Crafting dYdX's Decentralised Future: Essential subDAOs for Consideration

~ Personal thoughts as community member ~

Thanks for putting this together. Lot of good ideas here.

My main feedback is that it’s really important to be focused and prioritize the most impactful things the DAO should focus on. Trying to do too much at once will not go well, nor is it necessary yet if we zoom out and look at the long term trajectory of the protocol over the next 5-10 years. Given that, I believe the protocol should focus on just 0-2 more subDAOs beyond what already exists (grants, ops).

Another core thought is that the protocol should not yet focus on growth. The protocol should be as focused as possible on core product development and operations. It is still (and even upon the launch of v4 will still) not at a point where it has strong enough product market fit to compete toe to toe with CEXs. Focusing on growth now will be super distracting, waste resources, and likely not find much success yet (dYdX Trading didn’t have much success with growth efforts despite trying hard for a while).

Here are my quick thoughts on each of these

Community subDAO
Seems unnecessary right now. Both because of my point on not needing to prioritize growth yet, and also there’s a good amount of overlap with the growth subDAO

Growth subDAO
Seems unnecessary right now for reasons stated above. Could be considered 6-12 months post launch of v4

Governance subDAO
Not sure if this is necessary. It seems to have a lot of overlap with the mission of the dYdX Foundation. I will leave it to them to comment as to whether they think this would be useful or not at this stage

Security subDAO
Also seems unnecessary for the time being. dYdX Trading’s role come v4 will be to develop open source code, and an important part of this is security (see open roles for security Job Application for Engineering Lead - Security at dYdX).

Product Development subDAO
This is not necessary right now. Again dYdX Trading’s role will be to develop the open source software that powers the protocol and product so duplicating this will be actively bad and result in a much worse outcome. External development can be funded through the grants dao

Marketing & Communication subDAO
Should just be combined with the growth subDAO

Risk Management subDAO
This could make sense. Agree having an entity focused on this would be useful

Treasury Management subDAO
This could also make sense

Dispute Resolution subDAO
This seems really unnecessary right now. Seems like it’d really slow things down. What problem are we trying to solve here that exists right now?

Market Maker or Validator Business Development subDAO
This could make a lot of sense

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