KlimaDAO Forum

@jabby09 Thanks for the detailed breakdown Jabby. I think we have consistently been the most transparent, cost-effective, cohesive and organized team within the DAO (thanks to you). Very good point about the potential for milestones to handcuff us.

Still, concerns about accountability and incentives between the orgs are valid. For my own sake, I want to try re-framing things so I can better understand where there is tension, and where there isn't.

1. Top-level DAO strategy: we need transaction & retirement volume, and our path to get there is by building out the UI, API, and marketplace and by eliminating web3 friction. The DAO and community has been extremely well aligned here .
2. This strategy requires heavy investments in software development, engineering, and sales. On this we have also been strongly aligned past budget KIPs have passed with little controversy .
3. The market is best served by a standalone brand. The product, partnerships, sales, and protocol teams were all aligned when we created Carbonmark to address challenges faced with the KlimaDAO brand
4. We critically need an organizational entity for this brand (see my post above). We have strong alignment here as well, even within this thread
5. This new org should manage itself to reduce DAO organizational overhead, reduce DAO software maintenance burdens, and for Carbonmarks own longevity, agility and resilience. Tension: how much management control should the DAO have over the new org?
6. This new org must continue to consume the DAO’s tech stack (specifically the Retirement Aggregator contracts, Retirement Bonds, and liquidity). This is a no-brainer as the products whole USP is oriented around Digital Carbon, most of which is owned by the DAO. Tension: can we prevent Carbonmark from abandoning the stack in the future?
7. This new org must continue to contribute to the DAO’s tech stack. This is status-quo, as the product team already develops on both fronts. Tension: can we prevent Carbonmark from abandoning this responsibility, switching to forked & closed-sourced versions?

From my perspective, Carbonmark and KlimaDAO’s fates are bound completely. Carbonmark is nothing without the DAO and nobody on the product team has any interest in rebuilding our foundations. I struggle to think of a practical arrangement that can can fully alleviate these tensions without creating more headache. I would much rather we secure a single tranche of funding so we have a guaranteed runway and peace-of-mind for contributors. Other arrangements are too far outside my domain of expertise (I’m not a lawyer) and I haven’t heard any real actionable suggestions yet.

Vote No. Massive red flags here.

As engineering lead I would love to see KLIMA on every CEX under the sun, but I've been taught by @Archimedes and @TheLawyer that listings are monumental undertakings that require lobbying, pitches, legal due diligence, and lock up piles of capital.

I watched KLIMA get listed on gate.io and did not see any of your abovementioned liquidity arguments pan out. CEX's can unlock free marketing and can expose us to new audiences, sure, but they are still bound by the laws of supply and demand.

The vague $750k UDSC earmark also needs a lot more context.

Maybe I am ignorant of some potential deal or partnership opportunities, but this proposal is highly questionable at this time (lets focus on KIP-45 first?). There is no harm in maintaining our deep DEX liquidity until we have more concrete plans and some positive signals-- at which point I'm all ears!

Head of Engineering at KlimaDAO here

Creating & funding this entity is an absolutely critical step for both Carbonmark & the DAO.

I only wish we'd done it sooner. Since day one, our approach to building products has been blockchain-first, and permissionless. These technical decisions have tradeoffs touching everything from user onboarding, to transaction speed and website performance. Some of these Web3 tradeoffs are simply insurmountable for the segment of the market who would adopt Digital Carbon at scale. Managing wallets, gas, and permissionless assets is simply too much to ask from carbon brokers and project developers who have long-established KYC and accounting practices. Many quality of life features that I want to ship-- Stripe integrations, wallet abstractions, KYC and AML, and more, are simply not possible in the current DAO structure, so me and the product team have deprioritized them. This has been deeply frustrating for me.

Our legal designation has also made my job as a manager and team-builder more difficult, as I can't compete on the same level as software companies who can offer more familiar employment contracts. Thankfully KlimaDAO and Carbonmark are exciting, high-impact projects: plenty of top-tier builders have showed up to contribute. The team I work with right now is incredibly efficient and talented. The next phase of growth, however, is going to require a more traditional talent acquisition process.

As I've come to understand (I am not a lawyer) the only way to bridge these gaps and solve these problems are to establish a legal entity.

Right now, most dev time is already spent on Carbonmark. KlimaDAO invented ReFi and the Digital Carbon Market, but it absolutely can not succeed without a product like Carbonmark. I want Carbonmark to be the most comprehensive UI and API for interacting with the Carbon Market end-to-end. The DAO liquidity engine has already made the impossible possible-- the largest and most diverse supply of carbon credits with open access, instant settlement & instant retirement, and a set of APIs that allow anyone to integrate carbon into any application.

Now, we believe we have enough feedback to address fundamental issues and really unlock the scale we've all been envisioning.

For those who are worried about my commitment to the DAO going forward: Me and my colleagues will continue to maintain app.klimadao.finance for the foreseeable future. The DAO marketing team has already made huge strides towards taking full control of the website & blog, so they are no longer dependent on us developers for their new content and campaigns. In addition, the DAO will benefit from the fact that projects like Klima Infinity, KlimaDAO Pledges, and the carbon-oriented sections of the app can be deprecated and no longer be a burden on the DAO to maintain-- these have already been re-implemented (and much better!) in Carbonmark with the same value-sharing mechanisms for the DAO.

Finally; we work in the open and plan to continue doing that as well. Concerns or complaints about our pace, code quality, roadmap or spending have always been welcomed. So far the product and engineering teams have received nothing but praise, our team outperforms any team I've ever been on dollar-for-dollar, and is improving every day.

Disclosure: I'm a core co-founder, and an Engineering lead.

I hope my opinion is worth something, as I've borne a significant burden of work since before launch; interfacing with all departments to help ideate, coordinate, build and test the core KlimaDAO products, while hiring and leading the frontend/web3 team. In October 2021, KlimaDAO presented an ambitious vision to the world. People loved it, and threw millions of dollars at it. Now, the ultimate responsibility falls on me and my fellow builders to turn this vision into code. A shrinking market-cap, external competition, and this brief moment in the limelight creates a sense of immediacy and pressure that I don't think outsiders can fully appreciate. We shipped a lot already, but we need to keep the pace.

I think this proposal is a great step for the DAO and I fully support it.

I should first say I appreciate the concerns of our very vocal contributors. Accountability, transparency, decentralization are important. It’s easy for me to take these things for granted— I’m just here for the carbon. So I’m glad these complaints are being surfaced now and I’m taking them to heart. Reading the discussions has already shifted my perspective quite a bit.

But I am still surprised and confused by the very emotional and reactionary responses and ultimatums given by a few contributors over the last few days. It seems to me that they either: A. misunderstand the KIP... B. entered this arena with a serious mismatch of values and priorities... or - C. Are letting emotions get the best of them. Probably some combination of the above? Not to mention some missteps of our own.

The way I see it, this KIP does a great job of formalizing the structure that has already emerged organically. This KIP is a small, but important step towards accountability, transparency, decentralization! We can’t relegate ourselves without first formalizing what our powers and responsibilities are. To call this a ‘power grab’ and ‘step towards centralization’ is a complete mis-read of both the KIP and the status-quo. I’ve tried to take some of the slippery-slope arguments and ‘what-if’s to heart but they are wholly unconvincing.

Our current working model, and the one outlined in this doc, are not perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good. I worry that only those who have shipped high-impact products under pressure can really understand this. Too much of the discussions are driven by a desire for perfection and idealism. Perfect governance, ideal democracy, perfect transparency. All nice-to-haves, all wholly impractical at this early stage. We can achieve them in due time.

For these reasons I am also thrilled at the addition of a working group who can hopefully weigh my productivity concerns while still ensuring progress towards decentralization and governance to the satisfaction of all investors. A flood of good suggestions and ideas have poured over the last few days. We should take time to weigh them all, and iterate, without getting mad at the Operations team for not adopting them right here and now in this KIP.

Last point. My eyes have been opened: I would have hoped that Core had earned more respect and trust from the community by this point. I see, every day, across dozens of calls and chatrooms, how insanely brilliant, ambitious, and hard working the founders, core & leads are. I’m so humbled to even have seat next to them. But the tone in discord and in this forum seems to be largely of suspicion or skepticism towards core. It’s clear we need to do better to show our work and values to the rest of the world and earn more of your trust. Much easier said than done, but we can try!