ATOM Accelerator’s Journey: Updates and Next Steps

Change log 1: AADAO is abandoning the idea of a signaling proposal to extend the mandate to December 2nd and will end its mandate as expected on November 12th, 2023 Change log 2: We’ll pause applications on Sept 5th and not Sept 1st like previously announced Hello $ATOM Community, The ATOM Accelerator, also known as the AADAO, has embarked on a transformative six-month journey. As our initial term is set to conclude on November 12th, 2023, we’re excited to share our progress. 1. Our Achievements Over the past months, we’ve made significant strides: • A major highlight has been our involvement in the Tokenomics RFP. This project, much anticipated by the community, promises to be transformative and revamp the ATOM tokenomics and the Cosmos Hub governance; • We’ve meticulously reviewed 167 applications, out of which 22 projects have been greenlit. This translates to a total disbursement to date of 110,601 ATOM or $925K. See Chart 1 - Applications for monthly details; • Our collaboration initiatives have been fruitful, with notable partnerships such as the AEZ Accelerator in tandem with Neutron DAO and Long Hash Accelerator; • The stATOM-ATOM LP of 450,000 ATOM on…

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unless you are stride or neutron or lum or the vibes guys, how can AAdao justify their overhead just to distribute funds to teams and projects previously rejected by governance? other than support 2.0 initatives that were rejected in 82, what has AAdao done that couldnt have easily been done through regular spend props?

I think that extending the mandate or terminating the program make sense.

I would like to be specific, I take issue with only two of the funding initiatives:

• Cosmos Millions

  • in the end, it’s a wash. Not terrible, mainly due to strong execution. I’d try to avoid similar funding in the future but one very clear reality here is that it did make an effective sink of atoms.

• Missions Publique

  • my opposition here is simple. I’m concerned about having our cabinets penetrated.

Like that.

As a validator, it is my job to prevent the penetration of cabinets at all times. Only Cosmos hub stakers should matter to the hub and not any world economic forum.

I am strongly suspicious of the world economic forum.

Out of deep respect for @Better_Future and @hxrts – I’m withholding action on preventing the involvement of Missions Publiques and their vibez. I am also organizing a Twitter space with MP.

common_spelling:

vibes guys

According to @Antoine_Vergne it is properly spelt “vibez”

To be clear, you support extending the mandate by three weeks. Followed by non renewal of the program mid December? @jacobgadikian

I am personally supporting this extension proposal.

I agree with others that the AADAO isn’t the best, I would love to see it less opaque and possibly have all applications be public via DAO-DAO (on Neutron?). Then, the reviewer committee votes publicly on funding proposals made to the DAO. This would have led external interested community members to express their concerns before the payment of the problematic grants.
HOWEVER, as an ATOM holder, I am pleased to not have 100 funding props per week. Where, as an ATOM holder, I have less context than the AADAO to vote properly.
I will mention again those thoughts in December at the renewal proposal.

167 applications and no one interested in enhancing Atom valset decentralisation,

while

• LS centralisation risks
• CCs addition centralisation risk
• CEXs’ whitelabels number increase

it’s quite disappointing, nop ? regardless what you’ve done otherwise.

my tiny bags will vote YES on the next extending proposals if and only if there is a focus on that precise field.

@tom

Some or all of the above points are valid and will be addressed as part of the tokenomics RFP by Blockworks, Binary and RMIT. Looping in here @effortcapital

If I may give some thoughts here. I think AA Dao has done quite a good job better than most foundations. But, if I am to be critical I can’t lie that there is a clear conflict of interest funding projects from the French Region. Specifically two mentioned:

1. Cosmos millions
2. Missions Publique

Jacob has already stressed his concern but I believe when you are spending money from the CP, their needs to be better selection on what gets built & how it can be consumer facing, & from my point of view grants to people you know. I think if it’s going to extended we ask that new officials are elected like Synthetix does with their councils so we don’t have this problem continued. Good start but time to pass the torch imo

Side note: All for Effort Cap being elected.

@BendyOne comment from CosmonautHq on 8/17, #aadao topic channel:

"From experience governance proposals are very time intensive.

Personally I am only part time and would struggle/be unable to do my work (reviewing and comms) and governance simultaneously.

This question though is why we are going back to governance to request the time. Governance can of course reject it but we thought it important to show the fullest picture."

It seems your team bandwidth likely to get hijacked from preparing and defending the governance proposal as per @BendyOne comment above.

Unwise to effectively lose 3 weeks to gain 3 week extension.

Or to lose 2 weeks to gain 3.

Blockquote It seems your team bandwidth likely to get hijacked from preparing and defending the governance proposal as per @BendyOne comment above. Unwise to effectively lose 3 weeks to gain 3 week extension. Or to lose 2 weeks to gain 3. I tend to agree with this comment. This seems like a lot of work just to extend 3 weeks. I’m not sure what the community gets out of it. There are still 3 months until the end of the project. Can the team not complete the tasks in 3 months especially if they put a pause on processing applicants? Also I would expect operational costs to increase based on operational expenses listed in original proposal (it won’t let me include links). Based on this document we could expect costs of ~$44K of overages charges to the community (Monthly salaries for listed positions * 75% of month). Is this really necessary? Couldn’t we spend our time more wisely than wasting it on this proposal to extend for 3 weeks? Every one on the team is paid quite generously that I would expect deadlines could be met. For example, we are paying $3K per month for part time to work 8 hours per week. With 3 months left, I think it should be easy enough to complete tasks…

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syndicatemike:

there is a clear conflict of interest funding projects from the French Region

ahahah sorry but lmfao

how many grants are given from & to US citizen/orgs? no problem/cOnFLicT oF inTEreST there i guess…

that’s ridiculous.

They’ve built more promising tech the Lum , I think we are both biased here. My opinion though

Stride Labs (SL) strongly supports this proposal. During Stride’s transition to Interchain Security, being able to correspond with a group of informed Cosmos Hub representatives was invaluable. Whenever Stride was looking for guidance around AEZ strategy, contributors consulted the AA DAO and they provided valuable input. The Atom Accelerator DAO has also been a crucial operational partner to Stride, custodying the 450,000 ATOM provided as liquidity on Astroport Neutron in a safe and timely manner. As future consumer chains onboard, more POL will be deployed into the ecosystem. Until a trustless solution is deployed, an operationally-savvy multisig composed of Cosmos governance-elected representatives will be necessary to steward these funds. The AADAO also reviewed a grant proposal submitted by SL. The review process was thorough, the AADAO team tracked SL’s progress in a detailed manner and has consistently provided transparency to the community through regular Twitter posts, Twitter spaces and blog posts. SL strongly supports the team’s term extension and renewal, especially if the AADAO can continue to provide the same quality of services to the interchain and…

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This extension shouldn’t be a problem, reconducting next year shouldn’t be either. Of course there are opposing voices and there always will be… that’s just the sign of a healthy political system in Cosmos. I love our dramas. Its just less fun to bare in a bear market

Anyway, jokes aside… whether you like the DAO member or not, deep down you all know we need a DAO. So far I think the Atom Accelerator has done a fairly good job regarding the very high bar set by the community expectations. Of course I’ll vote positively on this extension and I look forward to have the DAO next year as well. We are far from being over with the public infrastructure of Cosmos and to roll this out correctly, well… we need a DAO !

@Youssef provided the community grants reporting extension, the final delivery date for mandate report is December 2nd, 2023; in addition to the end of mandate report, AADAO will also share a forum post outlining the vision for the mandate renewal, at or around the same time, correct?

Then, on December 9th, 2023, the comprehensive spending proposal will go on chain to renew or terminate the DAO’s activities.

Might you be amenable to deferring the spending proposal on chain to Dec 14th, instead?

If the community grants your team an extension to produce the mandate report – it seems to me AADAO should reciprocate the courtesy by allowing reasonable, minimum time for the report to be read, processed and discussed prior to triggering a vote on chain.

To me that would be fair.
Delivering the report on Dec.2, followed by on chain proposal on the 9th feels aggressive.

I see your observation form French teams. That isn’t a conflict of interest, I think Cosmos devs/builders/community has a large Canadian french population. The Conflicts of interest have been transparent and addressed. Ever since the cosmos millions dilemma on validators there have been clear rules established. Speaking of Cosmos millions, they have shown to improve, address community concerns and grown under bearish conditions.

AADAO isnt perfect but we want nothing but to drive maximum value to Cosmos hub and AEZ. I urge everyone not to focus on just 1 grant you may disagree with but also the 10-20 others in progress. The sentiment hasn’t been healthy and it sets everyone back. This isn’t directed towards you but in general.

Lastly I appreciate the support and ideas from everyone even the criticism. We are always looking to improve.

Hey Noodels great feedback. We would love to conduct operations via an onchain platform like daodao. It would reduce a lot of overhead and give more clarity context on it. We are exploring this option as we speak and has been one of our key focuses.
One thing that is difficult to portray however is the many hours spent on meeting with teams, negotiating grant sizes and deliverables and addressing any potential problems that may arise. AADAO isnt just a grant focused dao but stewards of business development, outreach in organizing events, partnerships, as well as becoming a trusted medium for participation such as strides liquid staking deployment on astroport. The grant winners effectively become partners in a sense where review committee members and oversight such as myself participate in countless calls and check ups ensuring a smooth progression or potentially minimizing risk if the teams fail to deliver. Point I’m trying to make is that there is a lot of work behind the scenes the community isn’t aware of and I just wanted to share my experience on the process.

Just to chime in here on the topic of “what is the AADAO doing that the community pool can’t do?”:

As a grant recipient I’ve seen up close how much work the team is putting in, from the Tokenomics RFP design & handling, to the interviews, to the weekly calls where they monitor progress and track whether what we’re doing is still mostly aligned with the current political sentiment. In the end someone needs to check if the grant recipients are doing a good job and if the Hub’s interests are being represented.

Spending money comes with accountability monitoring, and that takes time.

For this being the first time the AADAO is run, I’m extremely impressed by the transparency. I believe there’s a future where the DAO is run similar to how Neutron’s treasury is run, with the community able to Veto proposals, but the tech isn’t on the Hub yet, so I’m eager to see them continue to work in the current configuration until this is possible.

Thank you @Noam for sharing your experience of working with AADAO first hand.
I’d add to what you said that AADAO is also engaged in various ‘non grant’ activities that are taking a significant chunk of our time but that are definitely worthwhile: business development with prospective consumer chains that want to test the water with us, advisory to consumer chains such as Stride and Neutron, operational support such as the Neutron airdrop clawback that we’ll be handling and transferring back to the Hub, POL on behalf of the Hub deployed on Astroport (450k ATOM).

Because AADAO is the only elected organization that is 100% ATOM owned and aligned, it naturally attracts Hub’s key collaborators. To be honest, I’d go as far as to say the ‘non grant’ part is as important as the grant one.

Re, the mission publique proposal. First I’ll note the team hasn’t had a chance to do their Spaces yet, and out of respect we should give them the chance to do so before we form conclusions. From an AADAO perspective, the idea behind the mission publiques project was to focus community energy and intelligence on the ICS contracting design & optimization problem, and, hopefully, thru this work — and also the RMIT desk study effort running in parallel — to achieve, say, 5-10% better value for the hub community thru better ICS contract design, say, on $1b of ICS chain bondings over next 3 years. That’s $50-$100m of value for $atom that might be realized: back of the envelope, $50m (value for $atom) / $60k (project cost) = 833x ROI possibly achievable for $atom holders. its a hard problem, and polkadot’s attempt to solve it chopped them up pretty badly, but, its also low-hanging fruit for the hub if we can solve it. And, then also the willingness of the mission publiques team to translate learnings from the delib gov process experiment into recommendations and mock-ups for how to bring this kind of a process into an on-chain environment was another benefit perceived by AADAO…

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J, I tend to agree I’m just highlighting an issue that I see which is my opinion. Doesn’t mean it’s correct, I just don’t see the point of having the same people over & over, should be a point where if you’re spending CP funds at least cosmos Stakers should have a say in future elections. As for French Canadian, I wouldn’t know who is what because of the transparency but I’m a US maxi which I’m biased too. So agree to disagree, I said you’ve done a good job. But I wanted to give critical feedback instead of giving everyone a gold star because I only thinks that’s the fair way to comment. Otherwise, the work has been great, just a few comments I had, didn’t mean it to be absolute!

In Jacobs fairness, I don’t think many are aware to the WEF connection. Would cause an issue if more were aware. I think people are more upset that technically the money given to AA was from the community pool.

Accountability does not organically transpire øver time. It needs a framework, a process and procedural rules for standardized reporting requirements, reporting cadences , etc.
I applaud AADAOs consistency in generating and sharing monthly reports. And for being responsive when there have been requests for information.

But so long as transparency measures are a product of self policing and internal controls within DAOs and other cp funded recipients, community members will question the accuracy and comprehensiveness of disclosures made.

It’s difficult to create a culture of honor in the system when it’s wholly reliant on the honor system.

syndicatemike:

don’t think many are aware to the WEF connection. Would cause an issue if more were aware. I think people are more upset that technically the money given to AA was from the community pool.

https://forum.cosmos.network/t/no-funding-for-wef-affiliates

Yes of course it would cause an issue because we don’t want that around here, I don’t even think that this is a controversial point of view. I could be wrong but my opinion is strongly that it’s quite non-controversial that it’s a bad idea to fund the WEF.

I’m 100% on board with it. I don’t think it’s a “global collective” rather then siphoning dollars from the economies for their mission of control.

Jacob has a right to express his concerns regarding this situation as every community member does. Just want to clarify this wasn’t directed towards or anyone in particular and I’m certainly not questioning the validity of his concerns either.

J. Parillo shared the following comment in Cosmonaut HQ. Sharing here because it’s a very good suggestion. And am in agreement. Renewing AADAO, and renewal of the team that administers it’s mandate are separate issues, and deserves its own consideration process. Would be great to hear aaDao express how this can be supported in its forthcoming proposed plans for operations. Telegram Jim Parillo in CosmonautHQ I feel as though a vote against the members of AADAO leading the grants process is somewhat different from disbanding the grants process entirely. I assume if the AADAO is rejected for renewal, it shouldn't be done at the end of the life of the 9... "I feel as though a vote against the members of AADAO leading the grants process is somewhat different from disbanding the grants process entirely. I assume if the AADAO is rejected for renewal, it shouldn’t be done at the end of the life of the 9 month period. The proposal to renew AADAO beyond 9 months should be submitted with sufficient runway for alternative solutions to be considered and implemented. We vote for the President of the US in November so that there can be a tranistion…

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Govmos:

whether you like the DAO member or not, deep down you all know we need a DAO.

i agree very much with this, i strongly beleive we need mor daos that carter for different aspects , there should be a dao or mechanism for much smaller grants of less than 3000 usd with faster turn around.

Absolutely agreed with that. This is the path for the future, it will happen imho

I absolutely agree with this.

The single most disappointing part of being in AADAO is that we have thus far inspired other people to setup other DAOs.

I would strongly encourage more people to do so.

Thank you for the updates, AADAO. Salute. Hope the team is doing well and staying healthy.

_
Concern: When AADAO chooses to fund entities like “Cosmos Millions,” what are we expecting? Unfortunately appears to be an enabling force to mostly fund pals because of XYZ (personalized) collective reasoning.

“We the people of the Cosmos (Cosmonauts), in order to create a free world…” will be sparked with strength to carry out the mission more aligned with the original vision for the Cosmos Hub.

Atom One + Constitution

Thank you everyone that has replied here or reached out privately. We really appreciate the feedback and support.

After careful consideration and based on insightful feedback from the community, the AADAO team has decided to not move along with a signaling proposal asking for a 3 weeks mandate extension.

Importantly the extension we are asking for is not significant enough to justify the energy of the community on a public governance vote. As such, we will finish our mandate as originally planned, on November 12th.

As announced in the initial post, we will pause application intake on September 5th as we calculate that we will have enough pending applications by then to issue grants in both September and October/November.

There are a number of key questions that we and the community need to resolve around the end of our mandate and any future mandate renewal. The DAO will be developing our ideas and we welcome all feedback on this.

Well you might not have looked to Millions codebase yet. One of the most advanced tech built on Cosmos ecosystem, involving IBC, ICQ and ICA.

Also, pointing out a “french conflict of interest” is indeed ridiculous when it represents 2 out of dozens of projects submitted to the AA.

I support this proposal and will vote YES.

Youssef: Recognizing the need to bolster our operational efficiency for the next phase, we’re considering the addition of a Grant Lead Also from the initial proposal: ‘Four Part Time Proposal Reviewers (4) - Cosmos Hub validators to participate in voting on grant proposals’ Grants reviewers in many other grants programs are selected in a more decentralized and community driven process with public applications in the forums, governance approval and votings and more. In the case of the AADAO, representatives from Imperator, Citadel, Cosmostation and Chorus One were chosen without any applications open or any selection process. Moreover, there wasn’t any signalling proposal in the Cosmos Hub for the community to approve or not the chosen validators. In this forum thread nothing is mentioned about the next steps regarding the selection of validators to be part of the reviewer committee. All validators in the Cosmos Hub should be given a chance to apply to be part of the reviewer committee, a council should be selected by the community to evaluate applications in a fair and unbiased way, and then the selected validators should also be approved via governance with a…

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AAdao is only necessary for validators to more easily run ATOM like an unregistered security.