What you are saying highlights the tragedy of the commons when it comes to the funding of public goods.
As per Vitalik:
Public goods are practically useful resources that in economist terms are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Another way of describing public goods is that they are anything that is good for the public that struggles to find funding through traditional funding sources.
Public goods are notoriously overutilised, underfunded, and poorly understood. Poktscan.com as one of the most valuable public goods in Pocket’s ecosystem is a good example of this. It was funded altruistically by a team that can no longer afford to do so, and its existence is now in peril.
If you complete an impact scorecard to consider POKTscan for a typical DAO grant, it would score very highly across each of the key dimensions of utilization (how widely and frequently it is used), measurable benefit (depth and long-term nature of benefit), ecosystem-wide significance (whether it is more than just a nice to have), access to alt funding sources (how much hard would be inflicted if it didn’t receive outside funding), and the novelty factor (how many alternatives are there?)
While PNF does not have the capacity to fund grants as large as the DAO, we can move quickly in line with our responsibility to act in the best interests of the Pocket Network community.
You are welcome to your perspective, but this is not a valid one from PNF’s view. POKTscan is literally fundamental to how exchanges, data aggregators, along with most of the community interact with and parse Pocket’s blockchain every day.
We have discussed their costs in detail, and we have asked the POKTscan team to share these publicly. We solely support their costs to maintain and run their data analytics platform, which does not include funding for their data science team or node-running business.
The DAO has no direct say on how PNF spends its treasury. We could put up a vote on a purely advisory/signalling basis, but I’m not sure how much benefit this would provide, and it sets an extremely unclear precedent for future PNF funding decisions.
Never mind the fact that requiring a vote on some - or all? - of PNF’s funding initiatives would require an amendment to PNF’s constitutional role within Pocket’s ecosystem, including an update to PNF’s articles, mandating a vote on PNF spending decisions would remove many of the benefits of how PNF is currently set up. PNF is designed to provide reliable support to the ecosystem and a long-term mission-driven view of Pocket’s strategy. This is undermined the more we require proxy votes on operational/strategy decisions. It’s a very bad way to run an effective organisation.
Sharing some quotes from the debates about approving the current design of PNF at the end of last year:
We are ultimately talking about a grant of a maximum of $10k in stablecoins per month from our treasury and the opportunity cost of not staking PNF’s POKT as validators (which we may do in the future).
If you are comfortable with the principle that PNF can fund other contributors from its treasury, the same principle should apply here. This is how we supported some of your work without requiring a vote before the ERA Budget passing, for example.
Lastly, preserving optionality is usually the most effective strategy in times of uncertainty, particularly when a binary decision is unnecessary or entirely self-imposed. Instead of forcing an immediate decision to fund POKTscan or let them die, we are giving them what they need to survive to prevent them from immediately closing up shop, buying us more time to think about the most appropriate next steps. Community input is, of course, welcome in this regard as we continue to work out the optimal path forward.
As per the original post: