GIP: GIP-08
Title: Call for Transparency on GoodDollar LLC Treasury Management
Author: Gustavo Segovia
Status: Stage II / pre-proposal
Track: Proclamation
Created: 2022-08-08
Transparency GIP
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TL;DR; This Proclamation Governance Proposal is aimed to request GooDollar LLC to share with the GoodDAO community a full report on their operations, strategy and budget management as a way to bring transparency towards the industry and market in order to maximize the potential contributions and collaboration from professionals and social-inclusion/impact investors. This report might include:
- Treasury management and allocation: How much the GoodDollar LLC is receiving from sponsors (eToro)?
- Budget breakdown: How is this budget spend and allocated? How much is it used for developments, what kind of developments (wallet, app, protocol, GoodDAO, etc.), marketing, legal, Human Resources, contractors, etc.
- To Disclose GoodDollar legal strategy: Is a proper Foundation aimed to take care on the GoodDAO, it’s protocol and community going to be stablished? So far, only a Private company limited by guarantee without share capital (aka GoodDollar LLC) has been set up, and it’s not properly clear if their main goal is to serve the interests of its sponsor or those of the GoodDollar community.
- Priorities Disclosure: a Roadmap was published last april, is this plan still on track? What constrains is the team having to deliver what has been promised?
- GoodDAO planning: So far, there seems to exist natural conflicts among GoodDollar LLC and the GoodDAO, while the former (LLC) has all the budget, so main decision making power and incentives to keep going over the project developments, the later (GoodDAO) seems only to have ownership over the protocol changes (that haven’t happened, yet) but no budget to move forward any strategy or initiative of their own.
Once all money is transparent, we believe that the invisible hand will become the visible hand, and the philanthropy bank could actually direct the economy to create more value.
Yoni Assia - Good Dollar The Visible Hand - November 2008
GoodDollar has advocated for transparent policies for money generation and distribution since our project was conceptualized, even before Bitcoin creation, the first fully transparent global currency with fully transparent and immovable monetary supply and distribution policies.
Money, in whatever of its forms, is ultimately the combination of an accountant system and a Trust system. The accountability covers the function of tracing how the currency is being generated, burned, and transferred among peers; while the trust system enables the exchange of value around these “numbers” being transferred from one peer to another, Trust in having your local stores, rest of providers or exchanges in accepting that money for valuable goods and services.
The Visible Philanthropy Bank
Policies for minting, burning and distributing our G$ currency are fully transparent and encoded into the blockchain, and are also described by our WhitePaper, so we can say G$ is actually a fully transparent currency where all rules for generation and distribution of money are open to everyone to engage with it in a permissionless and decentralized way.
But what about the organizations leading the design and development of this currency for inclusivity? Are they behaving visibly and transparently?
While the GoodDollar economic protocol is ruled by the GoodDAO, smart-contract set which is owned by the GOOD tokens, the only entity working on SW development and other related activities is GoodDollar LLC, a non-for-profit company based in the UK, which is getting its funds from donations from eToro, a web2 investment platform.
While the whole world should be thankful to eToro and Yoni Assia for founding and funding the first and probably the more likely-to-be-sustainable crypto-UBI innitiative, we all should be also demanding the same organization to report to us on what are actually the plans, and how is this money flowing for enabling the operations of GoodDollar LLC to happen.
As GoodDollar aims to bring good and fairness in the world wealth distribution, I completely submit to the following statement:
It is only a wealthy mindset and thinking level, which is going to solve the UBI in the real world.
It is only a capital of the wealthy people, which is going to fund the GoodDollar treasury to make the UBI possible and viable worldwide.
Anonymous Community Member
But we do need also to understand and consider that this initiative can only succeed if and only if it is led, promoted and executed with an open, inclusive and decentralized mindset. Opaque treasury management and Command & Control structures, inherited from the old world order will jeopardize any effort for empowering and inspiring communities of developers and investors to support the protocol and grow the value that GoodDollar aims to deliver to its +450k users (and more to come) around the world.
Where is the money going to?
From a web2 perspective, demanding any Limited Company to disclose their way of using their budget would be completely out of order, traditional organizations have the right to have their own business goal and treat their operations and strategies as opaque as they will. It is the right of shareholders to keep or not their information private from the public.
But GoodDollar is all but a traditional initiative, it is a project aimed to alleviate poverty around the world, and all the money they have does need to address this “specific” problem.
How do we know this money is well used? Well, this proclamation GIP aims to answer this specific question. How do we ensure that GoodDollar LLC, in its very centralized position, is not biased in its strategy or has no agency to deviate the funds to other purposes consciously or not? For example, what should be the organization focusing on? Bringing more investors or more claimers?
The only way I see to ensure the success of GoodDollar strategies and operations is to make public and transparent the way they use the money to build and promote the protocol, promote an open discussion about it, and even make an open call for other development teams to make proposals to use that same budget more efficiently and effectively. But not only, this would also create the necessary Trust in the team so more funds can come over so eToro doesn’t have to be the only UBI sponsor around GoodDollar.
GoodDAO: The way Forward
Having eToro and GoodDollar LLC accept to report to the community on the way they are using the money to fund the developments of this UBI initiative, further conversations do need to take in place to fully transfer this money to the GoodDAO to not only have a Visible Hand, but also a Visible and Inclusive Philanthropy Bank.
It is true DAO developments are still in an early stage and giving all the development money to a contract in which anyone can make submissions, therefore, there’s a risk of receiving malicious attacks and mismanagement over the funds.
But what if GoodDollar LLC is mismanaging its budget already? What does the community know about the organizational and web3 expertise of the company leading efforts for a sustainable UBI?
Initiatives like Token Engineering Commons are working on the foundations to make DAOs founding and governance secure and sustainable, we could create, for example, new instances of the GoodDAO where the GOOD token gains economic value as a way to keep the funding coming so GOOD holders can rule on the way the development money is used without including plutocracy power over the
GoodDollar protocol (this explanation will be expanded after having the current GIP approved).
The web3 industry is already proving the success in empowering communities of developers and contributors to take their own decisions regarding the commons purpose that a DAO can chase, we’ve seen how decentralized communities had achieve to thrive the value of their protocol/tokens, therefore, GoodDollar does need to set a proper strategy for decentralization.
If we do really want the success of GoodDollar we do need to embrace web3 principles for wealth generation, and this can only start with transparency.