Thanks @amanwithwings for shepherding this topic through various community feedback sessions and discussions. The work on this has been amazing, and it’s clear how much thought and effort has gone into ensuring OBRA Wave 2 serves as an effective funding vehicle for the Safe ecosystem. We truly appreciate the dedication and collaboration that has driven this process forward.
TL;DR
As close participants in OBRA to date, we believe OBRA strategies moving forward should be explicitly designed to deliver tangible outcomes. We suggest setting KPIs within relevant strategies that can be adopted by all grant proposals, sunsetting strategies that may not produce actionable outcomes, and more clearly redefining the scope and priority of other strategies.
Finally, security is big topic, and we’re excited to see it being prioritized. We believe a dedicated security strategy focused on supporting security-focused projects and subsidizing audits can be of value.
Reflecting on OBRA 1.0 Strategies
Strategy 1: Research and Implement Safe Token Utility: Beyond the concern of underutilization, we also see a gap in applying research findings, raising questions about what the intended outcome of this strategy is and how effectively these outcomes were achieved. As a good first step, we would like to see the implementation of prior research that we deem high in quality, such as @LuukDAO’s Report on Savings Accounts and Safe Vaults. In line with our belief that OBRA should prioritize funding initiatives with tangible outcomes for the DAO, we support sunsetting this strategy in the next wave of OBRA.
Strategy 2: Foster Module Ecosystem: Expanding the utility of the Safe Protocol through a thriving module ecosystem remains a key focus, and we’re excited to see this continue. This is essential for driving adoption and engagement among developers and users. In the upcoming wave, we’d love to see an emphasis on user-facing services and tools, such as alternative interfaces, browser extensions, and other projects that decentralize access to Safe’s technology. To maximize impact, SafeDAO could explore designating specific frontends as “SafeDAO-approved,” similar to the approach taken by other DAOs like Uniswap.
Strategy 3: Increase Awareness of Safe Ecosystem: We fully support continued investment in awareness initiatives, though with a renewed focus on KPIs and impact. Establishing a baseline ‘strategy-wide KPI’ for all grant proposals within this funding bucket could help ensure outcomes align with the intended goals set by the Strategy Steering Committee. Additionally, distributing funding across multiple types of awareness efforts such as Safe-centric events and community-building initiatives could generate a wider range of meaningful activity and help identify the most effective approaches.- Strategy 4: Research Decentralization of Safe Stack: Despite funding truly valuable work (e.g., SEP 43), unfortunately due to lack of sufficient engagement with this strategy, we believe it may be time to sunset it. Similar to strategy 1, it is difficult to assess intended outcomes when there are gaps in applying research.
- Strategy 5: Increase Governance Participation: Governance participation and community engagement are critical to SafeDAO’s growth, and we’re pleased to see it receive significant attention. While this strategy has shown promise, there is room to enhance its impact, particularly given the level of funding it received during the last wave of OBRA. Moving forward, it may be helpful to explore alternative ways to improve governance, especially approaches that are tried and true from other ecosystems. For example, Optimism DAO has implemented grant lock-ups and governance participation requirements for grantees, ensuring their active long-term ecosystem alignment and mitigating grant poaching. Additionally, if increasing governance participation is not maintained as a standalone strategy going forward, we can explore mandating governance participation as an overarching KPI for all projects applying to the awareness or other strategies. This ensures that the topic of governance is not completely neglected and left to fall by the wayside.
- Strategy 6: Wildcard: This strategy has been a valuable catch-all for various initiatives, but again, we believe the DAO would benefit from a more focused approach. We propose repurposing this strategy into an operations strategy/budget, which would enable the Strategy Steering Committee to fund essential operational expenses like grants management infrastructure, reporting and analytics, and other SafeDAO improvement expenses. Excess funds could potentially be reallocated to support the security strategy if needed, given its importance in the next wave of OBRA.
Improving Security
Security is perhaps the most critical challenge to address in any crypto ecosystem, and we’re excited to see it being prioritized in the design of OBRA Wave 2. We fully support the creation of a dedicated security strategy focused on the following areas:
- Supporting security-focused projects or solutions for the Safe Protocol: Encouraging innovation in security will strengthen the ecosystem and enhance user trust.
- Supporting ecosystem projects with audit grants or subsidies: This will help bolster the security of the Safe ecosystem and incentivize builder participation in Safe’s module ecosystem.
- The security strategy budget can allocate funds for both security-focused projects and audit grants. This removes the need for a separate program outside of OBRA, saving resources for the DAO and creating a lean, streamlined process.
- Over the longer term, as the ecosystem continues to expand with new projects, it may eventually make sense for the community to consider establishing a dedicated audit subsidy program for SafeDAO, independent from OBRA.
Closing Thoughts
As committed supporters and contributors to SafeDAO, it has been an incredible journey witnessing and participating in the evolution of OBRA in real time. The work done so far has been highly commendable and we’re excited about what comes next!