It’s unfortunate that there’s an attempt to spread a false narrative within the community, especially when contrasting it with the efforts of contributors who have braved the bear market and tackled devastating industry challenges head-on. These leaders have relentlessly worked on developing the Badger ecosystem, a rarity in our space where many shy away from the tough obstacles and often opt for the easy route.
The claims outlined in this RFF and community council proposal that are the basis for the loss of trust are clear lies which represent what looks like an attack on the DAO with the intention to take over governance. Something so disappointing to see as Badger is on the cusp of releasing eBTC to the world after 18 months of building with the support of leading protocols in our space.
BadgerDAO is more decentralized than it’s ever been, with a clear vision in eBTC, exceptional financial rigor compared to the past, transparent on chain operations, all while attracting new ecosystem participants every quarter that share in that direction. This is something the community should be very proud of especially in how far we’ve come.
It’s absolutely critical to ensure everyone and anyone reading this proposal has the actual facts to help build their own perception.
Let’s start by taking a look at how BadgerDAO has made significant progress towards further decentralization over the last 3 years.
Decentralization is a spectrum especially amongst DeFi protocol DAOs and should be looked at across both its operations and the technology it develops. BadgerDAO has made significant progress across both of these areas.
Its Tech
Then
- Upgradeable and multisig governed smart contracts across all protocols (amplifies its impact with more live protocols)
- Significant reliance on other protocols and their assets which proved to be detrimental to both Badger and others.
- Backed by a variety of centralized assets.
- Multiple offchain reliances for the functionality of these products.
Now
- A single protocol in eBTC that is intended to be a primitive others build on.
- Backed by one collateral asset.
- Immutable smart contracts and non custodial.
- Minimized governance on core parameters to further limit human participation.
Its Operations
Then
- No transparency or understanding around financials and DAO spend
- No understanding of protocol revenue or profitability
- No frameworks for operations and treasury management
- Primarily individual contributors with no experience working together
- Limited support from professional service providers
- No regulatory framework or gameplan
- No ability to interact in a compliant way with partners
Now
- Financials - Public live financials across the DAO that anyone can view
- BIP approved frameworks for operations and treasury councils
- The ability to contract with specialized service providers to improve operational efficiency and create liability protection. This requires the ability to complete KYC/due diligence, to foster partnerships for legal, compliance, accounting and tax, security, development, marketing, and commercial partnerships.
- 36 independent service providers and contractors supporting the growth of BadgerDAO.
- A clear regulatory framework supported by industry leading legal councils.
All the while the governance framework has matured and empowers the 30k+ token holders to approve roles on councils and foundational policy frameworks for these councils to operate under. This coupled with the association has proven to enable the DAO to make more informed and efficient decisions.
What’s important to understand is the state of BadgerDAO in 2021 and 2022 as well. In particular after the hack and on the cusp of the largest collapses in our industry (FTX, Celsius, Terra etc.), BadgerDAO was on the brink of its demise.
- Products weren’t profitable
- Emission spends were through the roof ($28M projected for 2022)
- The chaos of formation had the DAO spending an enormous amount of capital on almost 50 full/part time contributors.
- It lacked specialized service providers to navigate the regulatory difficulties of this space and progress development to ship a truly innovative primitive.
- No clear mandate for solving these issues.
It was from this point that change started to happen that has put Badger in the promising position it’s in today and the ability to withstand the bear market. One that was tackled initially by many of the contributors that are being wrongly scrutinized in this proposal and that was accelerated with the launch of the Association in Jan of 2023 and driven by its leadership. This included significant cost cutting measures going into this year that are also going to be executed under budget.
Lets talk about the Badger Association
Overall, the purpose of the Association is to foster growth of the Badger ecosystem; to enable technical and operational development by hiring and managing contractors, to progress strategy, partnerships, and governance, and to help evolve legal, security, and overall best practices in supporting BadgerDAO. The Badger Association is not a single service provider. It represents all service providers supporting the DAO and receiving fees today. Including critical software infrastructure, legal, smart contract development, security etc. All with documented, legal contracts in place to support executional obligations.
Losing faith in it is losing faith in every professional provider that has enabled BadgerDAO to continue to be a leading DeFi project that’s building world class technology like you see with eBTC.
The association operates under the current constructs of BadgerDAO governance and BIPs. It always has.
For example, it receives funding approved by the treasury council which comes in the form of a well documented budget. That meets consensus among the 5 of 9 council participants and is posted publicly for the community to review. Like this from last year.
The mandate to which the treasury council operates under adheres to the treasury framework approved via BIP by token holders.
The Association then enables real time updates of financials across a variety of categories. This is made possible as all capital is exclusively onchain. All transactions are public and trackable by any community member.
With this funding the association can legally and contractually engage with service providers that in most cases wouldn’t collaborate with BadgerDAO otherwise. This also allows for liability protection for contributors and service providers in a space that’s filled with regulatory uncertainty.
The Association today consists of:
- 10 fulltime contributors/contractors
- 6 part time contributors/contractors
- 20 independent service providers (across web2 security, web3 security, legal, smart contract development, software services, marketing, creative/design, finance, product, supporting across global markets)
- Board of directors that require ⅔ consensus on decisions and consists of 2 BadgerDAO founders and 1 of the longest term contributors.
These are all contracted engagements with obligations to the Association to execute and with board oversight for quality and safety. Again further showcasing how the Association, its relationships, contracts and expert service providers isn’t anywhere close to friends/family and just the core team. Many of which have shown their involvement publicly.
How the Association is accelerating growth
- Created a modular structure to support global delivery and expansion of the Badger ecosystem that has resulted in 36 total independent providers. This proactive approach has enabled the turnaround efforts with expert service provider support for development, security, financial, legal and commercial innovation
- Trending to perform ~9% under budget for 2023, while upgrading specialized support to bring eBTC to market with the highest standards.
- Engaging service providers to build eBTC across the full technical development cycle that will continue as it introduces new protocols underneath it to foster stability and growth.
- Supported the $BADGER token through market making due diligence with a leading provider to increase depth, distribution and global awareness.
- Innovating global legal support to create frameworks for deploying eBTC and supporting the regulatory footprint for $BADGER.
- Continuing to work towards cutting costs and upgrading service providers to ensure the highest output for the DAO moving forward.
Lets refute clearly false and malicious accusations shared in the proposal above.
- Falsely suggesting the association has taken power away from BADGER token holders creating levels of “centralization” when that is not the case at all as described above. The Association manages service providers to enable quality and safety of development, which has always been a responsibility the community has empowered to contributors. The last 12 months it’s been operating in this fashion to ensure better regulatory compliance, liability protection and having the ability to interface with professional service providers that require compliant contracts.
- Falsely suggesting that the association is “heavily weighted towards lifelong friends” when this is inaccurate. There are 5 ppl that know each other well of the collective 36 active contracts with the association to which over 50% of those are independent businesses. These 5 people have been active contributors to Badger since 2021 and earned their way into supporting the DAO starting with grants like everyone else.
- Falsely presenting the Association as the “primary technical service provider” to the DAO; instead it represents all service providers (legal, security, finance etc.) who have opted into contracts including the contributor who posted this forum RFF.
- Presenting as if the association has broken governance, rather it has adhered to governance approved frameworks since inception.
- Suggesting there’s been a failure to create long term viable products, while the original poster and the community council poster were full time contributors building these protocols and some of the most compensated contributors across the DAO.
- It was the proactive efforts of the Association leadership to push the technology to be more decentralized, reduce security threats and ensure products were meeting profitability standards (Progressing Towards Further Decentralization | by BadgerDAO 🦡 | Medium) that’s allowed Badger to be at the point it is today with eBTC.
- Falsely suggesting there’s been a failure to present the “return of value” from eBTC development to token holders which hasn’t launched yet when literally last week there was a professional budget for 2024 and product roadmap presented to the treasury council, with the original poster suggesting he was going to approve it. Ongoing discussions are happening within the treasury and a detailed roadmap will be shared with the community soon.
- Continuing to present the idea that because of discord being in read-only mode there is no community voice. Nothing in the governance process changed, there was a preventative security action on a comms platform that was used for early community conversations. Forum has been the primary place for refining proposals that could be voted on by token holders. Discord is already operational again and is the basis for this attempted attack.
Association leadership has enabled improved outcomes end to end and supported decentralized progression since its inception and will continue to provide quality and safety for the greater badger ecosystem while putting community first.
Unfortunately DAO’s are seeing more and more of what this community council proposal seems to be. The reality is they are individuals with the intent to extract as much value as possible for personal gain or power. Community members should be focusing on the opposite, providing as much value to collectively push the ecosystem forward. That’s how we all win. We’ve demonstrated this intent and integrity since day zero.
Unfortunately many of these contributors lack understanding of the eBTC protocol, its codebase, growth plans, nor do they provide the expertise to push this forward as they haven’t been involved in its development technically, economically, or commercially over the last year. This includes the details of engagements and relationships with the extended service provider network that are supporting eBTC.
I fear the community council has been convinced with false information to follow a crusade without having all the facts.
This is what I think may be happening here but the reality is Badgers never quit and they are fearless. That’s my commitment to the community. Unwavering effort to ship an exciting DeFi primitive in eBTC, continuous progression towards further decentralizing the DAO, building innovative partnerships with leading DeFi protocols in the space, helping bring best in class service providers into our ecosystem with deep levels of specialized expertise and acting with transparency while adhering to governance frameworks.
There is a substantial amount of content, detail and plans about to be shared around what the eBTC launch is going to look like and how it could see accelerated growth in the market which in turn will drive more excitement around the Badger ecosystem. This will be coming soon from a variety of ecosystem participants that have deep domain knowledge in these areas and great reputations throughout the DeFi space. I hope we as a community can focus on the excitement around this vs a malicious attempt by a small group of people to overtake governance.