Election, Take 2

I know many of you have been wondering what we’ve been up to lately. You probably noticed we haven’t posted a funding request in a long time. And in August, we called for supervisor applications, but as of today, no new supervisors have been added to the board. What happened?

Funding Requests

We decided to suspend funding requests after the Dash price dropped to the $50 range last year. We felt at that price it would simply take too long to accumulate a significant investment fund. We also don’t want to add additional sell pressure to the Dash market. Since we’re holding our liquid funds typically roughly in a 70:30 split, we would have to sell a large amount of Dash into the bear market.

We realize that in reality the sell pressure is not much reduced due to our stepping back because the budget is typically taken up and mostly sold to fiat by other proposals. DCG is standing out among those and as far as the DIF is concerned, that’s fine. Before DCG started posting supplemental proposals, I had a call with Quantumexplorer to discuss the DIF leaving more room in the budget for DCG. We didn’t need much convincing. There are a few voices who say DCG should cut more, even stop work on Platform. To say it with Steve Jobs: “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” Just swap Apple for Dash. Having funds left for investments is a luxury that we can’t currently afford. We want to see Platform released. We want to see the developers work full steam ahead. We don’t want to see more layoffs mere yards from the finish line.

Supervisor Election

Unfortunately, our call for applications in didn’t yield enough candidates. We extended the deadline in September, but even so, we had to figure out how to deal with a situation where the number of candidates does not exceed the number of available slots. An election wouldn’t make much sense if every candidate is guaranteed a slot.

At the same time, without fresh funds to invest, we reduced our meeting schedule to once per month, which means slower decision-making.

Ash and Glenn also chose not to extend their terms beyond the original election time frame. Both resigned in October. Glenn took on a new job where he had a potential conflict of interest and Ash needed more focus on his own company CTX. We parted on very good terms, but the added workload on the remaining supervisors (Sven, Rodrigo, Michael), who all already have other external priorities and commitments, and then the holiday season led to more delay.

However, we still want to fill the open supervisor slots and so we’re having a second go at it and decided to change the election method. We plan to hold a DAO proposal-based election counting both Yes and No votes. The treasury 10% threshold rule for funding proposals will not apply. The simple balance of Yes minus No votes determines the election result for each candidate. Candidates with negative balance are not elected and the slot will remain vacant for the time being. This adds transparency and gives the community a say over which candidates become supervisors (basically a veto right) and gives us a vote ranking to determine next year’s two-year vs. one-year terms.

You will see these proposals, one for each candidate, posted to the DAO in the next few days. As it looks, we will have two existing supervisors standing for re-election and two new candidates. Michael was elected for a two-year term, so he will extend automatically.

Funds are Safu

Some people were asking about our assets, since you haven’t heard from us for a while. We will publish an annual report for 2022 in a separate post. For now, I’ll just say that almost all of our funds are invested in equity, so we have only limited exposure to the whims of the crypto market. At least two of our investments have developed very well and our portfolio looks strong. More to come.