Lot of Apes met with RattyMouseman (RH) of FWB to ask about transitioning away from Cartan and WGv0. In the interest of informing the community, here’s a breakdown and solutions for your consideration.
PH’s thoughts:
Meta-governance is the priority. RH suggested SC appoints WG leads but that they be ratified by the community.
The first issue with respect to the RFP for a new admin is finding out how much of what Cartan is doing is outside the scope of the admin. I’ve been speaking to this as well before this meeting.
RH also spoke of a peer review system where leaders check other leaders. I think this is a stopgap that can work to move in the direction of onchain KPIs, which @bradley2026 noted is how Dash does things. IMHO, onchain KPIs for data driven positions like Treasury is where we should be going.
FWB is US-based, and RH said that the US will try to find a “nexus” in order to claim jurisdiction. It will be harder to put the FWB nexus over $APE because of $APE’s wider holder base, but I feel it’s definitely super important to “internationalize” the DAO ASAP.
I’m actually working on a proposal that houses solutions for this and ancillary problems in a Prop House structure. The Prop House itself should not supercede WGv0 and the Transition, but the ideas there are definitely relevant for WGv0 and the Transition. It’s also good to look ahead and see how many decentralization-focused ideas can actually work together for a better outcome. I’m not preaching decentralization for the sake of some ideal. It actually works better, and I believe the document may help to detail how things fit.
Anyone interested can leave comments, and I’m going to be personally working on how to incorporate solutions from there into the pressing issues we face in the coming weeks.
The number one issue I’ll be championing — because no one else is — is the creation of the Supervisor role to oversee the Board. The Supervisor can be a group of members, which is decentralization at its best.
Currently, I believe Cartan formed the Foundation to house the roles of Director and Supervisor under the same entity, which is the worst way to do things. These roles should and can be separated by Cayman Foundation law, and this issue should be considered in the transition by WGv0.
Very interesting idea and I agree with that PH’s advice could be taken. The supervisor role is worth trying. Looks like the DPH proposal is almost ready. Look forward to seeing it go live.
Need to consider the possibility of bastardizing a protocol from another chain in order to time-lock principal without locking rewards. If we can find a model that is close, we might be able to adapt our own protocol relatively quickly and make that a separate source of licensable income to continue the perpetual, or possibly even fold into principal to continually boost yield. Depending on how you organize it, you can also leverage something along these lines towards pushing the nexus away from the US.
Good idea here, with one pushback: The yield generated is specifically to go into projects, because that’s the basic point of the prop house. So even if we made a huge score on yield alone, we would want to prioritize getting that money out to projects to build. The yield is only meant to manage the risk of investing in speculative industries, not to necessarily become a revenue driver in its own right.
Any ideas on protocols that don’t lock rewards? Also, if we can’t find one, would people be willing to just put the Endowment in the hands of a vetted group of multisig holders?
I think that you will run into problems dividing the yield generated from a secondary stream like this between projects that have already recieved grants - splitting it across the board might not generate much additional money for the projects, whereas increasing the principal continuously will give the prop house an ability to help more projects meaningfully. However, I can also see the value of simplification of just passing it through.
I will look into some protocols when I get home tonight
Love the idea for a Degen Prop House! Made some comments on the doc.
My biggest concerns are finding qualified people for the manager roles and that the members of the DAO might have a hard time saying yes to 3 million $ape right off the bat without seeing some sort of proof of concept.
Thanks for the support, AA. Here’s my thoughts on your concerns:
I saw that comment in the doc, and I changed the process to reflect this scenario. Take a look, and please comment on that change if you still have issues!
The focus on the $3M is an issue I knew would come up, and what I’m also hoping is that folks understand that the $3M isn’t touched at all. Matter of fact, I don’t care if the $3M itself remains in the hands of (god forbid) the SC, just as long as the YIELD from that $3M is used to fund DPH projects. So basically, DPH just moves $3M in $APE on Coinbase that is just sitting there useless now, puts it into a staking pool, and lets the yield (free money!) fund DPH.
This is $3M that is providing the DAO no yield at this point, and DPH isn’t asking to take custody of that Endowment in any way, if the community makes that a huge issue. Because the Treasury is denominated in $APE, there is literally 0 scenarios in which taking stagnant $APE and putting it into a yield-bearing place is bad for the DAO.
If you consider the BendDAO $APE staking too risky, Uniswap V3 APE-ETH is a virtually tech-risk free place to put the $3M. The only issue here is separating the Prop House legally from the DAO so the $APE can be traded into ETH.
DPH is focused specifically on smaller projects that haven’t gotten funding yet — focused on those founders who don’t even have the working capital to build an MVP. Think Lil Nouns to Nouns —> that’s DPH to ApeDAO.
So the issue of dividing grants between current recipients of grants is moot, because DPH is specificallyabout building the unfunded builders up. If a builder already has a grant from ApeDAO or Yuga, that means their business is far too mature and scaled to need a grant from DPH, because getting a grant from ApeDAO or Yuga requires a PoC that takes minimum tens of thousands of dollars and a team, usually.
Random thought: DPH staking directly through Apestake.io could help to internationalize the DAO, reducing the overall political risk of $APE. Because the frontend is geofenced from the US and Canada, staking $APE directly through Apestake.io may help to further the argument that the nexus of ApeDAO is not from the US or Canada.
Legal opinions here? This statement is now in the DPH risk assessment. Let me know if it makes sense or if I should take it out.
Added limitations to what Managers can do with the Endowment. Most important updates:
Managers are not allowed to take leverage.
Tech risk manager, defi manager and risk manager must agree with a unanimous vote on every Endowment strategy change. This slows down investment efficiency, which is a good thing. The Endowment is not being used to trade, but rather to find long term staking and yield strategies.