Before I respond, let me first state the amendments we’re making to the proposal:
- Lowering the asking amount to 30m; 20m for current employees, 10m for key hires that are currently in motion
- Unallocated POKT will be held in escrow by PNF
- Quarterly reports about allocated and vested POKT – you will be able to track when this POKT is unlocked
I want to be clear to everyone here - I don’t want anyone thinking that this proposal is being forced through or else PNI, or the protocol, dies. This isn’t a bailout. We aren’t going to zero if this proposal doesn’t pass. This isn’t asking for 30m to get V1 out the door. We may have attrition, and it will be more difficult to recruit, but myself and the team will continue building.
That said, it obviously does help. Everyone building in PNI (and future builders) deserve more POKT, and that’s a fact. It’s up to you to decide whether I, and by extension, the rest of my team, can execute on our roadmap moving forward.
Objectively, everything has improved over the last 6 to 12 months despite the price of POKT going down:
- Our quality of service has improved from 400ms to a consistent 200ms.
- While still difficult because of testing, it has become easier to contribute to v0 and v1 takes all the lessons learned and is magnitudes easier to contribute to.
- While we were transparent before, we’re even more transparent now.
- 15% of previously subsidized relays are now paid.
- Inflation is under control – PNI lit the torch with WAGMI and the DAO carried the torch with FREN.
- The effects of controlling inflation will continue to be felt as we continue to drive natural buy demand through the Portal.
- V1 has made progress from a spec to a happy path MVP, and continues trekking on.
- We support more chains.
- We have more nodes on bare metal than ever before.
- Our flagship product, the Portal, has become faster with a complete rewrite of the backend in Go, allowing us to make changes more easily across the board. Our Partnership API was spun up in two weeks as a result of these changes.
As for our missteps, they all fall on me. I have always cared about the ecosystem more than PNI’s success as a company, but the fact is, we should be building a business, not a non-profit. We over-hired. I misallocated POKT. I chose to be generous with early employee vesting. We are pushing the boundaries on every single aspect of a bleeding edge technology; governance, the way that we work, economics, distributed systems. It’s going to be messy. And yes, we could have been better. Notwithstanding these mistakes, the direction of change has consistently been up and to the right, since our inception. The best we can do now is acknowledge, learn, and not make these or any other avoidable mistakes again.
Related to this proposal, I understand that we are setting a precedent for future funding of organizations within our ecosystem, which introduces risk to the DAO of being looted of its treasury in the future if multiple organizations follow PNI’s lead.
PNI should not be considered a special entity when it comes to a grant that incentivizes employees and contractors of companies. However, we are currently the core developers of the Pocket Network project – we’re building v1, driving the majority of growth to the protocol, and building much of the core tooling – and we have committed these funds to a standard program of 4 year vesting packages to current and future employees. We are committing to transparency about how these funds are allocated, with quarterly reports about allocated and vested POKT. These funds are not going into a black box.
It is reasonable that as founders of Pocket Network, and as the core developers of Pocket Network, we would be trusted with a larger sum. So, as to the risk of precedent and future looting of the DAO treasury, I have faith that the DAO will be prudent about its allocations of future POKT and allocate large sums only to entities who hold the same level of responsibility and who have earned the same trust.
Now that PNF and PNI have split, this makes PNI like any other company in the ecosystem. Any future grants that we submit from the DAO will be for open-source public goods that we build and maintain, just like any other contributor, according to the same set of rules. This solves several concerns by aligning PNI’s incentives with the community and enabling continuous incentives for everyone pushing this project forward internally.
With all this said I want to address some of the points made in the comments above:
We have lacked the processes to integrate and support external core contributors in the past. The process has always been difficult, and given the nature and priorities of what the protocol team has to do, it has required deeper knowledge to be able to contribute in the first place. Another challenge is that the tendermint codebase has many nuances that, unless you’re deep in the weeds, you won’t catch right off the bat. There is a lot of missing context to learn as to why design decisions have been made.
Now that we have established a process, it has become easier to contribute to V0 over the last 6 - 12 months. We are designing V1 from the lessons learned over these last 2.5 years. We’ve already had multiple external contributors to V1 at this point - because it’s significantly easier.
Laxman’s point doesn’t have anything to do with external contributors. That has always been an independent process. We made the decisions with POKT vesting based on how we felt we had derisked what we had built at the time.
We have done all of this. From q4 last year, everyone began being evaluated on performance and we gave everyone in the company equity. Our salary burn is around $400k, a full 50% cut from where we were. We have the bare minimum across frontend, backend and devops. We will continue to keep our protocol team as is. If we cut more, things will break. When it comes to infrastructure, people only notice when it breaks. We don’t want any of the applications using Pocket to be in that position. It’s much more difficult to gain a customer back once you’ve lost them.
Our largest spend is in infrastructure, and we have an aggressive plan to move as much as we can from the cloud to baremetal and outsource the altruist system to the existing network of nodes. This is the highest leverage move we can make at this point. This does not happen overnight, and everyone we have on the devops team is all hands on deck to either migrate our infrastructure or launch new chains.
I think it’s important to emphasize that PNI is not a one man show. We work closely as a leadership team and I have full faith in Arthur and Laxman to make the right operational decisions for us to steer PNI towards the vision I’m setting. That said, we all have our own part to play and I believe the leadership team we have built today can get us where we need to go.
This is a completely separate proposal. I do believe we need to be more aggressive with reducing inflation, more so than SER (will respond accordingly there as well). We are preparing another proposal to bring inflation down further. Incentivizing the network to move to a predominantly bare metal or owned infrastructure setup is what’s going to help us in the short term and long run.
Several people continue to speak as if nothing has changed. We laid out our plan at our State of the Union event in November. We’ve laid out our roadmap with each function. We have clear goals and deliverables. We’re actively working with the community to assist us across the board. Arthur laid out all of this in his post. We just need to execute. PNI and the project will survive.
Judge us on our execution now and moving forward, not the past.
Our mission has always been to enable as many people, organizations and developers as possible to build on top of Pocket. This has never changed. We would not have the ecosystem we have today if that wasn’t the case. We have continued to move in the right direction. Now that PNF has been empowered by PIP-26, Pocket will never be a single-headed organization.
We are. We currently have had 4 non-PNI contributors to v1 with one full time active contributor. This is because the team has learned from the difficulty of contributing to v0 and have established the systems and processes for people to contribute to v1.
Yes, there are equity incentives for everyone in the company. The glaring hole that this proposal seeks to fill is the incentives with the network. PNI doesn’t succeed unless the protocol succeeds, and it’s important to align those incentives properly.
I have amended the proposal to reflect everyone’s comments here. I hope this is sufficient for the community to move forward with.
To wrap up, thank you for all of the feedback. There is no playbook for anything we’ve accomplished over the last 2.5 years, and I continue to be impressed with everyone in this community.
At the end of the day, I continue to be beyond ecstatic about what the future holds for us.