Following discussion in this thread it was revealed that Orb Collective does not intend to continue as a service provider to Balancer DAO beyond July 31. It is important to make the distinction that many individual Orb employees are likely to continue working in the ecosystem - this does not mean everyone at Orb is leaving Balancer (and this would be a massive loss if it were the case).
Promptly placing those individuals who plan to continue in the ecosystem with other service providers will lead to a more productive and collaborative environment compared to an extended three month dissolution process. For this reason I propose to halt any previously approved payments to Orb Collective after May 31. It’s important there is at least two weeks from the passing of this vote (if it passes) to the offboarding date of May 31 so this proposal should go to a vote this week. Discussion can and should continue however, either in this thread or the other one.
It is reasonable to expect supplementary budget proposals from other SP’s in the near future to ensure funds are available so all Balancer contributors who are transitioning have a secure salary.
If funding is required for Orb Collective beyond May 31 the community can consider that in a supplementary BIP if Orb Collective chooses to present such a proposal. The community should be prepared to move quickly to approve any sensible funding request.
Specification
All future payments to Orb authorized under BIP-20 and BIP-197 are halted with immediate effect.
Orb employees who are leaving the ecosystem should immediately begin transitioning any active projects to other SP’s. This means inviting contributors from Maxis/Beets to any external communication channels with 3rd parties immediately.
Access to Slack, Notion, Asana, and any other workflow tools will be removed for all Orb employees who have not started the onboarding process with another SP as of May 31st. These Orb employees must remove themselves from any external communication channels related to Balancer.
OpCo is mandated to provide a clear accounting of all USDC currently held in the operational wallet. Specifically, what amount remains unspent after all Year 1 obligations are fulfilled (aside from those nullified in this BIP).
OpCo is mandated to return to the DAO treasury any remaining BAL allocated to Orb under BIP-38.
(My thoughts are my own, and they are probably not properly formed, but you’re rushing me, so I have no choice.)
What exactly are the politics in play here? It is patently outrageous to post a proposal on Wednesday and declare that it must move to Snapshot on Thursday.
It is important to make the distinction that many individual Orb employees are likely to continue working in the ecosystem…Promptly placing those individuals who plan to continue in the ecosystem with other service providers will lead to a more productive and collaborative environment compared to an extended three month dissolution process
Y’all keep taking this assumption for granted. The more this offboarding is rushed, the less likely people are going to want to remain within the ecosystem. You’re actively deterring Orb personnel from working with Balancer by demonstrating how little respect the DAO has for job security.
And yes, Orb has made mistakes. Various players (including myself) have failed to achieve some of their stated goals. We didn’t make quite the impact that we wanted to, and there are glaring holes still to be addressed across the ecosystem. But this isn’t some grand, conspiratorial rug. We engineers are not making ludicrous sums of money to do nothing. It’s just basic inefficiency, and we’re not even alone in accepting blame for that - the whole “ecosystem” contributes to the roadmap for each and every team, including ours, and there has been a huge lack of clarity in priorities.
So I would simply appreciate it if this were conducted with a bit more tact. There’s no need for such a rush. Everyone is already glued to their screens all day strategizing about what’s next because it seems the rug could be pulled at any moment. Give these professionals time to sort out their careers; extend them the same care that they have for the protocol.
I agree fully with the thoughts voiced by @rabmarut. I find how this whole thing is being handled quite jarring, and am surprised by how people like rab are managing to keep their cool despite this - I don’t think I would.
I think it’s a mistake to let this go for three months but ultimately I have no hard proof of that, just my subjective opinion. The reason I posted this has nothing to do with money - the goal is to ensure a prompt transition so people can get back to work and put some urgency behind presenting a plan for winding down Orb and the costs of that (if that’s the plan).
If people cannot offboard Orb before May 31 and salary funding is required for June that can easily be presented in a 1-2 page governance proposal explaining amount needed, why offboarding hasn’t completed, what the plan is to complete it during June.
My concern is if governance does nothing here this might drag out for three months because there’s no urgency. If it takes a few weeks to get people sorted at a new org then we could lose two months of people being able to focus on working for Balancer. All I care about is people that want to work can focus on the work but for a time everyone has to focus on sorting this out (unavoidable).
All that said if I’m the lone ranger here then I’ll drop it and return to my lane. Perhaps this is really none of my business at the end of the day which is fair.
I 100% agree with everything you say here. If this were written up as a BIP requesting funding to help the Integrations Team and it’s engineers transition, and provided some transparency around costs for this team, I think it wound find a lot of support.
I agree things are moving too fast. It sounds like @immutbl is going to put together a proposal for Friday. If you don’t think that proposal well represents what you have stated above, you should consider writing your own.
I also agree that there could be a lot more tact here. I do understand the desire to quickly cut funding to an SP that has so far refused to provide any transparency into costs, while at the same time stating its intentions to leave the ecosystem and asking for funding to do so.
Orb is a team with talented people, most of whom who were doing what they thought their job was for the most part . They should be treated with respect and decency.
No one yet has put a price tag on this proposed extra time. It’d really help to know what it was and what it covered.
Thanks for your comments, everyone. Just quickly, without giving too much thought to another response, I want to make one clarification:
In my post above, I was not advocating for the full three months. Currently, I think @Danko8383’s approach (linked below) is the most reasonable. In summary:
Overriding things with new specifications doesn’t seem fair in this scenario, imo…At the same time, it wouldn’t be reasonable for Orb to keep all of its staff and current costs for another 2.5 months just to offboard…Best-case scenario is Orb coming forward with a viable offboarding plan for them.
All I’m asking here is not to rush this to Snapshot this week. Let’s give everyone some time to get their thoughts in proper order.
I think the DAO should avoid putting undue stress on senior technical talent for the failures of the professional managerial class; waiting at least a week before sending this to a vote won’t cost the DAO much, but rushing it may result in unwanted talent churn.
Give time for this talent to strategise, and make a decision on how they can continue contributing and under which entity and team structure etc.
I think the DAO should avoid putting undue stress on senior technical talent for the failures of the professional managerial class; waiting at least a week before sending this to a vote won’t cost the DAO much, but rushing it may result in unwanted talent churn.
Give time for this talent to strategise, and make a decision on how they can continue contributing and under which entity and team structure etc.
I think you’re misunderstanding, or I’m very biased in my position I guess is also possible.
If your second sentence is accurate and talent is strategizing about their next move, it is reasonable to expect at least the beginning of a plan to be formed and presented to governance by May 25th (when a vote would need to start to authorize new funding for June).
The only added stress of passing a vote to halt previously approved funding beyond May 31 is forcing that plan to be presented to the community and accepted in around two weeks.
If we wait a week as you suggest OpCo is legally obligated to pay out June funding as there’s a 15 day written notice required to terminate the agreement with Orb so the only remaining decision for governance will be to cut July funding or not.
That said, I imagine the people at Orb would like to resolve this in a timely manner. Perhaps governance “forcing” the issue would result in losing good people we’d rather not lose. That is a completely fair position and life goes on regardless at the end of the day.
it is reasonable to expect at least the beginning of a plan to be formed and presented to governance by May 25th
Is it? The majority of the talent in question has only been informed of this impending doom within the last 6 calendar days. Only within the last 3 calendar days did governance signal its intention to halt funding in May instead of July.
So we’re talking about engineers who are only very recently aware of their predicament and need to strategize about where their paychecks are going to be coming from for the foreseeable future. Any hypothetical transition may require sweeping changes to the way they receive those paychecks. It may require spinning up new entities, or switching from FTE to contractor. It may require losing out on benefits such as 401k or healthcare. It may require accepting just three months of runway instead of another year.
Two weeks is not a long time to make such arrangements, or even to make firm decisions as to their feasibility. Some people have families, children, and mortgages. There are careers on the line, and already the DAO SP model is leaving a bad taste.
Two weeks is not a long time to make such arrangements, or even to make firm decisions as to their feasibility. Some people have families, children, and mortgages. There are careers on the line, and already the DAO SP model is leaving a bad taste.
It took a year to split up Balancer Labs back in the day so I get this completely. If two weeks is not enough to decide on a course of action to pursue then it is definitely better not to vote on this. I was hoping it would be reasonable to take a week or two for each team/individual to assess their options and decide which is best to pursue, that would be presented to governance along with a budget for June.
That could be unreasonable though. Maybe it is better to take a lot more time to think through everything.
that would be presented to governance along with a budget for June.
I think this might be the crux of the issue and the reason for our talking past each other. Despite your outward insistence - which I trust maps to your actual perception - that we can simply receive extra funding to wind down, the perspective from within Orb is quite different.
These recent forum posts inspire very little confidence that any new budget would be approved. For us, it feels far safer to cling to (at least some of) the budget we’ve “already” been allocated thru July rather than cutting that off and requesting brand new funding. The risk is that we’d go through the effort of crafting a proposal only to see it promptly rejected by the DAO.
yea I had that thought too. nothing is guaranteed (extra true in our case). I don’t have much actual voting power but I will use whatever influence I have to support any individual or group at Orb planning to stay at Balancer. I have to believe rational heads prevail at the end of the day. If the integrations team decides to pursue creating their own legal entity and becoming an SP I’d actively advocate for support of continuing to pay salaries through Orb and paying any cost associated with standing up such an entity (legal advice, etc). But it still might fail to be approved.
In my mind it’s better for everyone to get that answer in 2-3 weeks rather than three months. Of course that dialogue is still possible without passing this vote. Even with Orb fully funded through July 31 I believe it is to everyone’s benefit to decide what they want their future contributions to look like, communicate that to the community/voters, and start working towards that future. If that’s standing up a new entity or getting hired at OpCo or some arrangement with Beets or something else, dealer’s choice.
It won’t happen overnight but the sooner it does happen the better off Balancer will be. My intent is not to stop paying salaries of people working on Balancer every day but to use what leverage governance possesses to ensure this transition is the top priority and is handled with as much transparency as possible so all parties are aligned on the intended outcome. This is how we really move forward united to me.
I think this is something worth thinking about. Why does no one at Orb/in the integrations team think that there is a way for them to get budget? This conversation has been full of invitation after invitation to come forward with proposals for transition.
IMO the other story that we are maybe not talking about so much here, has to do with maybe not the best strategic planning around time spent on projects vs return on investment, and not providing the transparency outward to allow anyone else to step in and help make better strategic decisions. That doesn’t mean we don’t need people to work on dev/user support and integration topics in our ecosystem. If anything, these things have been neglected a bit in pursuit of big shiny projects.
I’m working 12+ hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week right now trying to support our users who are having problems using our site or with our protocol, our ecosystem developers who are constantly asking questions across telegram and discord, and our governance operations which is pretty full on all the time.
I see a whole bunch of very talented people who could be doing all of this work and improving the way it is done now being released from a long running project with little chance of returning a positive ROI.
I am not a religious man, but I wake up every morning and pray that more engineers in the Balancer ecosystem would take more time to focus on what’s actually happening and the needs of the users/developers who are trying to build on and use our platform now/today.
If people in Orb don’t feel like there is a place for them in the ecosystem, I really encourage them to come back and look around and find ways to add value. There are so many, and it’s a good way to keep your mind off organisational woes as leadership figures out how to deal with governance.
I also don’t have many votes, but will strongly advocate for any team and/or person that I see out there engaging the people that need help and spreading the good word on a regular basis. Even better if there is a plan forming to provide better tooling and documentation resources and make this less labor intensive work.
It’s also worth noting that my pay is public information, which is set by a BIP ever 3 months, as are details about how the SP I work with spends it’s money.
