A public letter to The Safe Team

I have participated in SafeDAO governance for almost two months and I would like to point out some issues that exist in SafeDAO. And I will no longer participate in the governance of SafeDAO, because I feel that users are not respected enough compared to the team/investors/guardians. As a normal user, I was very disappointed in my participation in SafeDAO.

On a few core issues:

  1. The team can control the proposal almost 100% in the process, whether it is using various strange rules, or deliberately delaying the time for the proposal to enter the next stage, or the official Twitter intentionally not retweeting a proposal (even if the proposal meets the standards) , or even deliberately not numbering a proposal.
    In fact, the last feedback for SEP #1 came on October 3rd, but it wasnā€™t entered the snapshot until Oct 18, and many community members expressed dissatisfaction with the delay. (And the team did not put SEP#1 on the snapshot on time as promised, but it was submitted by the community members on the snapshot).
    And my proposal([SEP # ] Make The Safe Token Transferable - #7 by theobtl) is actually complete in format and summarizing the opinions of the community members, and, it was published three days ago and entered phase 1, but the team directly locked my proposal without my explicit approval (no longer giving me a chance to speak), and listed Danielā€™s discussion as SEP #2 (in fact, Daniel himself did not bring this proposal into the phase 1, and my proposal entered phase 1 three days earlier than Daniel), although I agreed to let Danielā€™s proposal enter SEP earlier, it seems rather dictatorial for the team to make such a move without asking for consent.
  2. Users do not have sufficient voting rights in fact, which does not meet the teamā€™s stated goal of turning Safe into a public good.
    In the initial voting rights given by the team, users only accounted for 17.9%, while the team and investors combined reached 64.3%.
    Whatā€™s more, only 17% of users claim (the OPā€™s claim rate reached 70% two weeks after launch) after the peak period of claims has passed, which means that users actually only have about 3.5% of the voting power.
    I personally think that most users donā€™t get a reasonable amount of tokens, knowing that a Safe is usually managed by multiple people, 43,000 Safes that are eligible for airdrops means that there are 100,000 users behind them, but 100,000 people Only 50M tokens were allocated, and 140 guardians were allocated 25M tokens. I recognize the contribution of the guardians, but it is obvious that the team did not pay attention to users from the beginning. In my opinion, this is why only 17% user claimed their token.

Below is the letter I sent to the team DM, but they did not respond effectively to my query, I sent these two letters as open letters. I donā€™t know if Safe Team will lock this letter like it locked my SEP, but I will still send this letter.

Letter 1 , Oct 23
Hi Safe Team, please assign a number to this SEP, and post it on official governance twitter so we can see more feedback/attitudes about it. [SEP # ] Make The Safe Token Transferable
I donā€™t know why you guys havenā€™t assigned number and retweets for so many days, I donā€™t want to maliciously discredit you, but

  1. This proposal is actually the most discussed and participated proposal. Even if it has never been retweeted by the official Twitter, there are more than 60 comments in total, and more than 500 people have participated in the relevant temperature voting. It is more of a community proposal than SEP#1.
  2. SEP#1 was assigned a number on the first day of release, and got an announcement on the official Twitter, but this proposal has been released for nearly three days, and still no official response has been seen.
    Since these Twitter accounts are actually controlled by official staff, you can actually control the level of publicity of the proposal.
    If you are not interested in a proposal and intentionally donā€™t retweet it, the proposal will never be known to the majority of community members unless the person posting the proposal is a social influencer, which is not decentralized at all.
  3. So far, less than 20%(about 17%) of users have claimed their SAFE airdrops. Knowing that the peak period of airdrop claims has long passed, such a low percentage of user claims is unreasonable.
    I personally think that most users are not satisfied with the amount of airdrops they get, even if wintermute has more than 800 transactions and asset storage of more than 30m, they still only get less than 20k tokens, and more than 99% of users do not Eligible to initiate proposals (including me, I only have 3k tokens, but several community members have pledged to help me bring this SEP to snapshot).

In the initial proportion of voting rights, users only had 17.9% of the voting rights, while the voting rights of the team and investors accounted for more than 64.3%. In the case of such a low user claim rate (the speed of claims has been very slow - less than 100 times a day, I think the userā€™s claim rate will not exceed 30% even after the claim period ends), the user actually has less than 3.5% of the voting rights.

You must know that the userā€™s voting rights reached 100% when Optimism was launched. (Even counting committees, users have 50% of voting power).

Especially when most of the tokens of the team and investors will not be released this year, so it can be considered that it is not in your interest to let the tokens circulate this year, I am not sure if this is the reason why you do not forward this proposal, but you There is indeed an incentive to do so.

You must know that 3.5% of user voting rights have made SafeDAO not like the proportion of user voting rights that a normal public good should have. If this proposal is also deliberately blocked by officials on social media, then the so-called SafeDAO is actually Itā€™s just the dictatorship of a few people.

I am very angry, otherwise I would not have used such harsh words.

If there is still no official number assigned to this proposal on the 25th, I will post these contents as an open letter to the forum and have social influencers I know retweet the letter.

Letter2 , Oct 24
Listen friends, I donā€™t mean to discredit you, because Safe is in fact the most important infrastructure in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is inseparable from your outstanding abilities and efforts.
Also, I know you guys have been busy migrating recently, and you probably donā€™t have a lot of energy to spend on forum governance, and I understand that.
However, I think that you have not done a good enough job in the governance of SafeDAO, you have not done a good job of what the official should do, and the response speed is often too slow.
I have to point out the core problem, as I said before

  1. The team can control the timing of numbering the proposal, and the governance Twitter is also controlled by the team, and the team can actually delay/block a proposal on purpose. Like the last feedback in SEP #1 that it took two full weeks to vote, it was inseparable from the teamā€™s procrastination (whether intentional or not).
  2. The issue of voting rights, I mentioned, in fact, the current voting rights of users are only 3.5%. This is not the voting rights of users that a public product should have. You can refer to any other public products such as ENS, OP, UNI, and see Is what I said right?
  3. You have also realized that compared to other products, is the claim rate of Safe airdrop too low? A claim rate of 17% one month after opening for collection is very rare. I can honestly say that this was a failed airdrop.

In any case, you should understand that in fact in the governance of SafeDAO, the team has almost 100% decision-making power, as if my proposal actually entered Phase 1 (three days ago) earlier than Daniel, and it is more complete in format, but You still have no hesitation in numbering Danielā€™s proposal earlier without asking me for my opinion in advance.
You can check out my panel, in fact I spend a lot of time participating in Safe forum governance, and as a participant in OP governance I also voted for Safeā€™s proposal, Iā€™m really interested in participating in this kind of governance experiment.
But as an ordinary participant (because I am not a social influencer), I feel that users in SafeDAO do not have any real right to speak (you can see this from user airdrops, and more than 99% of users get insufficient tokens to initiate a proposal).

8 Likes

I agree with you very much. Safe is too centralized, and the voting right is not in the community at all. In particular, most tokens of the team and investors will not be issued this year, so it can be considered that it is not in your interests to let tokens circulate this year. I am not sure whether this is the reason why you did not forward this proposal, but you do have the motivation to do so.

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Felt the same way as you said. I also tried to give some suggestions to the team but totally ignored by them.

At this time, SafeDAO may be a DAO, but in fact it is a DAO composed of a team and a small number of others. Usersā€™ opinions doesnā€™t matter.

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I discussed this problem with some teams several months ago. Is most of the DAO governance structure reasonable at this time?

They generally believe that team should have a certain/sufficient governance right, because it helps to prevent bad guys from buying tokens in the market to vote to steal the interests of DAO (such as mango DAOā€™s recent exploit), but if the team has too much power, then in fact, users DAO participation will become meaningless, but if users are not allocated a sufficient proportion of power, it cannot be called decentralized governance.

Future DAO development needs to have a balance.

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Good Product and Fake Dao

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@theobtl is right to close the second proposal but the tone used and basis pointed out as the reason for closing the proposal is very discouraging.

It would have been more acceptable if he base his reason for closing the second proposal on the fact that 2 proposals communicating same information would cause confusion rather than finding faults in the second proposal.

I hope he can summon courage as the head of governance and apologize for belittling DAO members efforts.

However, the only disappointment I can get in the whole arrangements is you (@b1k00 ) abandoning this DAO.
Know that things doesnā€™t always go the way we want them but we have to move on.

If not for your courageous act to to give this proposal a hard push via several means, it is reasonable to think that this proposal wonā€™t catch the interest of SafeDAO governance lead (@theobtl ) who is expected to cordinate this, itā€™s obvious as he has never talked about it for almost a month it was posted.

This DAO needs more people like you @b1k00 , not everyone has strength of going as far as you did but surely we love what youā€™re doing and you can see that by the number of likes on your different posts.

Itā€™s not necessary we comment, our likes speaks.

Go nowhere, friend and letā€™s do this together :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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Thank you for your comment, @CaptainTee.

I wholeheartedly apologise if that appeared to be the reason why I closed the thread. I absolutely did not close it for finding faults, which would be inacceptable. When I mentioned room for improvement in this comment, this was only part of my argumentation why, in my opinion, it made more sense to go with the original proposal on enabling transferability which had already been discussed and improved over a longer period of time. These improvements were also not the main argument.

The main argument was, as you also say, that @b1k00ā€™s proposal on enabling transferability seemed to be a duplicate of the original proposal, in which case in my opinion it makes little sense to have the same topic discussed in two distinct proposals. I briefly mention that in the latter part of the comment linked above and meant to put this front and center, but I realise that this wasnā€™t very clear.

Absolutely. Please reconsider your decision to not be involved anymore, this would be such a loss to this DAO.

Please also see my following comment in direct response to your open letter.

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Dear b1k00,

As I also told you in response to your messages via PM, I am grateful for your contributions to SafeDAO and glad to see you being so active in the forum.

I canā€™t speak for SafeDAO or the whole Safe team, but allow me to respond to some of your questions and comments.


You have every right to share this open letter and you are raising some valid points, but please be clear that I did respond to your messages and did my best to give reasons, explain things and ask for your feedback. If you mean with ā€œnot respond effectivelyā€ that I did not fully agree with everything you said, Iā€™m sorry to hear that but Iā€™d also appreciate it if you could make that clear in this open letter.

Personally, I find it absolutely reasonable to be wondering why things take so long. I also find that frustrating at times. But then I keep reminding myself that DAO governance is an early discipline itself with major shortcomings in operational efficiency while realizing that the Web 2.0-approach of ā€œmove fast and break thingsā€ is precisely what web3 is not about. Instead, we are creating immutable infrastructure that is built to last and prioritizes quality and rigor over speed and quick wins. SEP-1 ā€œParticipation Agreementā€ is a good example, as this proposal pioneered how participants in a DAO can limit their liability, but due to the regulatory uncertainty and complexity of this matter, I find it reasonable to leave it open for discussion for more than six days. After all, our governance process requires a proposal to be open for discussion in phase 1 for ā€œat least six daysā€, not exactly six days.

This governance forum is where all SafeDAO-related discussions should take place. Truth is also, SafeDAO is still barely a month old and next to team members there are many community members, ecosystem participants and key stakeholders who have not yet made it a routine to communicate here in the forum. The goal is certainly to have all governance discussions take place in this forum, but thatā€™s an ongoing process. As DAO Coordination Lead, Iā€™m doing my best to encourage people to join the forum and have their SafeDAO-related conversations here so that we all know about blockers and outstanding issues related to a proposal.

[ā€¦]

Letā€™s take a step back here. The original proposal to enable transferability was authored by the forum user @Daniel and received a lot of feedback. When it was close to being final, you decided to create a second proposal on the very same issue. How is it useful to have two proposals with two separate conversation flows on the same issue?

We can discuss whether we want to change our governance process to have proposals and counter-proposals on contested topics, but in this case I could not even see any major differences with your proposal. You also included an impressive list of people als ā€œco-authorsā€, although I heard from several people listed there that they did not co-author the proposal nor consent to being listed there. If you were the author of the original proposal, would you be okay if someone just copied your proposal and reposted it as theirs?

The author of the original proposal did agree to move it to phase 1 and asked me to implement the change because he was unavailable. I hope this is to your satisfaction too since we now have a proposal to enable transferability in phase 1.

The practice is that proposals are announced once they enter phase 1, not during phase 0. The same applies to the proposal to enable transferability once it was moved to phase 1 earlier today and became SEP-2: https://twitter.com/safegovernance/status/1584559669195915265


Personally, I would find it unfortunate if you stick to your decision to no longer participate in SafeDAO. After all, we are all in this together and SafeDAO is still immature - in fact not even one month old. The future of SafeDAO is still in front of us, so is virtually all of the work. Only together can we improve SafeDAOā€™s governance and make sure that this vital piece of infrastructure lives long and prosper.

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Stop the pointless excuses.

Answer the voting power problem, this is the real problem.

Users who make up the majority (over 99%) of DAO members only have less than 3% of the voting power.

And more than 90% of the voting power are held by investors/guardians chosen by team/team related.

Is this fair?

This issue was very apparent in the SEP#2 vote, with a majority of community members (over 95% of community) voting in for, but the proposal is about to fail by only a dozen people with team-related/official backgrounds, so this is a real DAO?

1500+ community members is just a waste of time and 1% people related to team beats 1500+ community members?

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Please see my response to your other message here. Youā€™re asking the right questions and we need to discuss them more explicitly with the whole community.

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What need ? 1500+ people SAY YES TRANSFER , WE WANT ! What need now ? We start SEP 2# FOR DICTATOR REASONS !! Few people controll all !

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I feel your pain @b1k00 . Iā€™ve engaged in governance in many DAOs and this is the one Iā€™ve met with the most barriers to participation.

It feels like anytime I have an opinion that isnā€™t shared by the Safe team, I am met with a wall of text and endless questions.

TBH I am wondering if itā€™s worth continuing here. I also wonder if Safe Guardian really do want others to engage in governance, or if theyā€™d rather just handle it themselves. Iā€™m ok with either of the above, but I wish it was clear so I didnā€™t waste my time.

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