Summary
This proposal seeks to provide facts to the Balancer Community to empower it to answer two questions:
- Has Orb Collective’s leadership enabled it to properly function as a Service Provider (SP) to meet the needs of the Balancer DAO; and
- Should governance continue Orb’s status quo as a critical SP that has received a significant amount of funding to date.
If the answer to both questions is “no”, a vote in favor of this BIP will cause:
- The termination of Orb as an SP as of the 31st of July;
- Payments to Orb to require monthly approval from Balancer governance after Orb’s leadership has provided detailed plans on spending projections for the next month and reported on spending for the previous month. To be noted, the previous monthly spending report is for evaluation purposes, not for retroactive governance approval;
- The reconciliation of unused, returned, or unvested assets paid to or being held by Orb, including USDC and BAL per** per BIP-20, BIP-38, BIP-33, and BIP-75 or otherwise.
Background
Orb was retained by the Balancer Foundation nine months ago as one of the most critical SPs for the Balancer ecosystem by BIP-20: Funding Proposal of Orb Collective. BIP-20 covered Marketing (and sub-areas of Brand Identity & Visual Style, and Content Creation & Social Media), Integrations (including Documentation & Community Support), and Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)/Operations.
Marketing
Until a few days ago, marketing was one of Orb’s main responsibilities. In April 2023, Orb leadership announced they had “developed a new vision for how marketing at Orb will evolve and iterate.” However, on May 4, 2023, Orb leadership announced they were terminating their marketing services immediately. They also disclosed an employee exodus where more than 27% of their employees had resigned, including all the marketing employees they included in their budget update.
Orb’s Q2 2023 budget, posted on April 25, had it paying more than $90,000.00 to marketing employees.
However, all its marketing employees are gone. There is no indication that Orb leadership will revise and reduce their Q2 marketing budget and any July 2023 wind-down expenses.
Marketing - Brand Identity & Visual Style
The post from 0xmui in the Balancer Forum gives concrete examples of steps that can be taken to align Balancer’s brand and marketing strategies. A recent comment in the same post from Beethoven X underscores the importance of a strategic and cohesive approach to brand and marketing. BIP-254 retained Beethoven as SP for a number of efforts, including marketing.
None of Orb’s marketing updates mentions a study or initiative to update or re-think the Brand Identity or Visual Style. (See Orb Collective August 2022 Update, Orb Collective September 2022 Update, Orb Collective October 22 Update, Orb Collective November 2022 Update, Orb Collective December 2022 Update, Orb Collective January 2023 Update, Orb Collective March 2023 High-Level Updates, Orb Marketing Strategy for Remainder of Q1, Orb Collective February 2023 Marketing Update, Orb Collective March 2023 Marketing Update).
This comment highlights how Orb leadership has allowed Balancer’s brand to fall behind its competition.
Marketing - Content Creation & Social Media
Orb leadership’s reporting on marketing strategy and results fails to address or explain any difference between what they proposed to accomplish v. what they actually delivered. For instance, Orb leadership outlined the following for their planned Twitter campaigns in “Marketing Strategy for Remainder of Q1”:
Orb leadership reported on the performance of their above Q1 Twitter strategy by sharing the following “results” in their February and March updates:
The Balancer Community wasn’t informed about what happened with the items proposed, if the goals were accomplished, if any issues were encountered, or if they used any new content not initially planned.
BeethovenX also proposed an initial marketing approach with a leaner budget and has recently advanced an integrated view of the ecosystem, tools, and goals to accomplish Balancer’s marketing goals.
To date, Orb has spent over $479,000.00 on Marketing.
Integrations
Regular reporting of metrics and KPIs is needed to enable the Balancer Community to understand what has been and is being achieved, and what the next steps are.
Regarding integrations, the community doesn’t know if everything previously planned by Orb leadership was properly executed, or if there were pain points or delays in the roadmap. This type of information has not been regularly presented by Orb leadership in their updates. Further examples of these issues can be found in the Orb Collective March 2023 Integrations Update and the Orb Collective February 2023 Integrations Update.
Whilst it is possible to verify some activity on the Orb Collective Github page, the lack of proper reporting makes it difficult to verify the efficiency of how time was allocated.
One of the key headings on the form shared by the Integrations team for its reporting is titled “Increase Balancer’s market share” - it itemizes the Integrations team’s activity in this broad area of “market share” for that month. The reporting, however, doesn’t help the community evaluate the performance of the Integrations team. It omits explanations of how the outlined activities increased Balancer market share, why certain activities were chosen over others, the time and resource costs, whether the specific activities came in over or under budget, and, if so, how. Matters concerning Integrations also attract little, if any, public discussion in Discord or on the Balancer forum.
Documentation & Community Support are mentioned in BIP-20 and BIP-75 as Orb’s responsibilities. Proper developer support is important. When a developer asks for help, response time is slow, as seen in this Discord channel. Questions are mostly answered by non-Orb contributors.
Current documentation was rewritten by other Balancer DAO contributors earlier this year. Notwithstanding the substantial efforts of these contributors to overhaul critical components of Documentation, the work that Orb leadership agreed to perform is incomplete, as the onboarding process for new participants and partners remains unfriendly to users.
To date, Orb has spent over $545,000.00 on 5 Integrations employees.
GRC & Operations
As per Orb Collective November 2022 Update, “Part of Orb’s role in the ecosystem is to protect the resiliency and growth of the DAO by creating a strategy for ecosystem regulatory and legal risks and as well managing the corporate governance and risks for the agents of the DAO and ecosystem stakeholders.”
Educational and outreach opportunities for the community appear to have been largely ignored by Orb leadership in relation to GRC & Ops, particularly on the public forum. There have been BIPs where Orb leadership should have ensured a comment from a GRC standpoint was offered, like BIP-146.
Orb leadership has not presented KPIs to track GRC interaction and performance. Reports in relation to GRC have been sparse on content and generated little interaction with the community. Examples include: Orb Collective November 2022 Update - its GRC section, Orb Collective January 2023 Update - its GRC section, Orb Collective March 2023 GRC Updates, Orb Collective February 2023 GRC Update, and Orb Collective February 2023 Ops Update
Another example is the Balancer Maxis’ proposal for the new Governance process, which was adopted via BIP-163 without a forum comment from Orb Collective or any other open interaction between Orb leadership and the community.
Orb leadership is responsible for ensuring clarity is provided in the Balancer ecosystem in relation to its Governance. Yet, some SP funding requests, particularly from Orb leadership, lack clarity on the purposes and terms of the funding and services that the SP will provide or has already provided. The Orb leadership funding requests are often rushed and/or inconsistent with the DAO’s SP funding template and more recently adopted Governance process. Some examples are: ambiguities between BIP-20 and the SLA for Orb incorporated by reference therein; BIP-38 (in comparison to the more detailed and much less ambiguous BIP-55), and BIP-33 and BIP-75 (which themselves seem appropriate for Q3 & Q4 2022 budgeting requests for marketing, but it is unclear why these were not done for any quarter thereafter); BIP-264; BIP-275; and the ONsite proposal, where Orb asked for more than $93,500 in additional funding for the planning of future onsite events. More than 2 weeks have passed and Orb leadership has not yet confirmed it will revise the proposal so the requested funds flow to OpCo rather than directly to Orb.
On May 4, Orb leadership announced that 3 of Orb’s 11 employees had left. Just 10 days earlier, when Orb’s leadership shared the Q2 budget on April 25, they knew at least 1 GRC & Ops employee was departing. Yet, Orb leadership inexplicably omitted this from its Q2 budget post. Orb leadership has not expressed any plan to reduce its USD $529,825.00 budget for Q2 - $460,500.00 allocated as compensation now for just 8 people rather than the 11 identified in the Q2 budget post.
On the same day the Q2 budget was shared, Orb leadership posted BIP-275 and asked to immediately spend more than $600,000 of BAL as liquid compensation for employees rather than on the annual cliff/vesting terms that were previously agreed. Orb leadership later reduced the liquid BAL request to over $44,000 BAL to pay 1 GRC & Ops employee and more than $2,640 Bal to pay 1 Marketing employee who was inexplicably omitted from Orb’s Q2 budget. More than a week has passed, yet Orb has failed to honor its agreement to provide further details that respond to community questions concerning BIP-275.
The Q2 2023 budget update allocated more than $195,000.00 to Orb GRC & Ops employees for Q2 2023. However, 33% of Orb’s employees in this area have already resigned. There is no indication that Orb leadership will reduce Orb’s GRC & Ops budget for Q2 2023.
To date, Orb has spent over $750,000.00 on 3 GRC & Ops employees.
Financial reporting of the Orb Collective
The Orb reports and the Orb funding proposal (BIP-20) demonstrate that Orb leadership’s reporting form and standards obscure the community’s ability to assess Orb leadership’s current and past spending.
While there is one report on spending for the period of August, September, and October 2022 that is more detailed, we can see there is no report for November and December 2022 spending. For Q1 2023, there is only a forecast of the spending, published at the end of January 2023.
There are no specific breakdowns by compensation for each department or each employee. Instead, we see departmental breakdowns of costs that group together compensation and operating expenses, yet never isolate either expense category by department. In fact, the only disclosures we see on compensation pertain to the overall compensation of the entire employee group; these disclosures are usually prospective and, therefore, not definite.
Orb leadership’s financial reporting makes it impossible to conclusively determine how much Orb leadership, including its CEO, has earned for the last 9 months and is slated to earn through 7/31/23.
There are further spending requests, BIP-33 and BIP-75 for the marketing department for Q3 and Q4 2022, that appear to be add-ons to the funding requests made in BIP-20, but the add-on nature of these expenses wasn’t explicitly disclosed in the two BIPs. BIP-20, while not breaking down the funding request per department, was already quoting a marketing department of 3.5 FTE, which is the same marketing department quoted in BIP-33 and BIP-75.
The only general accounting number is given in BIP-275, in which the CEO of Orb assesses that, for 2022, the total amount of BAL allocated to Orb was 398,257, and 295,491 was allocated to employees subject to 1-yr-cliff and annual vesting. However, the assessment omitted any breakdown of cliff or vesting calculations/breakdowns and more than a week passed with Orb’s CEO failing to answer any of the questions he agreed on 5/1 to answer that were raised in response to his post.
There is often overlap between Orb’s departments and the words that Orb leadership uses to identify service areas, making it difficult to determine who is supposed to be doing what, in what department, for how much, and when.
Further investigation is required to determine: (a) how much funding Orb has received in both USDC and BAL and the status of the BAL in terms of employee allocation, and cliff and vesting schedules, (b) its actual expenditures for specific personnel compensation, and (c) the services and other deliverables, goods, equipment or materials it obtained for or on behalf of the Balancer DAO.
Specification
A “yes” vote authorizes the following specification:
- The termination of Orb as an SP as of the 31st of July;
- Payments to Orb to require monthly approval from Balancer governance after Orb’s leadership has provided detailed plans on spending projections for the next month and reported on spending for the previous month. To be noted, the previous monthly spending report is for evaluation purposes, not for retroactive governance approval;
- The reconciliation of unused, returned, or unvested assets paid to or being held by Orb, including USDC and BAL per** per BIP-20, BIP-38, BIP-33, and BIP-75 or otherwise.