Proposal: SAFE distribution for users

how ridicule that you must have used ethereum chain and not gnosis chain to qualify, completely ridiculous

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I think the highlight of this proposal is the dynamic SAFE parameters - tx fees and time-weighted value stored. This is an excellent approach.

However, the rest of the proposal fights against the strength of these parameters.

Rewarding mainnet safes exclusively seems brutal. I mostly agree with the third point @calchulus made: safes created before any reasonable expectation for airdrop would filter most sybil attackers (even then, I don’t think this filtering is necessary here - see further below).

The “meaningful amount” goal seems to rise from that mainnet-centric strategy, which is a self-inflicted problem. While Safe spun out from Gnosis, it still grew as Gnosis Safe. Why not use (and encourage use) of the ecosystem the same way Cowswap did? Remove the 400 minimum. Let the bigger safes claim on Ethereum, and have all the smaller safes (be it Ethereum, rollups or altchains) claim on Gnosischain.

Going further, once we forget any minimum amount, and determine airdrop amount solely on gas spent and time-weighted value stored, there’s hardly a downside to rewarding every Safe - before or after feb9 2022. A would-be Sybil attacker who made 100 Safes on a cheap altchain and did 2 transactions on each for a total of ~$20 spent in gas fees would get the same amount as a legitimate historical user who opened a Safe on Ethereum and did one transaction costing him ~$20 in gas. All things considered, legitimate users with a rich Safe history and ample funds should dwarf any Sybil attempt.

If nothing else, skipping Gnosischain users is a strong negative signal against taking chances on the Gnosis ecosystem. Indexing airdrop amount on the Safe ETH/dollar values and/or gas spent would likely result in a minimal decrease for the bigger participants anyway, as I’d wager the amounts involved are negligible. Gnosis Safes secure billions of TVL on mainnet, while the entire TVL of Gnosischain is ~$220M.

As stated, I think the plan would fall short of its first bullet point - “decentralize through wide distribution”.

And needlessly so!

The dynamic SAFE allocation parameters (tx fees and time-weighted value stored) are excellent equalizers. An airdrop solely based on these settings would be unopinionated, decentralized, reward usage, raise awareness and let every current Safe holder feel ownership.

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Obviously anyone who didn’t qualify will probably be upset. I didn’t qualify but I’m not upset, I think it is a good start. A lot of the things you are proposing (minimum amount and early date) seem good ways to stop airdrop hunting. One of your goals was to reward past usage but prefer potential future active governance participants. The way you accomplished this appears to be if they used the product and had a financial stake its more likely they will participate in governance. Seems reasonable. Might I also suggest that Safe has an entire group of people who have a proven track record of involvement in governance and monetary stake in Safe that isn’t just through the use of the product alone. This would be everybody involved in Gnosis governance. The snapshot forum would have records of all the people who participated up and through the vote to allow Safe to break off and fund it. Seems some of these people if they weren’t active users of safe before February would be left behind. Just something to consider.

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Choosing ETH over time is kind of not fair I think. since most multisig host control over contracts or funds that are not ETH based.

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Those who receive it will be happy - those who don’t will complain.

That’s how an airdrop works. While I understand your frustration as a founder, the metrics don’t seem to justify an allocation to other networks.

Take Optimism as an example - at a total of 622 ETH (Safe on Optimism) held on safes, this is 0.037% of the total amount on Ethereum Mainnet (1,679,644 ETH)

This nominal amount is true for other networks - Mainnet seemed to drive most growth.

You point out holding ETH as a major qualifier:

It sounds like transactions (only 2) have an equal weight - this is just receiving assets twice or swapping out of that said ETH etc.

As a company who “own smart contracts exist on more than 7 EVM compatible chains,” I’m confident your organization will qualify for some of this distribution.

I’m grateful for your commitment and usage of the product .

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a couple of thoughts on the proposal. Full disclosure: I’m an owner/co-signers of Safes that have deployed multiple proxies and use them actively for development. I will address a few points that have been already brought up:

  1. concerns for ETH as the only weighted factor

This is the one point I would amend for this proposal as a large number of development teams utilize stable coin to fund their treasury, not ETH. Although ETH balances maybe crucial to have for a regular multisig, it pales in comparison to be as critical as 1) stable coins holdings 2) native token within a treasury. 2) is of course impossible to quantify, which leaves stable coins as optimal shelling point for the distribution. My request for amendment would be to include both ETH, WETH and stable coins holdings over time

  1. concerns on picking Ethereum network users > other chains

Risk model for users on non-Ethereum chains is not comparable to the risk early users took by deploying assets through Safe (and prev: Gnosis Multisig) on Ethereum. I believe active users reward distribution should have causal relationship to a) risks incurred to the users of the early product b) how important the initial $$$ drives subsequent adoption. Let’s also be clear that, with the absence of the early adoption for the original Multisig on Ethereum- we would not have gotten here.

To give an example of what early risks looks like for the first few Safe users, note that the big Parity wallet hack would have been fresh in recent memory and that industry standards for teams would have been to use an institutional solution like custodial wallets.

transaction fees is another contributing factor on top of risks, really active users should at least expect amount quantifiable as kick back for usage on a higher gas cost L1

  1. Lack of incentives for future developments on other chains

I don’t think this is a good argument given that airdrops are rarely proven to drive the product adoption after the fact. Beyond the scope of this distribution, I think it’s a better fit for initiatives like Safe Guardians and subsequent ecosystem allocation to fund future application developments.

Ultimately, IMHO the the distribution criteria satisfies the established goals. My only request for change would be a point to consider stable coins held > time as a factor for weighted allocation.

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Does this data include Safe Guardian’s part?

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Since GnosisSafe spawned from gnosis, I think that people who committed to lock their GNO token for 1 year to support the project instead of staking should get an airdrop, but should be less than the early GnosisSafe users

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  1. An initial distribution based on mainnet seems to focus on longer-term users, while the resources have been set up to allow the community to create proposals that incentivize L2s. As @tschubotz mentioned, there is 40% of SAFE supply in the SafeDAO treasury that can be allocated with proposals to these other L2 Safe chains.

  2. Including stablecoins is a valid point as the determined value is straightforward and many teams have held a large portion of reserves in stables learning from the '17/18 market cycle. A large amount of the NFT market seems manipulable. If NFTs were considered as part of the value it might make sense to choose an allow-list of top NFT collections based on a set of metrics. If there are oracles that can derive the value from multiple reliable exchanges, that could be used for price, or using OpenSea prices.

Major Ethereum staking tokens such as Rocket Pool’s $rETH and Lido’s $stETH also seem like important additions to the consideration of the airdrop. These staking protocols have provided key roles in moving Ethereum’s Beacon Chain forward.

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It seems like a good idea to see a future proposal to reward Gnosis Chain users.

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Is there a reason to not include users of this OGs set up GitHub - gnosis/MultiSigWallet: Allows multiple parties to agree on transactions before execution.?

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It doesn’t seem so as the topic title is SAFE distribution for *users*.

It would be good to receive confirmation from the Gnosis team on this.

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Gonna jump to some of the main concerns rather than address the whole proposal.

Adding an allocation based on eth value over time is fair to some extent. Those that might not deal with eth but hold a significant amount of value would fall through the cracks. If the purpose of this allocation is to reward trust based on the value held, perhaps a better method would be to reward activity. for example, the average time between transactions? average no. of transactions within a month?

The gas spent multiplier is a nice thing to have but it’s basically reimbursing operational costs that we were prepared to spend. It is however a good indicator to the above comment in order to calculate activity.

so, using eth balances to calculate a portion of allocations has its pros and cons. I feel like there are more cons and it should be reconsidered.

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Yes, this is only for the user distribution. Guardians will learn about their allocation at a later point.

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Yep, also, there are two community treasuries that directly relate to GnosisDAO/Gnosis Chain with the 15% GnosisDAO allocation and the 5% joint treasury. The latter could exactly be used to support initiatives that benefit both projects (Safe and Gnosis Chain) such as an additional airdrop for Safe users on Gnosis Chain. This is really just the beginning of the distribution, I’ll expect much more to come once governance is set up.

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For 2)

The issue is about where to exactly draw the line. @tschubotz s proposal limits to just ETH as this is the native asset. But if you start adding more it already opens pandoras box. If you add DAI, why not USDC and then USDT, but what about aDAI? or the DAI that is controlled by the SAFE but in a Uniswap LP position? People would always argue that the step to the next asset in line is marginal.

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There should be airdrops for GNO holders, but this is a discussion to be had on forum.gnosis.io

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We spend a lot of time in 2019/2020 pushing legacy Gnosis Multisig users to switch to Gnosis Safe, so most of them are anyways early adopters of Safe. Also it doesn’t really make sense to distribute to wallets where we do not even provide a user interface anymore or actively maintain the codebase.

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Agreed, this is likely the same case for adding NFTs which I’d consider more subjective than stablecoins.

NFTs
Only top collections could be selected. However, defining the cutoff of collections to include in order to avoid low-quality price manipulated projects is subjective. The upside of including NFTs in some form is growing Safe’s future adoption in the NFT communities.

ETH staking protocols
For Ethereum staking protocols, it seems like there could be a more clear cutoff, e.g., $rETH and $stETH. These protocols have been important in moving Ethereum towards The Merge. Staking protocols have increased Ethereum adoption, brought awareness and education to The Merge, and likely have had an impact on stabilizing ETH price.

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“It is empowering to own a part of the product they use.” - @tschubotz

:100:: Safe is a core component of crypto and it’s awesome to have the opportunity to be a part of its ownership. It would be useful and interesting to study successful businesses that have co-op models from the past.

Questions

  1. What are the next steps: How long will the Safe team and community review feedback and make potential adjustments?

  2. Are there rough target time frames for the Safe users and SafeDAO Guardians distribution to take place?

  3. Is it possible to distribute $SAFE tokens before value is assigned to it? This could potentially have a major tax benefit (Not tax advice) in that the value gained from the tokens received might be treated as a capital asset rather than income in jurisdictions like the U.S.

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