PIP-38: Re-electing Michael O'Rourke to the Foundation

Proposals Improvements
30

Thanks for the feedback - I’ll give my thoughts on each one.

This doesn’t address the conflict of interest concerns. For example, if I were to step down as CEO and be chairman of the board, I would still have Grove equity. In the community call I mentioned that 95% of my time would be spent on the Foundation. The rest of my time would be spent either in a monthly board meeting or high level strategy discussions for the company. It is in good hands with the current leadership. In addition, the POKT grants help reinforce my incentives for the network, not just Grove to succeed.

I should clarify, the POKT for this proposal isn’t going to me - my intention is to distribute it to everyone who helped build and participate in Shannon. Yes, this includes Grove employees but also everyone else who has participated up until now and moving forward. I don’t intend to take any for myself in this distribution. The same goes for the price based milestones. While I am taking accountability for it, I am not single handedly going to drive the price up myself. It’s going to require the work and coordination of many people participating in the effort.

Based on this I don’t believe it’s needed to tie success to a listing. I would argue (to point #4), to get to those price points a T1 listing would be a part of that journey.

We should have it suspended until Shannon. Launching Shannon with a 1:1 burn/mint is the right approach. It is very easy to determine which gateways are attempting to game the system based on self dealing and the Foundation should remit airdrops to honest gateways until we have a trustless solution.

I’m not convinced this is needed. Everything in the proposal related to marketing and economics will help drive the process. There are many different factors that result in a listing, but if you can boil it down to one metric, it’s demand for the token. The goal is to start that flywheel outlined in the proposal and evolve from there.

I added a two year time window per feedback from others. As I mentioned in another response, the nodes on the network can choose to take over consensus at any period of time and take control of the protocol parameters. I view this as the ultimate fallback and is part of the beauty of blockchains. It’s social consensus that drives this, as through this eventual vote.

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Thanks for the feedback and yes I tried to front run most of what I thought could be said as a dissenting opinion, though there has been some valid feedback since posting.

I think I’ve touched on many of your thoughts and observations in other responses but to recap:

  • I’ve said this in other responses but I hope everyone understands that this isn’t something that can be tackled alone. Whether it’s existing Foundation contractors or pulling in others. It can’t be done alone.

  • I’ll have oversight directly from the folks working on the Foundation and given the same level of transparency I am committing from the community as well. In my working history with @shane and @Adz, they would raise hell if I was doing things outside of their own expectations and integrity.

  • I am assuming to hit these price targets we’ll have been listed in T1 exchanges

  • I believe that the 30 day trailing average (will edit @Lucky55) is sufficient to avoid any kind of manipulation.

  • I am happy to put a 4 year vest with one year cliffs (will edit cc @vojtech) on any POKT that I earn - though I would not feel comfortable impose that restriction on others

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Are you being ironic? The one thing most clear in this proposal is the opposite. The proposal gives Michael complete autonomy, the opposite of accountability. Even if he makes the best promises in the world, they are just promises, and there is ultimately no accountability if he is the only director and if the DAO has no control over funds.

That is a very fair request. I would still be extremely leery of giving all control to one person, but at the very least that would paint this entire proposal in a completely different light. Given the choice between doing what’s best for Pocket the network and giving a competitive edge to Grove, as long as he is CEO we cannot expect him to put the network first.

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Theoretically speaking,there would be nothing preventing a centralized RPC provider from forking Shannon and running it on their back end instead of just running the gateway server…

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Let me start by saying my comment is not about Mike @o_rourke per se. I’ve always disliked when people insist on telling me what I can and cannot do. You are not me; you do not know or comprehend my tolerance level. Only I know whether or not I have the will to persevere in anything I put my mind to. For this reason, I will not dwell on whether Mike is capable of handling the tasks he proposed.

However, I urge the DAO to reject this proposal in its current form to remain consistent with how we have approached every other proposal of similar magnitude, such as C0d3r’s recent proposal and CREDs. There are too many moving pieces all bundled together in one convoluted proposal. Mike is free to submit a proposal for each item independently so the DAO can discuss and vote on them separately, or we can consider the following:

I posted this yesterday on the DEN, but here are my recommendations on how we can move forward:

  1. Elect three new board members at PNF, ensuring the following skill sets are covered: legal, tokenomics, and technical.
  2. Mike can post a new proposal for a vote where he can ask to be elected as a trustee for the DAO or any title we decide upon, operating between the DAO and PNF.
  3. The DAO would grant Mike a total of six months to enact each of his ideas. He would need to get a quorum with the three PNF directors to move anything forward. This structure will add checks and balances.
  4. The DAO should use the token price, as Mike suggests in his proposal, as an indicator of whether his plans are effective or ineffective. This would require the DAO to step back from certain decision-making processes.
  5. The DAO would retain the ability to vote on key changes and the ability to override decisions made by both PNF and Mike if they do not align with our vision.
  6. Each board member will form smaller teams (agencies) with community members who have similar skills to assess any proposals and address unforeseen issues. For example, @Shane and @Rawthil can form a team to handle all things related to tokenomics.
  7. All decisions will be posted on the forum for transparency, allowing the community to assess them. It will be the duty of each board member to defend any scrutinized decisions in writing to the DAO.

To summarize: Mike only needs to convince three elected individuals to get behind his ideas instead of the entire DAO. I believe this is both fair and just. It incorporates @Jinx 's idea for a DAO trustee, gives Mike the freedom he needs to be effective, while the power of the DAO remains intact. This approach is similar to how the United States government operates. We, the voters, elect members to the three branches. They vote on ideas in accordance with our desires. After the Supreme Court members vote on an issue, they independently write an opinion piece explaining their vote.

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Providing a concise answer is challenging with so much to address, so I’ll begin with a brief introduction that serves as a TL;DR. I hope this helps readers understand and engage with the longer discussion to follow.

This post should be a 10 - 15 minute read (depending on the reader’s fluency).

General Thoughts

Despite the challenges and reservations, I ultimately support Michael’s proposal. Given the limited options available, this course of action appears to be the best choice we have.

Since I started to participate in the POKT community, I have met two different kinds of people: the builders and the crypto venturers (who come in very different colors).
Builders (among whom I like to include myself) do not really care about price. Well, we care, but it is not our main focus. We build solid stuff and think about details and edge cases. We prepare the rocket to get to the moon and make sure that if you put fuel in it, we will get there. But we leave the fuel to be provided by others (or hope that it spontaneously appears in the tanks).

Our builders have designed a SOLID protocol. Shannon code is top quality, based on formal theory, and designed to be easy to build upon. The tokenomics in the work for Shannon will encode the golden promises of crypto: permissionless participation, self-sustainability, and supply stability (or even attrition, wrongly called “deflation”). Sadly, the price does not care.

Something I learned from getting deep into economic theory (deep for a non-economist at least) is that POKT price cannot (currently) be logically pressured to increase its relative price against a foreign currency (a.k.a. “numba go up”). We need more paid relays, and we don’t have them; that’s it. Stop asking for tokenomics miracles.

The second group of people in the community, the crypto venturers, mostly care little about tech and only see the token price, the total supply, and the APY. These are the guys providing fuel to our rocket (because someone has to pay the bills of devs and node runners). Among them, there are some knowledgeable people who seem to understand the price whimsical actions better than what economic theory can explain. However, in the POKT Network, we decided not to listen (me included above all probably) and head on the builders’ path. This seems to be a bad decision, given that fuel is not getting into the rocket…

This brings us to a crossroads. We could stay stoic on the builders’ path, retain our DAO, and slow but highly consensual movement or jump into the uncertain and highly dynamic world of crypto venturers, adapting to their liking in hopes of bringing more of them on board. It goes without saying that taking the latter road is incompatible with keeping a fully operational DAO and PNF, as it requires many fast decisions and mostly a responsible one whom we can blame if we lose the bet.

For me, the builders’ path has been walked for about a year and a half. We improved our metrics and laid the ground tokenomics values for a healthy ecosystem. The result was price volatility and complaints every time the price was not going up. The promised land of mint=burn is still far on the horizon (~25B relays per day), and the community starts to wonder how much runway we have left. And me too. Staying on this path is the less stressful but might lead us to a heat death scenario.

The other path is starting to play the game of the community that is most likely to give us fuel for our rocket, the crypto venturers. It means that we will let go of some economic variables (mainly token emission control) in favor of creating appealing numbers of APY, which could in turn create an upward trend in the token price and keep feeding this with new capital inflow (new chains/servicers, new holders) hoping for a FOMO effect of high APYs and upward token prices. All this while keeping the supply growth restrained (as much as possible). In a few words, try to go back to the game that took us to ATH, but this time without a DAO to let us hit the brakes discretionary and fast. All that we need to do is to give up our vote power and have a victim to sacrifice if this goes the wrong way (in the end, no one wants to be responsible for killing the protocol).

This leads me to a difficult choice, which is to take the second path and support Michael.

I cannot ensure that the builders’ path that I firmly defended all this time can lead us to the promised land. I still think that what we are building can slingshot us to Mars, but we need to get to the moon first. Being that the only way to play the crypto game is to be fast, I don’t find Michael’s demand of pausing the DAO irrational. Moreover, I would oppose passing any of these proposals if we don’t have a fast structure and a head to cut. Nobody is responsible for failed proposals passed with N votes, but we will have a sole responsibility in this case. That is the price Michael will be paying, being the sole responsible for losing this game and wrecking the ship.

Regarding how we got to this point, the resignation of the board and their performance, which I addressed in this other post, I will not comment any further here.

Also, the known and real threat of forking cannot be denied; it is not nice, but those are the rules of the game, as violent as they sound.

On the DAO and Reflexivity

The proposed economic path of following Soros’ reflexivity goes against everything I have learned about equilibrium, and I do not agree with it, so I won’t go deep into why this is good or bad or how economically sound it is. Let’s say it is a way of explaining some economic processes that are highly related to social science and that, sadly, seem to prime in the crypto world.

What I will argue here is that we cannot effectively implement the Reflexivity feedback loops if we keep a DAO voting over every decision.

I began to work in the POKT ecosystem when PNI (now Grove) and PNF were a single thing but were already starting to be formally separated. That year, 2022, was not a good one, with POKT price falling and supply growth running wild. The problem of the supply growth (“inflation”) was first addressed in the forum in 12/2021, the WAGMI proposal proposal, and it took 4 months for the DAO to deploy an answer to an evident supply growth problem, and its form was the PUP-13, a washed-out version of the original proposal. The DAO was late and wrong, passing a patch instead of a solution (what WAGMI proposed). This delay cost us a 60% increase in the monetary base. It didn’t take long to realize that we needed a solution, not a patch, leading to proposals that never came to be, like PUP-15 and PUP-15+ (naming conventions were not a thing yet, I think). Six months later, we ended up with a patch bundle called FREN (PUP-22). By that date, June-August 2022, the panic was on us, resulting in many more patchy things being pushed into the network, namely PIP-22 (this triggered my rage and initial involvement in the community), PUP-29, SER (PUP-30) and ARR (PUP-32), all in a single year (without counting unsuccessful ones). What I’m trying to highlight here is that despite the existence of a clear problem (supply growth, or wrongly called inflation), the DAO took a lot of time to engage and never produced a solution. It was only able to agree on patches that came in late.

It’s interesting also to note how the very inefficiency of the DAO to handle hype/FOMO cycles fueled by high APY/emissions led to the creation of ARR and posterior stability, which basically killed the feedback loop that Michael is now trying to revive. So, if you agree with Reflexivity or Michael’s plan, the DAO as it is now controlling every aspect of the network cannot function.

However, let’s be clear that the ATH that was probably achieved by a FOMO that is explainable using Reflexivity is not guaranteed to occur again. In my opinion, it is more speculation than economic theory behind it…

Reflexivity and the Long Term

The proposed path is not sustainable in the long term; no hype cycle lasts forever.
I think that, if deployed correctly, this path can lead to new buy-ins lured by higher APY (fed with higher supply growth) and kept in the ecosystem farming yield and airdrops. Higher buy-ins will help with liquidity, liquidity with exchanges, and exchanges with Moon. But it won’t last.

We are buying time here, and we will be buying it with dilution. There is an unavoidable end to the hype cycle that leads to the negative cycle. We don’t know when we will reach that point, but before that happens, we need to have grown our traffic. For you, Michael, the goal might be the token price; for me, it is the paid volume. Because I know that with enough paid volume, we will thrive regardless of the next shiny thing in the crypto venturers’ minds.

So, whatever you do, the building and growth should not cease (nor change direction, in my opinion). I can accept giving you control over economic variables of the network, but I will keep being noisy on technical stuff because I think that we are going in the right direction there.

Narrative and Community Growth

This is not my strongest suit; in fact, I probably go by wearing a swim brief here (really? “Sunga” is “swim brief” in English? I was hoping for “men’s beach thong” or something… you English people lack style…).

The problem of narrative has been a constant topic in the community. My understanding is that any decent narrative is regarded as fantastic if the price is up, but the same one is the root of all evil if the price is down. I think that there is only so much that a narrative can do to help a protocol, but if the narrative does not have the correct tools to operate in the target audience, we will always fail. I cannot say if the current narrative is good or bad; I personally think it is better than what we had before and much more concise and focused on our technical strengths.

Some of our previous public-facing numbers, which attracted the initial community growth, were based on things related to APY, relay volumes (which were not completely organic), and price trends. I don’t think that previous narratives were better, and they even cost us credibility (i.e., Tornado Cash, revenue calculation based on minting).

So, I think that the narrative will fix itself if the price goes up. The only thing we need to do is to avoid technical screw-ups. With this last thing, I want to bring up the role of AI that Michael is proposing to put at the forefront of the network. We worked a lot to keep the hype shit out of POKT Network’s approach to AI, and I hope that this is kept like this.

We do not have room for technical nonsense in our narrative after we have worked so much to keep it serious. You want to highlight APYs and other make-up numbers that crypto loves? Go ahead.

On the Role of Grove

I would like to express my opinions on some of the topics you touch upon regarding Grove:

The AI litepaper was not produced by Grove; it was an initiative of the PNF. It might show the values that Grove has for LLM inference, but it is only through the input of Olshansky. It is not as much from Grove as it is from the rest of the POKT Network.

It is undeniable that Grove (formerly known as PNI) has improved since it was separated from PNF. However, this development cannot be regarded as open. Grove’s portal remains closed source, and there is no open information on how it works. This is OK; you are a private company. But I have many questions:

  • Why have you closed the open data streams that fed POKTscan and allowed the public to see the stats of the network?
  • Why refuse to provide very basic QoS data in the format provided by Nodie’s Gateway server?
  • Why don’t you provide data on incidents? I can recall two of them that made us work like hell and never got an answer. Never, radio silence from Grove.

This makes me wonder how open your decision-making process will be if we have you as sole director. Grove is not an example of transparency; “default to open” is not one of their values. This is especially important when you will be managing the whole DAO treasury, which will get bigger and bigger due to higher DAO allocation and supply growth rates.

How big will be the influence from Grove (employees or interests) in your decisions?

Proposed Actionable Changes

I will go one by one here:

Services per Node to 1

Thanks. I have advocated for this since 02/2023. It was not until Shane revamped the concept in GANDALF (a nice name goes a long way) that the DAO started to listen.

Sliding Supply Growth 5%->20%->30%->20%->30% …

So, you propose to fix RTTM, wait until we go from the current 5% to 20%, and keep it there, readjusting to 20% every 6 months or when it goes above 30%.

The first thing that I see here is that you expect to see the relays go from 500M/day to 2B a day in the near future. If we fix the RTTM that produces 5% supply growth today, with 500M relays/day, we need 4x relays to get 4x supply growth. Or are you planning to hard reset it to 20% supply growth with 500M relays?

Keep in mind that if the DAO allocation goes to 75% but the supply growth is not at 20%, the node runners will bleed.

10x on New Chains/Services

I believe that you will keep an eye on them and do some due diligence before whitelisting new chains. It is not a bad idea, but everyone will want to be creating new chains to farm yield.

Gateway Fee = 0

LOL, what? I know that you were advocating for a reduction, but zero is just too much. We need minimal friction for fake relays. I really see no upside here. If you have to buy at least 5K POKT to stake a node, why not have to pay a little for the traffic you send?

This opens up the door to spurious traffic. Strongly against. It is a step backward.

DAO Allocation to 75%

Well, not a problem if we are at 25% supply growth. The node runners will earn approximately the same:
Today we earn 0.75*220K = 165K POKT per day, the same as 0.15*220K *5 = 165K (given that 5x220 is 25% supply growth). If we stay at 20%, node runners will earn less than today (unless POKT price goes up).

Also, regarding:

Adaptation: We will adapt this parameter to maintain Node/Validator inflation aligned with the current schedule as annual inflation is adjusted.

and connected to:

Keep in mind that if the DAO allocation goes to 75% but the supply growth is not at 20%, the node runners will bleed.

You plan to increase the DAO take as the relays increase to keep node runners’ income constant?

Reduce Stake to 5K POKT

I agree on this. The number of nodes makes no difference today; the staking amount should be smaller. Also, it does not affect block size too much, as far as I know.

Marketing Around APY and New Services

No comments, seems OK.

Reposition Brand AI-forward, Support Beyond RPC

I like this. I will be watching closely to see what you actually intend to do. There is not much information on what this means to you.

Compensation Package

Let’s make a table…

# Milestone Reward POKT Reward USD POKT Market Cap Top # Years to get there (pure speculation from me)
1 Shipping Shannon 48 M ?? ?? 0
2 Price: USD 0.5 48 M 24 M ~65 1
3 Price: USD 1 48 M 48 M ~30 2
4 Price: USD 3 98 M 294 M ~15 2
5 Price: USD 5 98 M 490 M ~10 3

The first milestone is not a valid one, in my opinion. The DAO already paid for that, and I don’t see how you being in charge should affect its development. Maybe something above the mere shipping, like an increase in relays (new ATH), could be rewarded.

Milestones 4 and 5 seem too much, in my opinion. Maybe I’m too poor… Why is the reward in POKT doubled when the POKT price is multiplied by 3 between milestone 3 and 4? Is that a typo? Are there examples of such high rewards in the industry?

NOTE: After I wrote this Michael clarified that the tokens are to be shared among many participants involved in the fulfillment of such milestones. In that case the new question would be, what’s the maximum Michael’s take on these tokens? because they are pretty high nonetheless…

Closing Remarks

Wow, you read the whole thing? You have my respect. Wait, you skipped to the end to see some elevated conclusion? Shame on you!

Well, there is not much else to say. It took me ~5 hours to write this. In the meantime, the Poktopus Den produced ~900 messages that I won’t read…

I don’t know how much time we have to keep discussing this, but there will not be much time given the current market volatility. We better make up our minds and try to bring calm to… us? as soon as possible…

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@AmishBatman, who else would be responsible if @o_rourke is making all the decisions? That’s accountability—you can have autonomy and still be accountable.

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37

Y’all are wild out here. Straight up diluting yourselves by giving millions of tokens away to someone that has shown makes terrible decisions.

This proposal reads like the last one, only worse: PEP-49: PNI Compensation (Amended)

You all know there are other options right? Michael is not the be all end all. If it were up to me, I would put @shane in charge of everything. Give him full control of the Foundation and the DAO.

I’m also surprised to see the lack of appreciation on Ben and Dermots post. Actually, maybe I’m not surprised.

This is the last time I will post here. For the first time i can say I am truly done with Pocket Network. Wish I could say its been fun.

Good riddance!

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Opinions on this proposal aside, for the good of POKT it is crucial that any approved changes be legitimate, which means they must either:

To be able to proceed as currently proposed, amendments are required to both documents:

  • this proposal must include clearly written amendments to the Articles/Constitution anywhere that Mike’s proposed restructuring would be non-compliant
  • this proposal must pass with a supermajority, which means 75% approval by DAO participants who voted on the resolution, with the vote lasting no fewer than 14 days and a quorum of at least 25% of DAO participants who have cast a vote within the 12 months immediately prior to the date of the vote
  • the Article amendments must be officially filed with the secretary, exactly as written in the proposal, by the director(s)
  • the Constitution must then be updated in GitHub exactly as written in the proposal

As the interim director, it will be @shane’s duty to see these changes are approved properly as outlined above.

For an example of the clarity that should be provided for amendments, see here.

As for where I see conflicts between this proposal and the current Articles/Constitution…

Foundation Articles:

  • 1.5 requires supermajority approval (75% described above) for all ordinary/special resolutions of the Foundation, which includes director appointments/removals and amendments to the Articles
  • 4.5 empowers the DAO to govern the appointment of directors, via 1.5 and 4.17
  • 4.6 compels all new directors to resign from other positions of executive authority within the DAO, to avoid conflicts of interest
  • 4.8 empowers the DAO to remove directors
  • 4.17 compels directors to carry out with best efforts all DAO Resolutions (approved proposals)
  • 4.35 requires directors to disclose information to the DAO as necessary to ensure informed DAO Resolutions
  • 4.38 limits director compensation
  • 4.42-4.44 various controls that give the DAO oversight on Foundation spending
  • 6.3-6.6 empowers the DAO to govern the appointment of supervisors
  • 6.8 empowers the DAO to remove supervisors
  • 6.17 compels supervisors to carry out with best efforts all DAO Resolutions (approved proposals)

Constitution:

  • 4.7-4.10 repeats elements of the Foundation Articles re deferral of directors to the DAO
  • 6.8 states that all parameters not otherwise specified will be governed by majority approval
  • 8.11 states that protocol upgrades will be governed by PIPs
  • 8.14 states that no foundation article amendments can be made without DAO approval
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Well @JackALaing, you sure did design a fine system to prevent centralized control :grimacing::sweat_smile:

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A summary of my thoughts:

  1. Whatever the backstory of mutual loss of confidence in each other between O’Rourke and the previous PNF board, that ship has sailed. The founder is requesting to re-unify POKT leadership under himself, and we might as well get behind this vision as preferable to all alternate outcomes.
  2. If O’Rourke is asking the DAO to trust him by handing over to him the keys to both the treasury and the parameters, I do not think it is too much in return for the DAO to ask O’Rourke to trust the DAO to not use it’s supermajority vote to oust him without extreme cause or to use it’s majority to capriciously override his funding and parameter choices. The call to “suspend the DAO,” even if for a defined period of time, should be dropped; it is bad for PR, bad for token price and is not even an action that the DAO has the power to undertake within the constraints of the current constitution. The compensation package can be structured in such a manner to protect both O’Rourke and the DAO in case things do go south in the future (see below)
  3. Re the outlined economic platform, I find his understanding and applications of the theories of reflexivity, shock and supply-side buy pressure to be misguided with greater chance of directly contributing to negative price movement than positive price movement. Nonetheless, none of the proposed actions are particularly harmful and some of the ideas presented are quite good (such as putting to good use the work done a year ago to turn RTTM into an array). One proposal in particular I think is absolutely essential for providing necessary runway to the project, namely raising inflation in combination with radically increasing the DAO allocation. In addition, the case for the benefit of agility has merit. I am therefore ok handing over the keys of the car to O’Rourke within certain bounds (see below).

The first summary point above is standalone.

Some details to flesh out the second summary point are below:

  • In order to stay within the constitution, the proposed action should simply be to appoint O”Rouke as a director of PNF. This is an action the DAO is constitutionally enabled to make. Since the board is currently vacant, this will make him, upon appointment, the de facto sole director.
  • If the DAO goes through all the trouble to gather the 75% of the vote to pass this action, cannot O’Rourke trust the DAO to block any non-meritorious effort to oust him or dilute his authority by adding directors? He would just need to convince 25% of the voters to stay the course with him at the helm.
  • Wording the proposal to name him to be the “sole director” does not have meaning within the constitution. The addition of the word “sole” is unnecessary and could lead to constitutional challenges.
  • Wording the proposal to include any action of the nature of “suspend the DAO” does not have meaning within the constitution. It is unnecessary and could lead to constitutional challenges.
  • By “constitutional challenges” i mean that Shane, acting in capacity as interim director of the PNF could (and should) find the proposal to be unconstitutional and toss out the results and refuse to hand over the keys.
  • Greater confidence is conveyed to the market place, and thus to $POKT price, if the founder of the project and the POKT DAO are working together. Bypassing the constitutional process is not a good look
  • If, despite the above, O’Rourke insists that suspending of the DAO for two years (or whatever else similar to that effect) is non-negotiable in order to avoid nuclear war, then the proposal should at least be reshaped to be, first and foremost, a proposed constitutional amendment that spells out the exact wording of the textual change to the constitution that will enable whatever else follows to be constitutional. I see that @Jackalaing commented to this effect, so I defer to him. That being said, I really think that this proposal (or set of proposals) can be negotiated to everyone’s satisfaction in a manner that avoids the need for any constitutional changes.
  • A lot of good ideas have been floated on how to tweak the proposed milestone payouts in order to protect the community’s interests. None quite hit the mark yet and work should continue over the next few days on this front. In addition, if O’Rourke agrees to work with the DAO under the shadow of the possibility of a 75% vote of no confidence, then it is only fair to make sure the wording is such as to protect his interests in the event that DAO were every to take that step. [I just read Jack’s reference to Article 4.38 regarding limits to director compensation; I need to look at the wording of the text, but I imagine there may be way to provide the spirit of what O-Rourke is asking for while staying compliant to this article].
  • Taking cues from how compensation packages tend to be structured in the equities world is a good place to start, as those have been refined over decades.
  • For example, the DAO could grant options to O’Rourke to purchase $POKT from the PNF treasury at various price points and vesting at certain milestones. E.g., vesting immediately could be options to “purchase” (eg swap for USDT) TBD million $POKT at 0.3 USDT, 0.6 USDT, 1.8 USDT and 3USDT. Vesting upon shipping Shannon could be options priced at 0.1 USDT. This, I think, would satisfy most of the concerns the community has raised, while also protecting O’Rourke from the DAO, as certain options could vest day one and aren’t revocable even if he is removed as director. I think this also stays compliant with the Article on compensation limits, as the options would have negligible book value at current market prices.
  • Whatever form the above milestone-type payments take, I suggest that O’Rourke and the DAO negotiate over the next few days a split between what adheres to him as founder of the project, and what adheres to PNF, for the director(s) to distribute as fiduciaries of the PNF treasury. The first portion goes irrevocably to O’Rourke no matter what; the control of the second portion would either be with O’Rourke, if he is still director at the time of the relevant milestone, or would be with whoever succeeds him, if he steps down or is removed before the milestone is achieved.
  • Wording regarding control of the DAO treasury should take care to remain constitutional. One way I could foresee doing this is: (a) suspend all current DAO initiatives that require recurring funding, (b) turn more or less 95% of current DAO treasury and 95% of incoming DAO allocation over to the PNF to steward, with the recommendation (but not requirement) that PNF continue funding the current initiates. A small portion (e.g., 5% or so) could possibly be retained by the DAO to give DAO ability to directly fund a few items that are not a priority item to PNF. The PNF portion itself should be specified as to split between what portion gets escrowed to cover future milestone payments and what portion is available to the PNF for current discretionary spends.
  • Re potential conflicts of interest, I personally don’t see any conflict between him leading PNF and Grove simultaneously. I saw Jack’s reference to Article 4.6. I’m not sure yet the relevance of this article to O’Rourke’s executive position at Grove; I’d have to see the exact wording of the article. Note that “within the DAO” does not on face value mean “within the Pocket ecosystem”.
  • See also @breezytm comment; lots of good ideas there

Some details to flesh out the third summary point are below:

  • Please see @RawthiL comment; I agree with much of what he wrote

  • In particular, to think that the supply-side buy pressure that happened in 2021 in the midst of a bull run and the euphoria of a shiny new first-to-market token can be recreated seven years into a project wrought with glaring missteps, competitors crowding the space, and during a down/stagnant macro environment is not realistic.

  • The numbers simply don’t add up yet: the goals of directing 75% of mint to DAO, keeping inflation under ~30% and trying to create supply-side FOMO is impossible to achieve simultaneously. Any two out of the three can be achieved by sacrificing the third, but you cannot have all three.

  • My way of thinking is, first and foremost, to sacrifice trying to pump supply-side buy pressure and focus on using inflation to secure the funding needed to finish the development (e.g., immediately triple or quadruple inflation target while increasing DAO allocation to 75%), being careful not to lose market confidence in the process. Then, secondarily, relax a bit on inflation cap (on short time scales only and to the extent that market confidence allows) to experiment with creating a modest amount of supply-side buy pressure during times that the demand-side is also growing.

  • In other words: moving the adjustment of RTTM from weekly to either quarterly or biannually (or upon hitting inflation upper bounds, whichever comes first) is a sound idea that I support.

  • I absolutely agree with @RawthiL that burn should not be brought to zero. It is already well below market rate. If the goal is to support new gateways, a preferable way to achieve this is to leave the gateway fee and burn as is, and use DAO/PNF treasury to fund rebates to new gateways during the first 6 months of service. Eg, 100% rebate for first two months, 75% rebate during month 3-4, etc.

  • The following statement took me completely by surprise, “Launching Shannon with a 1:1 burn/mint is the right approach.” Talk about shocks to the system! Unless demand is something like 10x what it is today, there is no way I see launching Shannon with burn/mint equilibrium without tearing the whole network apart. If that is the current mindset, I suggest that prior to Shannon launch it be vetted for viability.

  • Reducing MinStake to 5k is doable. That always seemed a natural accompaniment to reducing maxchains. Note, that leaving ServicerStakeWeightCeiling at 60k is fine, but will result in the number of bins increasing from 4 to 16. That’s not a problem as far as the protocol goes; everything should adjust seamlessly, but it can create a few headaches for ancillary tools like the Poktscan explorer. It is also preferable to the alternative: reducing the ceiling would trigger a mass unstaking to right-size stakes to the new rules of the game. Again, that is not a problem from a protocol perspective, but could be a problem if done at a time when network providers and/or their token investors are losing confidence in the project. The stickiness of nodes to ride through uncertain times is a real thing. A parameter change trigger that “forces” (ie strongly incentivizes) an unstake of the majority of nodes removes that stickiness and could be just the prompt for a mass exodus. Not enough perhaps to technically threaten the protocol, but certainly enough to create a sizeable wave of sell pressure and threaten complete loss of market confidence in the project.

  • Giving the keys of the parameters to O’Rourke as PNF director (or even if he is not a director) is not a problem constitutionally. It’s a very simply PUP that doesn’t even need supermajority approval: Text of the PUP would be something like the following (assuming he is named PNF director):

    • Parameters affected: all
    • Old Values: See xyz documentation
    • New Values: according to the discretion of the PNF

  • -Of course this is premised, once again, on him being willing to trust the DAO not to revoke or override this PUP capriciously, matching the trust that he is asking the DAO to give him by deferring to him in the first place.

  • -For the safety and protection of all, bounds can be placed on key parameters, PNF/O’Rourke would have discretion to set the parameters only within the sandbox that the DAO defines. I haven’t thought this through all the way yet, but possible bounds could be things like:

    • "weighted average RTTM over all chains shall not exceed 2000 uPOKT and shall not trigger any daily mint in excess of 3M POKT or annual mint in excess of 500M POKT.”
    • "the setting of RTTM, DAO_allocation and Validator_allocation shall be such to ensure that validator allocation of mint per relay does not fall below 10 uPOKT and servicer allocation of mint per relay does not fall below 150 uPOKT.”
    • "GatewayFeePerRelay shall not be set lower than $0.00000085. That being said, PNF is empowered to use it’s treasury resources to offer rebates to gateways to offset this fee during the first 6 months of service.”

  • O’Rourke could then experiment as he wishes within those bounds but would have to follow the DAO proposal process for any change he wishes to make outside those bounds. I believe that having such bounds may give some assurance to the marketplace that the project is on sound footing and not opening the door to hyper-inflation or otherwise flailing and desperately grasping for straws.

7 Likes
41

Good call out - I’ve added these sections and a couple more for the Articles and Constitution. These are just examples but will consult legal for proper phrasing if the proposal is passed.

1 Like
42

Thanks for the detailed response. I’ll address the points that haven’t been brought up yet:

I think this is reasonable but it would need to be at a significantly cheaper rate to make this beneficial. Will need to consult with legal but some version of purchasing these at a 99.99% discount with clawbacks for vesting would make sense. The same goes for others receiving grants as well.

The goal of these parameter changes is to increase the total supply while keeping the circulating supply (node and validator rewards) relatively constant at ~5% assuming no relay growth. When we see relay growth increase, circulating supply should increase until we hit the reset of 20% emissions for circulating. DAO emissions should be adjusted through this process as well.

This is prudent. To reduce downside effects I want to introduce long term staking incentives for the network. Similar to how Filecoin uses a multiplier, we can do something similar for node runners. With more gateways coming online it’s a reasonable expectation to assume relays will continue growth. In the advent of the reset at 20% of circulating inflation, the expectation of continued relay growth mitigates downside pressure.

I’ve adjusted the proposal to reflect a full rebate. This should be the case until Shannon launches. cc @RawthiL

I don’t think it’s prudent to put restrictions on the range of parameters given the dynamism of not knowing how fast relays will grow nor what changes will happen to the price. As we start seeing things move I expect to preempt potential scenarios through the forums so we can discuss ahead of time.

1 Like
43

It’s been a while since I’ve chimed in here, but I want to bring into this official proposal some context of a piece of very relevant discourse that the one and only @PoktNews has highlighted in the past week, because I think it is a piece that is important, although buried in what is a very complex and deep proposal here.

Overview

https://x.com/PoktNews/status/1809583495804510376

Assuming that the embed feature for posts has been broken, it is a reply to this callout.

Open vector for bad actors to exploit Morse. Certain gateway operator can send fake relays (fake demand) and print coins out of thin air. Something that shouldn’t be possible in case that Grove and PNF management is closely tied.

These callouts of themselves shouldn’t be something that ultimately blocks a single party from governing the parameters, but deeper transparency into the tokenomic emissions control that is possible from this is a piece of transparency that should be highlighted, because I know this community of individuals has the ability to understand what they would require to have transparency that the kind of funny business that isn’t possible isn’t happening.

This all being said, having been someone that worked on the Grove team at one point, this notion of self dealing was well understood, and any work done internally was with the perspective of not allowing this behavior at bay to happen. These points don’t represent my views about if this proposal should or should not move forward, but rather to make sure those who are independent actors in the DAO have a wider view of the possible implications of what can be possible when turning off the gateway burn mechanism, paired with having full control of new network token emissions.

He Who Controls the App Keys Controls the Token Distribution

Fundamentally in Morse, the app key is the control point of token emissions. This was the motivation for keeping the gateway run by Grove, and was one of the original motivators for the migration away from Morse, and moving the system to a sampling based mechanism.

The problem that exists in Morse, is that if you simultaneously hold both an app key and the node key for a given app/node session pair, the owner of that app key can, for every session where they’re matched with their own nodes, simply sign randomized data and generate the corresponding Merkle Proofs against random streams of data. This means that if an app is able to pair itself with up to X nodes in a session, that party can generate X/24 (current nodes per session) of the total allocation of relays staked to that application fee.

What’s very important to consider here, is that if a Gateway operator also operates a majority of the node network for a given chain, they can mint a significant amount of that corresponding chain’s full bandwidth of relays without having to ever service the underlying RPC data.

Additionally, there is nothing that forces a gateway to send relays to all nodes in a session. Internal ranking systems like the cherry picker were built in a good faith way to properly tie rewards to meaningful quality of service. A third party gateway can send relays to only nodes that they want, possibly only the nodes they control.

The introduction of a burn mechanism for gateway actors completely eliminated any economic incentive for that app key owner (currently a gateway) to indulge in this kind of behavior.

Gaming Custom Network Rewards and No DAO Approval System for New Chains

This is a very important piece. Because while it would be clear that a gateway is sending it’s tokens only to it’s nodes in the long term, the real economic gain to be had here is to race to stake as many nodes on the new chain that the gateway can service. If there isn’t the same open process for onboarding a new chain to the protocol, there is an insider advantage to getting ready to allocate enough tokens to stake a majority of the early nodes on a new chain. Pairing this with incentivized bootstrapping rewards and a lack of burn, means that gateway operators who would be advantaged to quickly stake a lot of nodes on a new chain can simply mint themselves as many tokens as they can.

It is very important to note, that this isn’t about net inflation rate, rather total concentration of capture of new token emissions.

What Pieces Need to Be Watched

Again, I don’t inherently see these as risks that can keep this proposal from moving forward, but there are some important questions that other node runners should be asking to have the full picture of the implications for the impact to their network work reward share.

The App Stake Amounts for Gateway Operators

Specifically, what is important for node runners to know is how many relays an application is entitled to with their stake. If a new gateway manages to come into the system, what is the maximum amount of relays that the gateway can send?

This isn’t magic, these numbers are knowable from on-chain data, but the changes made with Gigastakes do make the total possible amount of relays a gateway can send at a number that might shock everyone involved.

Will these parameters still remain in place?

The Relationship Between Gateway Operators, and New Chain Node Shares

The other piece that should be watched, and again, can be from on chain data, is if gateway operators also magically end up being the fastest and first to support new chains.

As there will be new chain incentives, the opportunity to game this system is at its strongest in the time immediately after a new chain launch.

App Stake Growth

Assuming that the solution for this would be to force the gateways to actually stake app sizes relative to service, the economic game would become that it is more beneficial for a node runner to pour rewards into more app stakes than staking more nodes.

What makes me a little uncomfortable is I called out this mechanism in some earlier protocol work, but that has seemed to disappear from the public GitHub repo on what was the V1 protocol.

I’m going to leave the math here, because I know that there are some brilliant data engineers in the community who are fully able to absorb and model these implications and bring this back to the community.

Economic Security Guarantees

The idempotency requirement however does not protect against the above when the
same actor controls:

  • $50% + 1$ of the $S$ nodes in a session
  • The application sending the requests

For a given relay chain ID, assume that there exists $a$ existing apps, and
there are $n$ total existing nodes already staked for the relay chain.

The probability of a single node being selected for a session should be
$\frac{1}{n}$.

As session selection currently happens as random selection with replacement,
then we can represent the probability of controlling the majority of a session
as the probability of having between $\lfloor \frac{S}{2} \rfloor + 1$ and $S$
successes in $S$ attempts of an $\frac{m}{n}$ discrete event, assuming that $m$
represents the total number of nodes that the actor has staked on that relay
chain. We model this using the binomial distribution, with $p = \frac{m}{n}$
and
$n \in \lbrace \lfloor \frac{S}{2} \rfloor + 1, \lfloor \frac{S}{2} \rfloor+ 2, …, S \rbrace$

$$
P_{MC}(m,n,S) := \sum_{k=\lfloor \frac{S}{2} \rfloor + 1}^{S}{\binom{S}{k} \left(\frac{m}{n}\right)^{k}\left(1 - \frac{m}{n}\right)^{S-k}}
$$

This is the probability of controlling a session for an arbitrary app. Assuming
that the same actor controls $a$ apps, then the probability that the actor is
able to fully control at least one session for their own application would be:

$$
P_{SD}(a,m,n,S) := 1 - \left(1 - P_{MC}(m,n,S)\right)^{a}
$$

Then given $R :=$ application/BaseRelaysPerPOKT, $B :=$
pos/BlocksPerSession, and $N :=$ pos/StakeMinimum, the cost of a configuration
of $a$ app stakes and $m$ node stakes, for which the probability of capturing a session
can be calculated via $P_{SD}$, is computed as follows:

$$
C(a,m,R,S,B,N,T) = \frac{100aBS}{R} + mN
$$

Economics Code Sample

from functools import partial

import numpy as np


def p_binom(n: int, p: float, k: int) -> float:
    return (
        np.math.factorial(n)
        / (np.math.factorial(k) * np.math.factorial(n - k))
        * p ** (k)
        * (1 - p) ** (n - k)
    )


def p_majority_session(
    nodes_staked: int, total_nodes: int, nodes_per_session: int
) -> float:
    start = nodes_per_session // 2 + 1
    end = nodes_per_session + 1
    binom = partial(p_binom, nodes_per_session, nodes_staked / total_nodes)
    return sum(map(binom, range(start, end)))


def p_self_dealing(
    apps_staked: int, nodes_staked: int, total_nodes: int, nodes_per_session: int
) -> float:
    return (
        1
        - (1 - p_majority_session(nodes_staked, total_nodes, nodes_per_session))
        ** apps_staked
    )


def cost(
    apps_staked: int,
    nodes_staked: int,
    pokt_to_usd: float,
    nodes_per_session: int = 24,
    base_relays_per_pokt: int = 200000,
    stake_minimum: int = 15000,
) -> float:
    apps_cost = (
        apps_staked
        * nodes_per_session
        / (base_relays_per_pokt / 100)
    )
    nodes_cost = nodes_staked * stake_minimum
    return (apps_cost + nodes_cost) * pokt_to_usd

print(1 / p_self_dealing(10, 150, 350, 24))
print(cost(10, 15, 0.07))

This work was about the economics of a node/app pairing gaining a majority control of the truth of a session, i.e. 51% percent control. In this case, this math is capturing the assumed cost of a network actor gaining that 51% control, but it can be easily extended to see the implications of how the current network stake topology could lead to outsized distributions of these newly proposed token mechanisms.

9 Likes
44

This is the kind of math that honestly goes over my head, but I’d asked previously about how self dealing would be handled in the gatewayverse, since any gateway which is also a noderunner could theoretically route to their own nodes. This is one of the reasons that Shannon is so critical.

Thanks for the insight, Joe.

5 Likes
45

Remember when we used to have protocol developers who understood math and cryptography? That was cool lol.

ETA: the current protocol team is very talented in their respective domains, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve lost some critical adversarial thinkers in the last couple of years.

4 Likes
46

Governance of PNF

I can understand the nervousness of some of the community about giving any 1 Individual complete control over decision making, in my experience on boards, especially with startups, the board decisions are lead by the CEO/Founder and it’s is only an illusion of control in these situation, where an investor might have 1 board seat and easily out voted buy the Founding team.

Reserved Matters

What I believe could be more pragmatic approach could be outline the key areas, as ‘reserved matters’, these decisions would require a PIP, PUP or PEP in exactly the same way that it is required now, and have a ‘high water mark’ for what they are and also what they are not

As an example, what would NOT be a reserved matter

  • Hiring/Firing Employees
  • Making Day to day spending decisions
  • Making Day to day business decisions in line with the core mission

As an example, what would COULD be a reserved matter

  • Changing the core Economics Params (outside of agreed tolerances)
  • Any single spend over $200k (or another appropriate threshold)
  • Any disposable of assets or sale of IP

Advisory Board(s)

I would set up several, voluntary advisory boards with the purpose of helping guide the @o_rourke / Director(s) of PNF with key members of Gateways, PNF and the Community and Key Opinion Leaders (KOL’s.)

  • Tokenomics
  • Liquidity
  • Marketing
  • Development <Web3.0>
  • Governance
  • More++

If PNF was to adopt the policies and or ideas of the Advisory communities, there could be a retrospective remuneration process, as there has been for recent development updates from multiple parties.

Note: I would have a Non-exec chair (non voting capacity)/company secretary that would; arrange all board/advisory meetings, take minutes, circulate all information priory to each meeting, provide agendas and guide the meeting (while not participating), allowing all contributors to fully focus on the meeting at hand and not burdening them with additional work

Summary

I believe this would give @o_rourke/Director(s) of PNF control over all day to day decisions, allowing Grove, PNF and the protocol to ‘rock-and-roll’ and allow the community and more to add real value to the Key Reserved Matters

4 Likes
47

I have an amendment recommendation:

Summary: Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose

Proposal: Foundation Treasury Transparency Council

Objective:

  • Enhance transparency regarding Foundation Treasury spending by involving the community.

Key Components:

  1. Transparency Council:
    • Election of Members: Elect one or more community members to form a Transparency Council.
    • Access to Spending Details: Members will have access to monthly spending details.
    • Rationale Requirement: The council will obtain explanations from Michael regarding the fund allocations.
    • Community Report: The council will generate a monthly report to share with the community, outlining the spending and rationale.

The goal of this council is not to dictate spending, it is purely to provide transparency by a 3rd party

  1. Accountability Mechanism:

    • Penalty for Unreported Spending: Any unreported expenditure by Michael or foundation members will be deducted from Michael’s compensation at a ratio of 1:1.2.
      • Example: For every $100 unreported, $120 will be deducted from Michael’s compensation.
    • High-Interest Loan Concept: This acts as a deterrent against unreported spending by creating a financial penalty.
    • Pre-Compensation Reporting: If Michael reports the spending before the compensation package is issued, the Transparency Council can:
      • Assess the rationale for keeping the spending private.
      • Determine the necessity of the expenditure.
      • Decide whether to remove the deduction from Michael’s compensation.

  2. Suggested Lead:

    • Tim Riggins (alias): Proposed as the lead for the Transparency Council due to his impartiality and lack of personal relationships with Michael or the Grove team. Compensation is to be discussed. Both leadership assignments and compensation are to be revisited every 12 months.

  3. Foundation commitment:

  • Provide the council with a monthly balance sheet of treasury funds on the 3rd of every month.
  • Provide a clear and simple financial report for the previous month on the 3rd of every month. For every business day report is not delivered, a 1% of the total monthly spend penalty will be deducted from Michael’s compensation package.

This amendment aims to ensure that all fund allocations are transparent and justified, fostering trust within the community while holding foundation leaders accountable.

2 Likes
48

Defi Strategy and Liquid Staking: Why Wait?

If this strategy and liquid staking do not clash with Mike’s proposal, and there are no downsides, is there any reason not to proceed with these now, under Shane’s oversight as temporary director? If these catapult the POKT token price, pre-Shannon, to $1, the PIP-38 monetary milestones could be revised accordingly.

3 Likes
49

I am back, it seems Michael has verified my claims for which I was banned - unfortunately I am still perma banned from the telegram but as this is being fast-tracked to a vote very soon (just as I said about $GROVE and the fork plans maybe trust me on this one this time) I think its best I share my thoughts. Anyone who knows me knows how much I loved POKT - key word there LOVED. Past tense. Whatever this is now is not the Pocket I fell in love with, it’s not the Pocket that had tremendous amounts of promise. It is not, if Mike has his way, the:

Censorship Resistance Decentralised RPC Base Layer

That we as a community aligned around - PNF did not formulate

its own vision and road map

Rather we - the DAO, the community, the people building on top of this once promising protocol, we aligned on these ideals together. I have the utmost respect for the work that @b3n, @Dermot, @JackALaing did for this protocol and I was thoroughly ashamed to see them booted out of their positions because Michael wants power again.

In this post I aim to give my insights where possible and try to prove without a doubt not only is this a terrible idea, not only the end of the protocol, but with a few correct moves - something Michael clearly doesn’t understand how to do or those around him either unfortunately. I believe we can take the reigns back and push this protocol back on the right direction. I will call for some drastic changes, I may not say the things you want to hear but they are in fact the things you need to hear, we all need to hear these truths and really deep them. This is either the start or the end of Pocket and we need to make sure we make the correct calls - as a community, not a dictatorship lead by a proven incompetent leader.

Lets start with the very first point:

What drew me to start protocol development - no to crypto in general was Pocket so when I say this I saw it with true sadness in my heart. Shipping Shannon has never been a priority for Grove - not at all. They may have said all the right things, put up a front as if it were but hear me out now. I now work for Polymer Labs a mature codebase - they also started by building out a native L1, then pivoted to a rollup using a customised OPStack “Hack” utilising both Cosmos-SDK, OPStack, DA Layers - I hope by now this is starting to sound familiar to anyone who has kept up with the Shannon Development journey. Its exactly what we did - what I was a part of. When I joined the protocol team initially as an outsider working under PNF then slowly transitioned over to Grove (still paid half by PNF) until finally being hired fully by Grove I knew nothing. I had just taught myself to code, sure I picked it up fast and found it easy which helped but I didn’t know what a codebase 2 years under development ought to look like. Having now seen a codebase that has been under development for the same amount of time, is in its 2nd or 3rd testnet and mainnet soon approaching - that ALSO followed the same pivot journey that we did I know now what company focused on shipping a protocol’s codebase SHOULD look like that far in. I don’t even know how long Shannon/V1 was in development for before I got involved - but I know it wasn’t a short amount of time.

It really pains me to say this as I consider @Olshansky a good friend, but friendships aside for now lets get down to the difficult conversation. The time pre-h5law (AKA The Dark Ages) → V1 (pre-pivot/native L1/building cool shit) → Pivot #1 (Rollup w/ Rollkit on Celestia) → Pivot #2 (Cosmos-SDK L1 w/ RollChains integration for Celestia DA added security); in my eyes this journey demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of shipping a product - it even gives incompetence vibes. So much wasted time, wasted research cycles, wasted hires and fires. If Grove really wanted to ship Shannon I can see a few key points where things SHOULD have been done differently.

  1. Fire everyone involved in the Dark Age period - they couldn’t deliver a thing and set everything back at least a year? (Correct me if the duration of the Dark Age period is wrong but the point sticks) - They were unable to deliver and to quote myself as it is truly the best thing about crypto (which I myself plagarised)

In crypto its not about who you are but what you can deliver

Simple as that if you cannot deliver you are worthless, nuff said. Its a shame, Its peoples livelyhoods you may say. If they wanted to sit around and not deliver, maybe read a cool paper and do some research go into academia, join a bigtech company. Crypto is different, maybe its why my generation (doxxing myself rn but I’m wait for it Gen Z) love it. Crypto should be free from the bureaucracy and bullshit you find everywhere else, instead it should focus on what started this entire industry - an anon fighting for ideals in a world that lacked them (big up Satoshiiii).

  1. Rewarding the inability to deliver resulted in guess what, more ineptitude with regards to delivering the fucking product. For real if you continue to reward the people making decisions, failure after failure what do you expect but wait for it… MORE FAILURE.

Again it pains me to say this, it really does because I love the guy personally - even his knee high socks he’s so nice and caring - but Olshansky, if under management that cared about delivering the product would’ve been either:

  • Demoted to an IC (Individual Contributor) due to his lack of result producing abilities as a leader, or
  • Fired and replaced for someone who can focus and deliver

I can’t stress how much I love this guy, I genuinely am having difficulty writing this but numerous times Olshansky himself would ask me “Who do you feel like you work for?”, each and every single time I would reply “I work for the protocol, not Grove, I want what is best for Pocket Network” I was very often the one to challenge the team in their decisions - I was seen as the “voice of the community on the protocol team” and I was proud of that. I wish I could have done more to avoid the mess we are in now. I was against the pivot, I was against Olshansky’s push towards the OPStack (thank fuck we avoided that mess), I enjoy shutting people down I can’t lie it was fun to point out why all the ideas were dumb - I said lets either keep with V1 or use Cosmos-SDK for IBC. We settled on Rollkit because it was shiny - but it wasn’t ready for us so good thing we kept the backup plan of just using Cosmos right? Or is this something the Lead Developer, Staff Engineer, Super Senior He Could Date Your Dying Grandma Engineer, Lord of the Protocol Team, Chief Naming Officer (don’t get me started on our tiffs calling it Poktroll - especially now that its not even a rollup :joy:) Big Man Oldshansky SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT JUST A LITTLE. The idea was to pivot and ship ASAP, good intentions - yet another poor execution. It wasn’t ready for us, it set us back. If this was the only misstep it is absolutely forgivable without question. But if you look back through the timeline how many years, where Grove supposedly focused on protocol development, were wasted due to poor decisions, poor execution and just plain ignorance on how to ship a protocol.

The reason this statement doesn’t sound correct is because in reality Grove never was focussed on shipping the protocol, maybe they would have hired more than 5 people to work on it. Maybe they would’ve used the DAO rebate to fund it - not just one of the following:

  • Line their pockets
  • Recoup tokens paid out to initial investors (a refund of sorts)
  • Fund their Gateway (probably the most likely as the majority of the developers at Grove work on the Gateway)

Its not nice to say but let’s be real, when you’re startup becomes so uptight that being blunt, slightly dismissive of others, or fucking straight up rude and mean to others is more important than shipping your forever SOON™️ protocol release things have gone terribly wrong. Just to be clear here I was the blunt, dismissive, rude and mean one. I admit it but I am of the opinion that if you are becoming corporate before you’ve launched your fucking product thats a sign of bad leadership at all levels. So lets dive into that, leadership.

o_rourke wants to take control of Pocket, he failed miserably before, thankfully PNF picked up his mess and carried us somewhere respectable - a long way to go but god damn those guys did amazing work through bear and bull they shined. Big ups b3n, Dermot, JackALaing and Adrienne on god these guys did a lot if you cannot see that you are delusional.

@Cryptocorn correct me if I am wrong but wasn’t it under o_rourke’s initial tokenomics that the protocol was able to be bleed dry by mercenaries. The 1000% or whatever inflation Pocket came out the gate swinging with does not give me any hope that this guy knows a think about tokenomics - in fact it proves he knows not a thing. Read a book or something, read the forums, get active in the community and you (o_rourke) might realise this community IS INCREDIBLY KNOWLEDGABLE ABOUT TOKENOMIC AND ECONOMIC THEORY IN GENERAL. We have big brains like Cryptocorn and @RawthiL and others I am sure I’m omitting. We DO NOT NEED SOMEONE WHO NEEDED TO SELL HIS OWN HOUSE TO SECURE FUNDING FOR GROVE IN CHARGE OF THE TOKENOMICS OF THIS PROTOCOL. That is literally the dumbest thing we could do. Lets dive into that:

  • Start company → fuck up tokenomics → push it onto someone else (PNF) and pretend to focus on protocol development
  • Lie to everyone and focus instead on building out the Portal Gateway → Secretly integrate with other protocols → Give minimal resources to the team that you say are your priority → Hide from community for years and lie to them until called out publicly and are no longer able to hide from the mess you’ve made
  • Decide forcing PNF to step down by threatening a fork (which would be the end of Pocket hands down) → Also consider launching $GROVE → Take 2? Maybe the community will respect you this time around
  • Scrap that because community didn’t like the lies and deceivery → Instead ask to be voted into full control → No more paying the protocol → Take more money from the protocol with no promise of any return → Should I even continue at this point

o_rourke I once thought you seemed calm but more and more you seem in way over your head. I would never trust you with any authority or leadership in this ecosystem, if anyone does they are blind as to the mess we are in. YOU ACTIVELY SPOKE WITH INVESTORS ABOUT FORKING POCKET WHY, WHY, WHY SHOULD ANYONE TRUST YOU?

Lets chat on this: Instead of paying Grove who has failed miserably to ship Shannon - but like every other company got lost in the AI sauce, was misguided time and time again and displayed a complete lack of competence. Maybe heres a crazy thought - lets further decentralise the protocol. Fire the entire protocol team, anyone who wishes to stay now must work for PNF - the beef between Olshansky and others at Grove with @poktblade needs to be squashed because I think he should be on the protocol team ffs its silly how you don’t like the guy on god.

Im deadly serious reinstate all of PNF immediately, transfer control of the protocol team to them - if that means smaller wages so be it. I can find talented devs to come on. People who care about the protocol are more likely to work for a little less - who knows if we chuck in forcing you to resign we might see a price boom as investors see us cutting dead weight o_rourke would you even consider that? I mean if you truly care about Pocket you must be able to see your influence on the protocol has been a net-negative undoubtedly, irrefutably.

I will stop here for now and continue later. But I’ll end for now on this - I love this fucking protocol, I was devastated to leave working on it. But holy fuck what a mess you have made big boy, now its time for the adults to come and clean it up - sorry if I hurt anyones feelings in this post (I am not) I am expecting another ban from @Jinx for once again speaking the truth (fr tho unban me Michael admitted to all I said you’re being childish). I hope I can convince some people to see the light and take the steps we should’ve taken years ago. Had this been, dare I say it, Web2 Michael would’ve been replaced the dev team cycled through for people that can ship a product and we would all be enjoying Shannon not just starting to discover the mess o_rourke has made in his diaper. If even a single person tries to say this is strawmanning grow up - read the text and you will see I have simply spoken the unadulterated truth, my way.

Look out for part 2

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