Proposal to approve Lido DAO Treasury Management Principles and authorize the formation of a Treasury Management Committee

Proposals
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sabrychiaa is looking to join Lido Treasury Management Committee with address 0x83a8b5c6990cbc78ffc45cbbfe5748b895973623

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“We”'re not giving control to anyone. If you look at the details of the proposal, this Committee will never actually withdraw or hold any funds. All they will be empowered to do is propose principles, structure them into on-chain motions and execute them optimistically.

They can be overruled at any point by LDO token holders, who furthermore have to approve the existence of the Committee in the first place. It is purposefully difficult for the Committee to do anything at all.

You don’t have you trust them, you just have to check their work and if you are not satisfied, vote accordingly. The threshold in the proposal will be 4/7 nevertheless.

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The naive idea is that this committee could itself be automated in the future, considering the narrow scope.

This was just a suggestion of the types of principles the committee could enact.

The idea is that the discussions will still take place in the open with community participation, it is just one aspect of formalized governance that there would be a Committee with the ability to propose on-chain motions and the ability to enact them.

This proposal is considering a Committee with very narrow scope, with a very narrow mandate and with the aim to be automated in the future. Our view is that explicit principles are always better than implicit principles, or principles we invent along the way. It’s easy to ossify a rule that is clear even if some people disagree with it. It’s much harder to ossify a disagreement into a coherent principle.

But of course you are free to disagree, we appreciate your perspective on the topic.

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No, I take your point–more actions on chain = more attack surfaces. I think the mitigant is that the barrier to bringing any of these live is sufficiently high and the stakes similarly sufficiently high that only very simple motions and only extensively tested motions could make it to production. The idea of this committee is that it should do very very little but what it does do should be abundantly clear and if it makes it through to production, it is a candidate to being a forever rule encoded on-chain.

The other mitigant is that this is outside of the scope of the protocol itself, considering the scope is limited to Aragon treasury funds. It’s true stETH surplus accumulates in this treasury but the extent of the responsibility of the committee is limited to just that ringfence and no further.

Fundamentally I take your point, generally yes more attack surfaces equals more risk. This proposal asks token holders whether they weigh the benefits of more explicit principles, pathway to ossification, etc. over the risk of attack vectors emerging. The upside is not necessarily a monetary one but a choice to do more things in an ossified way rather than off-chain. Personally, I think when it comes to a path to taking human decision making out of the equation, the tradeoffs are generally worthwhile. But of course not at any cost (risk must be mitigated as much as possible etc.).

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My personal opinion is that subcommittees are formed to mitigate the governance process falling into disarray. If everything is subject to mass voting, similar to a liquid democracy, nothing would come from it.

Often times not everyone has all the context to make an informed decision. The education required to make sure everyone is informed takes time. Time is extremely limited for everyone. Tradeoffs must be made.

So, having the DAO empower a subset of trusted people to have a narrow scope of power allows the DAO to scale operations ever so slightly in exchange for a portion of control being sacrificed. The DAO would never move things forward if everything had to be an on-chain vote and community decision.

Karpatkey and Steakhouse are trusted providers in the ecosystem who I have personally worked with over many months and dozens of conversations. The individuals mentioned are all actively contributing to the DAO and helping build the protocol.

If not this path, are you suggesting every single update to the treasury strategy goes to a vote?
If there is a black swan event, should we deliberate over a forum discussion and hope things don’t go to zero during that time?

The treasury has idle tokens that could be used to extend the operating runway without another sale that would most likely be contentious no matter what vesting was decided on.

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I think you’re missing a big part of what’s been explained here. These people will not have full control over the treasury. The DAO always retains full control of treasury, the only thing that will happen is that certain specific types of pre approved by the DAO actions with certain pre-approved parameters will be “proposable” by this committee, and then executed “optimistically” (like Easy Track) if there are no sufficient objections/vetos.

You’re arguing in circles. You’re asking for ‘someone in charge’, which is exactly what the committee is for (within constraints), but with safeguards in place, and then you’re racing across the spectrum and arguing ‘well they can do whatever they want’. You want to make ONE PERSON solely responsible and in charge for doing all this? That’s bananas.

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marcbcs is looking to join Lido Treasury Management Committee with address 0x98308b6dA79B47D15e9438CB66831563649Dbd94

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@karpatkey is looking to join Lido Treasury Management Committee with address 0x7d4FDba7d1b22834eA75B5E45e4110Bf56E690f1

As we intend to participate with a Safe multisignature wallet, we have included the message in the following transaction:

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our confirmation in the calldata for the transaction linked. Address 0x9106CBf2C882340b23cC40985c05648173E359e7

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@Mol_Eliza is looking to join Lido Treasury Management Committee with address 0x620bD63538Bf10a87214b6187f5bc85926C2971f

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Snapshot vote started

We’re starting the Proposal to approve Lido DAO Treasury Management Principles and authorize the formation of a Treasury Management Committee Snapshot, active till Thu, 27 Apr 2023 17:00:00 GMT . Please don’t forget to cast your vote!

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Sorry for pointing this out, but you pretty much can and are expected once the thing goes to snapshot dyor. Most (myself included) persons on the list can be cross-checked by this forum and public references.

If you squint hard enough, you’ll see exactly why “let’s just vote on everything” isn’t ideal path forward. Full DAO can’t vote on every movement, and given the guiding lines & safety checks are in place, committee would be a more nimble vehicle for operational decisions.

“Could you noobs trade crypto for profit” is curious question, but tangential to committee’s main task — do ops necessary to achieve goals outlined in the proposal, in case the DAO votes those are the principles and goals worth pursuing. You’ll notice there’s no “profit” or “100x” in goals, and for good reason.

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Steakhouse provides financial services to Maker, ENS, and Lido. They have been active in Maker governance for quite some time. DYOR.

Karpatkey is a spin-out from Gnosis. I assume you know Gnosis and their suit of products. Gnosis is also one of the larger stETH holders and a close partner. Karpatkey was their internal treasury management team that did a good enough job to set out independently. DYOR.

The others are contributors to the protocol or have been actively conversing with contributors over a long period.

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Snapshot vote ended

The Proposal to approve Lido DAO Treasury Management Principles and authorize the formation of a Treasury Management Committee Snapshot has reached a quorum and completed successfully!
The results are:
For: 55.2M LDO
Against: 37 LDO

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Lido DAO Treasury committee 4/7 Safe multisig is set up for operation with following owners:

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Non-voting committee observers, not eligible for TRP, but motivated to contribute to discussions:

I’m interested in participating as a non-voting committee observer. My background is in cybersecurity and risk management, so I would love to contribute to the conversation. Let me know if that is still possible. Thank you!

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If possible, send me the contact to tg@kadmil. Would note that all the actions proposed by the TMC are to be shared on forum first, providing the natural “discussion platform”

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Just minor explanatory comment to this proposal:

  • @karpatkey and @marcbcs are not remunerated in terms of Lido-V2;
  • The Lido DAO will supply them with sufficient evidence to participate in a TRP with a ceiling of 25ETH per year equivalent in LDO (to be done by TRP committee).
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I think the principles are great but incomplete. In order for the DAO to create value it needs to produce economic value on deployed capital. In other words the incremental cash flows from investments needs to generate a return above the cost of capital, any return below the cost of capital is value destroying, which creates a doom cycle of increasing the cost of capital for the DAO and therefore operating costs which ultimately puts sustainability of the DAO in question.

The below examples are illustrative.

Let’s say the cost of capital for Lido is 8%. The exact cost of capital can be solved for or polled from LDO holders but that’s beyond the purpose of this example.

Project A is requesting $1m. It estimates to generate an additional $100,000 per year in incremental fees to the DAO in perpetuity and has a 50% probability of success. The net present value of the project is $625,000 = ($100,000/0.08) X 0.50. The value added is -$1,000,000 + $625,000 = -$375,000. Since it’s negative value added this project should be rejected.

Project B is requesting $1m. It estimates to generate an additional $10,000,000 per year in incremental fees to the DAO in perpetuity and has a 10% probability of success. The net present value of the project is $1,250,000 = ($10,000,000/0.08) X 0.10. The value added is -$1,000,000 + 1,250,000 = $250,000. Since it’s positive value added it should be accepted.

One advantage is it gets teams and the DAO thinking about what the drivers of value are. It also will help create a framework for investing in projects VS returning capital to LDO holders.

An issue with buy and burn models (MakerDAO) is it doesn’t discriminate between value. If the DAO is buying and burning LDO above intrinsic value then value is being transferred from long term holders to sellers. However, if buying and burning below intrinsic value than value is transferred from sellers to long term holders of LDO.

A conservative approach to intrinsic value is to use residual value + current assets. Residual value is one year fees of the DAO in perpetuity (or perpetuity with growth if being more aggressive).

As an example: Let’s says fees accumulating to DAO are $100m/year. Residual value is $1.25B = $100m/0.08. Treasury assets are $70M, putting intrinsic value at $1.95B. If buying and burning the return to LDO holders would be (cost of capital)/(1-percentage undervalued). Using the current market cap of $1.6B that implies a 22% undervaluation so an expected return on buy and burn would be 10% = 0.08/(1-0.22). Therefore a buy and burn of $1m can be expected to return an incremental $100,000 to LDO holders. This can now be used to compare against proposed projects. Since project B contributes $250,000 it would be a better use of the $1M in capital, however buying and burning would be a better use than investing in project A.

Finally, once projects are funded the intrinsic value is updated to intrinsic value = funded projects + residual value + current assets. In our example above funding project B would contribute $250,000 to intrinsic value. When projects fail they should be removed from intrinsic value.

Adopting this framework for effective capital allocation would not only help drive economic value to the DAO, but would become a competitive advantage for Lido given that to my knowledge no DAO has implemented a proper capital allocation program.

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