more preferable over eventual legal intervention. [1]

So to me, self regulating and returning exploited funds sitting in Lido’s treasury seems like an easy yes vote

[1] MEV on Ethereum: A Policy Analysis by Mikolaj Barczentewicz :: SSRN

2 Likes

Would be nice to get some comments from the broader community on why the proposal has been pretty much glossed over compared to the other proposals that went up at the same time.

Do think it’s worth highlighting again as well that all the ETH that went to other parties during the exploit has been returned, and it was within a few days of the exploit happening.

Goodwill might be a bad way of putting it too for this proposal, if sifu chooses to go further with attempting to recoup his funds then we will be obliged to help report where the ill-gotten ETH is currently residing.

The Snapshot ended not reaching a quorum.
Voices split is as follows:
Send 39.8 ETH to sifuvision.eth - 23.2M LDO or 67.14%
No action - 11.2M LDO or 32.86%.

Snapshot vote started

We’re starting the A decision on an outflow of 39.8 ETH from the Lido DAO treasury to aid in the Sushi recovery (restart) Snapshot, active till Thu, 25 May 2023 18:00:00 GMT . Please don’t forget to cast your vote!

1 Like

Snapshot vote ended

Unfortunately, the A decision on an outflow of 39.8 ETH from the Lido DAO treasury to aid in the Sushi recovery (restart) Snapshot hadn’t reached a quorum. :no_entry:
The results are:
Send 39.8 ETH to sifuvision.eth: 100.5k LDO
No action: 12.9M LDO

@Hasu well you got your way, at the expense of many users, protocols reputation, and even your own. It’s a shame, and not a good sign for Lido which is going to attract a lot of unwanted attention because of this move.

You’ve pushed back on a vote which was tailored by the Lido team around your arguments, specifically to nullify them, without a single argument as to why you voted against, and in turn made the Lido treasury a launderer.

This will likely be my last comment on the subject of Sushi since there’s only so many ways to beat a dead horse. First off, your proposal didn’t fail because of me, it failed to reach quorum by 80% in spite of my vote. Even though my vote made no difference I’m still happy to explain why I believe it is the correct choice.

You saying that LidoDAO’s ownership of the funds in question is illicit is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, which you make at your own risk. Sushi says if a bankrobber takes the subway to escape, the subway has stolen funds because the bank robber paid the price to ride the subway - we all know that this is never the case. The subway rendered a service, and was paid a service fee for it. If everyone had to know the last five transactions of each dollar bill and whether they were “legitimate”, there would be no commerce at all.

You even agree with that in principle. You admitted yourself, in a public LobsterDAO chat, that if an equivalent situation occured in Sushi (receiving a service fee for handling a big exploit trade), you would not vote to return it. This is understandable and correct, but please be consistent.

Finally, the entire situation is orthogonal to staking ETH from Lido’s treasury into the protocol. Service fees, like the above, are automatically sweeped and restaked, and were never part of the treasury to start.

If I were you, I would focus on my own misbehavior and liability in this situation for launching an unaudited smart contract which – to round out the analogy from above – left the trezor door wide open.

5 Likes

The initial proposal failed marginally to meet quorum. You didn’t vote on this one, if you had it would’ve passed, regardless of voting no. You’re inconsistent.

The 40 ETH, to start with, was clearly attributable and direct proceeds of criminal actions. There’s no arguing about this, it’s all on-chain… Lido was enriched by criminal actions to the tune of 800 ETH. Even the MEV actor, which gave this enourmous bribe, returned the full amount of ETH knowing that this is a major liability.

Like much of the MEV landscape, it’s riddled in criminality, and people like you support this as “A dog doing what it’s supposed to do”. In the real world if your dog bites someone you’re responsibible for it. If you build and run systems which are designed to steal huge amounts of money from people, often through quite blatant market manupulation, it will come back to you sooner or later. Law is often applied retroactively, operating under what is currently a grey area of the law is no excuse. You have to chose if you want to be a good or bad human being. You’re deciding to be a bad one with no moral compass, and no compassion for users which lost funds, despite there being clear avenues to go down and resolve it.

I said I would not vote “No”. Not that I wouldn’t vote at all. I would likely vote “Yes”, because it’s our duty to make sure this space isn’t seen as something which encourages criminal enterprise. However, you seem to thrive in making sure this is the case, clearly, as you’re doing here.

This is such a bad anology… You’re comparing nickel and dime with a $3m+ theft where Lido is a key component, regardless of it being unintentional or not.