AIP-183: Cartan’s Proven Track Record & Continued Commitment to Advancing the ApeCoin Ecosystem

Final AIPs Rejected AIPs
12

Hey all,

Appreciate the thoughtful post and outline of everything Cartan has contributed. While the ask is significant, I agree with the principle of providing economic incentives (significant ones where merited) to those who have shown their value and ability to create greater value than what they are receiving within a commercial structure.

Cartan has personally helped me better understand DAO mechanics and has helped me with increasing my involvement and contribution to the DAO.

I agree with @BoredApeG and the sentiment about reducing reliance on Cartan and the need for Cartan to put forth a better roadmap for how they plan to implement decentralization with the goal of them eventually not being needed. I think the key here is for the community to understand that this AIP will not start a slippery slope where Cartan becomes responsible for more and more, receiving more and more funding, and for the DAO to become more and more reliant on them. (From my understanding this is Cartan’s mission anyway so defining a path to further decentralization should not be an issue defining to some degree)

Additionally, a breakdown and allocation of where increased costs are going would be beneficial for transparency. There should be nothing wrong with Caran profiting from their commitment, dedication, and value added to the DAO, but transparency is key.

A lack of economic incentives for core DAO contributors will lead to lower talent quality and lower quality of execution. Because of this, I see financial incentives as imperative for core contributors like Cartan, just important to clearly demonstrate the added value that the DAO is receiving for the additional capital outlay.

Thanks,

Alex

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13

My apologies on initial calculation and thank you for starting to provide more communication and info. As a long-term hodler and “new to dao structures” participant I’m learning how to participate. I made a mistake on my initial apecoin price calculation; maybe I was manifesting future higher token value due to increased adoption and usage.

Regardless, I would like to understand the scope of work differences between the original scope which CG received compensation of 150,000 per month vs. the proposed scope of ~ 330,000 per month.

Generally, I am in favor of investing in areas that will generate additional adoption of Apecoin. To date it has been confusing to understand how this work has been progressing. A couple of follow-up questions:

  • Todays transparency report shows the dao investment outflows 5:1 of operating expenses to grants. (493,271 to 96,045). If we just look at Admin Fees the outflow decreases to 217,907. This would be 2x our current grant investments. Does the council have a viewpoint on what the correct ratios and/or future allocations should be? Does the council have a view of where these will normalize in the future? This AIP is advocating for a 2x of current administration fees. This raises a question of having administrative fees that are significantly higher than our current grants (which have direct impact on building the ecosystem)

  • It was mentioned that we have 10 full-time staff working on this project. You mentioned anticipating future resource needs that may arise. Can you share how current individuals are allocated to this project? What will the future staffing, and more importantly the deliverables look like with increased resources?

  • Waiting for additional apecoin council members; Agree that a couple of days will not allow sufficient time to integrate the new members into this decision making process with the end of your contract. Does your current contract allow for an extension under the current scope of work or can that be accomplished through a revised AIP? To me, this community representation is important for a decision of this size. The total size of this 12 month commitment roughly 4 million, and I agree with the views expressed here that we should be working to decentralize more of the DAO operations. I understand this is a business for CG and it should be compensated for its work.

Thank you for the quick response and putting together these materials. I am still reading through the report that was shared this morning. If there are sections that may answer some of these questions, please point me in the right direction.

-Cheers

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15

Possibly multiple Spaces. Cartan’s budget runs out in about 3 weeks and we have elections and staking during that time.

Perhaps an extension at current rate for a month to give the community and the admins the leeway needed to discuss, understand, negotiate and move forward :thinking:?

Not a fan of rushing long-term decisions, but willing to spend the sub-10% insurance premium for the community to do the right thing.

SSP✌🏽

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16

like the thought of a short extension to allow sufficient time for this process. I hate slowing things down, however 3 weeks to make this level of investment with pending community council voting and staking seems like the right approach. Interested in others thoughts/ideas.

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17

First off, thanks for everything that you do! I wish this discussion started earlier. Only while reading the Quarterly Report did I realize that Cartan’s funds would expire at end of December.

I have some questions which I hope you can answer:

  • Will collaboration with the analysis team be a requirement or an optional resource?
  • What does this mean? Did the idea for each grant proposal originate from Cartan or the SC?
  • Did Cartan consider adding a Discord to the scope of communications? I know that we have ApeComms 2.0 coming up soon which will create a Discord, but was any consideration given?

My biggest concern is that the 2x increase in cost may fail snapshot vote. Would Cartan consider sending at least two proposals to snapshot? I listed three possible options below:

A) This proposal
B) A 12-month extension of the original scope at the original monthly cost
C) A 3-month extension so that the 3 new Special Council members can provide feedback before the community votes to a 12 month commitment.

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18

Why administrators are ignoring proposals?

For example this one was submited in July

Another proposal was submited in July as well, and administrators moved it to voting after I made their ignore public.

This is how my converstions with administrators look like

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19

According to Brian Tang’s AIP, there are 10FTEs in staff who have been working for the ApeCoin DAO. In my opinion, the ApeCoin DAO could have at least 10 Special Council members to serve the community with different task forces, provide more resources, make the administrative group bigger. My vision is to create a more efficient DAO with decentralized control among different management teams.

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20

Mind blowing - the date was set in stone a long time ago, yet we get this days before it’s due to expire - also would have been better as a downloadable report, with many more details as others have already outlined.

21

Very concerning - this is an issue, if for example you are ‘ignored’ or ‘slip through the cracks’ what other options are available to raise concern or get reply - we must do better.

22

Hi @btang,

I’d like to thank you for your services this far and generally the excellent work of the team behind you.

I do however have several questions specifically relating to the APECOIN TWITTER FEED:

  1. How do you choose which AIPs to retweet and which ones to not, what is the process for this selection?
  2. Do you agree we should be fair and impartial and use DAO media channels to champion unbias behaviours, by simply adding equal exposure to all the AIPs? (One rule for all.)
  3. Why are you so aggressively retweeting APECOMMS tweets?
  4. Do you think a code of conduct team or similar could be needed as we grow, especially for areas where large amounts of influence and power are concentrated?

I look forward to your replies @btang

Regards,

Furious

1 Like
23

I wanted to express my gratitude for your leadership, support for the ApeCoin DAO, and congratulations on your many accomplishments that you have done on behalf of the ApeCoin Foundation and DAO. Thank you so much.

We appreciate the information and advices you have shared in the AIP. I would fully embrace a shared and decentralized governance for ApeCoin DAO under your leadership and for ApeCoin DAO’s future success.

Since the ApeCoin DAO is pretty young, it needs time to grow, and develop from centralized governance model to more decentralized model. Do you have a roadmap or time frame how the ApeCoin DAO should look like 3 years from now or 5 years from today? Something that you can share with the ApeCoin community. Thank you

Special Council Candidate
Ken Forest

24

Thank you everyone for their comments, questions, and feedback. I will attempt to address a number of areas together in this response.

As mentioned above, the Initial Scope of DAO Operations included primarily one area: Managing the AIP governance process. This includes administering Discourse, administering Snapshot, preparing AIP Analysis Reports and AIP DAR Packages, and implementing changes to Snapshot & Discourse as per community feedback. The Expanded Scope of DAO Operations covers 5 areas. Cartan mobilised additional resources and put policies and procedures in place to operate those areas while protecting the Foundation and ApeCoin DAO as a whole.

Cartan administers the ApeCoin DAO governance process as per the published and community approved process. The community steers the ApeCoin DAO ecosystem, specifically,

  • Community members submit AIP Ideas
  • Community members engage and provide feedback to authors
  • Community members vote on Live AIPs

Cartan remains independent and unbiased in administering the process, specifically,

  • Cartan does not make recommendations or suggestions whether an AIP is good or bad
  • Cartan does not vote to approve an AIP for vote or return for reconstruction/clarification
  • Cartan does not participate in voting on Snapshot

It is up to the community to approve more proposals so we can make more grant payments, decide what projects or applications are funded to forge the ecosystem’s history, set forward-looking budgets to steer the community’s future roadmap, and over time achieve decentralisation based on this underpinning of projects, applications, and community.
If any community member believes to have identified a quicker, fairer, and/or quicker way to progress the DAO as well as decentralisation, please bring it forward to the community’s attention in the forum as it warrants the highest calibre discussion.

The Foundation’s official communication channels are Discourse, Twitter, Snapshot, and apecoin.com. While I understand some community members want decentralisation across the ecosystem and to add Discord, two separate proposals on this topic were also turned down by the community. Requests to add Discord to the Foundation’s operations will require even more additional resources from Cartan than anticipated in this AIP.

The ApeCoin Twitter is intended to publicly communicate advancements in the ecosystem and highlight projects that are building on or integrating ApeCoin into their projects. If a team or project wishes for a retweet, please reach out to us. Furthermore, we would be happy for the community to propose a fair and impartial policy on how this should occur and we would implement that policy similar to how we administer the published AIP governance process.

As evidenced by RedVulkan’s messages, and verified in in Dune dashboards by Cartan here, the amount of work continues to expand. Activity, users, AIP Ideas, Snapshot votes, and overall community engagement continues to grow. Each new grant agreement, proposal, election, regulatory discussion, or legal conversation creates more information to keep track of, more data to secure, and more payments to process. The volume of incoming requests continues to expand and as a result, the amount of resources needed to responsibly manage the work must expand as well.

If we are successful in being re-elected as the DAO’s administrators service provider, we will use most of the new resources to hire more team members. Many team members will come directly from the ApeCoin community and therefore, they will bring the same ideals we all already share directly into Cartan.

Our commitment to this DAO over the last 9 months has been unwavering. We want to see new tools and structures to further directly empower the community. We want nothing more than to continue working for the Foundation but we need to ensure that we can operate responsibly and provide the trusted administration service for each and every new twist and turn in this ever-evolving landscape.

We would not be interested in a short extension because we want to put our full force of energy and focus into doing what we’ve stated in this AIP. A longer extension at the Initial Scope (as proposed above) would put the Foundation at risk because administrative work would continue to grow and pose unforeseen risks to the Foundation.

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25

Since it appears the intent is to leave the AIP idea unchanged, can you please clarify if the expectation is that Cartan will cease operations for the Foundation on 1/1/23 if this AIP fails to pass?

Alternatively, if the DAO is willing to accept the “unforeseen risks to the Foundation”, is Cartan willing to accept the 3-month extension previously proposed?

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26

At the moment, the ApeCoin DAO has no other alternatives or options on the table that allows the ApeCoin DAO to continue its operations without passing.the AIP. Therefore, I would recommend that we start building the ApeCoin DAO leadership team during 2023, and create a join operations with the Gartan Group leadership team as a redundant backup leadership system in place similar to a IT network systems that won’t fail apart easily!

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27

Nice example on how to answer nothing with extremely vague reply.

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28

We don’t have a lot of time to digest and approve a $180,000 per month increase in cost and commit to it for 12 months. I’m all for retaining Cartan as the operational team but this feels very rushed.

I would support a small extension (2 or 3 months) at existing rates, to give us time to consider and feedback on a 12 month expansion to take us into 2024.

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29

Hey Balou,

Thanks for joining the forums. I had asked these existential questions as the first post to this AIP Idea.

And the more I’m reading and learning, both here and off-site, the more I’m leaning towards just renewing Cartan Group’s current contract for 2023 (6-mos min as these things always take longer than expected) - with the condition that the Special Council draft an AIP that lays out a transition process where the DAO is progressively onboarding members of the community to work in partnership with the legal entity - progressive decentralization.

The rest of this post is for the rest of the community in general:

Hard resets and last-minute negotiations over Discourse and Twitter generally do not turn out well.

We are one of the biggest DAOs with a sizeable treasury, and while I am all for transparency and accountability, it never ceases to amaze that we continue to be “Penny-wise and Pound-foolish”! (ye olde English saying)

Do we really think an ad-hoc group, or worse a small gang of influencers, will really protect us from SEC/CFTC/IRS probes or lawsuits? This is not a pfp project, YugaLabs, A16z and their legal counsel put the SC, Cartan Group and this DAO together in the first place - let’s at least give the BAYC founders that credit.

The next 3 weeks are going to be filled with Special Council Elections, and all the noise and disappointments they bring, and then immediately followed up with requests for communications and transparency with little time afforded for on-the-job training and transition - let’s not add switching out the group responsible for AIP admin, asset custody, accounting, invoicing, and the legal requirements to maintaining a Caymans Foundation to this tumultuous period.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for being part of the ApeCoin DAO in earnest. Happy to have these important conversations, but let’s agree to disagree without being disagreeable.

Cheers,
SSP :v:t4:

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30

Yuga Labs LLC, Incorporated in the State of Delawere, USA. I personally think and believe ApeCoin DAO should be registered and incorporated as a legal entity in the USA in order grow and have permanent presence globally.

The ApeCoin Foundation is registered in Cayman Islands, which is fine, but the ApeCoin DAO should be compliant with regulations and law for its long term operations as a global DAO entity. I am willing to take the responsibility and work for that if I will be given the opportunity to have an assignment by the ApeCoin DAO.

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31

Fair enough, but I do think the vast majority of attorney’s in the USA have directed DAOs, especially ones with large treasuries and worldwide token-holders, to avoid incorporating in the USA until clearer regulations are set.

Not a lawyer but have sat in many meetings with legal counsel for NFT projects and DAOs.

FYI - Yuga Labs is not an LLC but a C-Corp – set-up for the ability to sell registered securities to accredited investors as recognized by the SEC. Lots of paperwork.

Thanks for your input.

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32

I completely agree with this. It is precisely why I await @btang response to my questions because we cannot be confident that Cartan’s AIP, as it is presently written, will pass its vote. Therefore, we need to understand if Cartan has contingency plans or if it is going to force the DAO to come up with its own. In either case, the DAO needs to be informed as soon as possible.

@btang Please advise. Thanks

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