Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth)

Preventing human-machines conflicts since 2014. Ethereum Foundation Alumni (2014-2018), co-founder of ENS (2017), co-founder of Higher Order Company (2023).

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

* helped launch ethereum
* launched the first Ethereum Wallet and Web3 Browser.
* coded one of the first ERC20 tokens, DAO, token sale and NFT (ENS!) contracts, and they were used as templates in the Ethereum home.
* spent 2 years promoting ENS as a primary means of login

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@udiWertheimer This is actually great news for Chinese open source models! The development of the next level one just restarted!

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

> $1m from the EF / lots of community integration

Those footsteps was the community carrying you when you couldn’t do it on your own

> labs received less than 50%

true, by a hair

> honeypot with no accountability to be pillaged by DAO opportunists

Look at the graph below. Ethdotlimo, Namehash, Blockful, Resolverworks, protocol guild, those were the next largest fund receivers, working with less than 10% of what labs got. Does that looks like DAO opportunists pillaging the DAO? Because I would call that fostering a strong community of developers.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

This was the ethereum website in 2015. I was the one pushing these pixels and writing the texts. No one told me what to do, I don't even remember how I got assigned the task of building it – I just showed up. Tokens, Crowdsales, DAOs, it was all there. It's quite naïve in retrospect.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

I pay my taxes. I don't see where they go. I vote. I can't track where the vote is counted. I can't build my own dashboard. We built a better system than that in 2015. I went to Brasilia and touted that we could "build a better democracy with 100 lines of code". That was probably one of the highlights of my carrier.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

I would say the ENS DAO was the model of how everything else should work: transparent, hard rules, uncorruptable.

But the problem is that people are hard to govern, even under the best rules. And we ended up reinventing a lot of existing governance structures to fix our own failings.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@fivedogit I was going to list all the things that got built in multiple years. 2016 was a big year for DAOs and icos

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

We built a better system in 2016. You could buy directly from founders, own directly in your wallet, liquid.

The world used it for pumping scams. Nobody else ever wanted to touch that.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

We built what we thought the world needed, not what it wanted.
That’s why we failed.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Nick, I believe your need to telegraph which votes you will participate in or not reveal you know that something was fundamentally broken when you activated those voting tokens. If you want to actually commit into self limiting your power, why don't you delegate it back to a new veto.ensdao.eth contract?

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Lots of things you *could’ve* done. You could’ve self delegated enough to outvote the next 5 delegates instead of the next 50. You could’ve given votes to 10 people you agree with but don’t control. You could’ve delegated to the veto contract that can only vote “no”. You could’ve done all of these and still negotiate a reform of the DAO and Foundation that addresses the communities concern.

But if you think they are unfixable and controlled by the wrong people then sure, a total takeover seems an option - but I’d really disagree on the diagnostic.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

It’s not at all illegitimate for you to use them, it’s what they’re there for. But it’s bringing a sledgehammer to a broken system and calling it reform. I take responsibility in that too: the DAO started with 50m tokens earmarked for future governance distribution to new teams, hackathons etc. SPP onboarded over 10 new teams in the ecosystem but we distributed less than 100k ens total to them. They should’ve gotten a million each, vested for 10 years.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

It’s not at all illegitimate for you to use them, it’s what they’re there for. But it’s bringing a sledgehammer to a broken system and calling it reform. I take responsibility in that too: the DAO started with 50m tokens earmarked for future governance distribution to new teams, hackathons etc. SPP onboarded over 10 new teams in the ecosystem but we distributed less than 100k ens total to them. They should’ve gotten a million each, vested for 10 years.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Lots of things you *could’ve* done. You could’ve self delegated enough to outvote the next 5 delegates instead of the next 50. You could’ve given votes to 10 people you agree with but don’t control. You could’ve delegated to the veto contract that can only vote “no”. You could’ve done all of these and still negotiate a reform of the DAO and Foundation that addresses the communities concern.

But if you think they are unfixable and controlled by the wrong people then sure, a total takeover seems an option - but I’d really disagree on the diagnostic.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Nick, I believe your need to telegraph which votes you will participate in or not reveal you know that something was fundamentally broken when you activated those voting tokens. If you want to actually commit into self limiting your power, why don't you delegate it back to a new veto.ensdao.eth contract?

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

@aurbelis @nicksdjohnson @LefterisJP I would support this. Usage of flash loans, shorts etc OR having the effect of transferring control of endowment or DAO tokens to the proposer would both allow the security council to act.

[Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth) @avsa]

Point d is the weakest one. So if “RFV Raiders” or Arca decides to buy tokens with the express purpose of taking control of the endownment, but it’s not done “immediately before the vote”, is it an attack or a legitimate use of token vote power? I believe it’s easier to treat an attack on its effects and not how votes were obtained.