Before we proceed any further with the discussion regarding the enhancements to the DGP programme, I would like to bring your attention to the events that transpired during the previous vote. The community expressed dissatisfaction with Reverie, having raised numerous inquiries about KPIs, OKRs, expanding the number of trustees, transparency, and other matters. Recently, information surfaced about a $300,000 payment to Chaos without a clear scope. Reverie has acknowledged that they do not vote for themselves; however, I would like to present some on-chain data that suggests a single, prominent VC with substantial token holdings supports them. This may explain their perceived arrogance, slow response, preferential treatment of certain grantees, and reluctance to address the concerns raised by community members.
An amount of 10.25 million USDC has been minted recently, indicating that an individual or entity has engaged in a transaction with Circle.
Subsequently, the 10.25 million USDC were transferred to an address, presumably associated with an over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk. From there, the funds were dispersed in a series of transactions to various designated wallets.
The wallets:
0x19D675bBb76946785249A3AD8a805260e9420CB8 216.838 ETH
0x91fCF056AE299a298698DA8647d84f912e8E57DB 68.491 ETH
0xbB9fD574Be2BE7c2526375A4391C7306C0794aB9 2.846M USDC Part of 20M Vote
0x408A38f4bD05f255B6C1defC24bce9D3A29Ba2b9 6.58M USDC Part of 20M Vote
0x9B5d33863ce5d9b0dec6F763d1F0d28944F89B47 700K USDC
0x28A3818D33E1929905bB285a379Dd30721BdE484 0.596 ETH 3.9M delegated reverie
0x6a23DB02799c56ec9Fbc9b59c689B8C78dD36D5E 0.596 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0x96A4278787C89F41549dd7c7504Bcf2320904013 0.596 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0x9d3dAc11a16Da122c806846022Ec69f72E79e424 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0xB018672368944e30AB08c8FB918D72c99bD1b435 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0xB9555fAFD3111d706B37e05f8EA07fe3D0e8426A 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0xC7Bb0569280240f16d22e805E371fD0C466F3B5d 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0xD65e21432B5efe02dB5F24b2fFDFfAE621Bdc467 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
0xbAAA7752b47B3Cf0BF5B2db7C6CCA518F549D304 0.597 ETH Part of 35M Vote
A spirited exchange took place on Discord recently, addressing the topic of Reverie. It may be beneficial for someone to summarise the conversation, ensuring its accessibility to the general public and, more importantly, the press. The presence of Reverie within our organisation stems from their alleged forceful manipulation of the voting process. It appears they may lack the motivation to engage with the community’s interests, with the potential to secure any desired remuneration and allocate substantial grants to favoured projects. To establish a genuinely democratic, decentralised organisation, it is imperative that we address the issue of this seemingly opportunistic entity. The primary concern is that their ultimate objective may be to siphon the community’s funds for personal gain.
You may examine the wallets presented in the initial post alongside the wallets from these screenshots, and then draw your own conclusions as to whether the voting process was subject to manipulation or not.
Thanks for putting this together I have made my opinion known in Discord so I will refrain from commenting for now.
I want to point out to the community that the $300,000 grant given to Chaos Labs is the largest grant issued by DGP. It was issued 11 months ago and was undisclosed by the program. Without @RealVovochka auditing the program on his own time, it could have gone undiscovered by the community.
We appreciate the effort you’ve been putting into this Vovochka. Your dedication to this Protocol and your unrivalled motivation to act in its best interests cannot be debated in any way shape or form.
Well done for this investigative piece!
Let’s hope it gets addressed and clarity is provided (by virtue of an affirmation or otherwise) as to who perpetrated this act.
Hope you are well. Josh from dYdX Foundation is here.
It looks like a lot of work went into the diligence, which I appreciate. However, I think there are some gaps in the information that you are presenting and the claims made. These are serious claims and I want to make sure they are supported with the appropriate level of proof. I’ve inserted the relevant parts below -
"Reverie has acknowledged that they do not vote for themselves; however, I would like to present some on-chain data that suggests a single, prominent VC with substantial token holdings supports them."
I took a very quick look at the info above. Just so I’m clear, from your research it appears that there was an OTC deal and the same address(es) voted in support of DGP v1.5?
"The presence of Reverie within our organisation stems from their alleged forceful manipulation of the voting process."
I do not think there is enough information here to substantiate this claim.
"The primary concern is that their ultimate objective may be to siphon the community’s funds for personal gain."
I do not think there is enough information here to substantiate this claim. Entitled to your opinion/concern though.
"You may examine the wallets presented in the initial post alongside the wallets from these screenshots, and then draw your own conclusions as to whether the voting process was subject to manipulation or not."
Could you provide more information about the alleged manipulation?
Thank you, @Josh_E_Wa.
I hope you are conducting your own investigation and not merely defending Reverie while they remain concealed.
My intention is to demonstrate that the two accounts that voted for DGP v1.5 are either a single entity or, at the very least, behaving as one. Moreover, this entity delegated tokens to Reverie at the time they executed the OTC deal.
Tokenizing USD into USDC is a three-step process:
A user sends USD to the token issuer’s bank account.
The issuer uses USDC smart contract to create an equivalent amount of USDC.
The newly minted USDC are delivered to the user, while the substituted US dollars are held in reserve.
When 10.25 million USDC is minted and sent to one account (OTC desk), it implies that a single company initiated a bank transfer. Consequently, any subsequent actions were in the best interest of that company.
A portion of the USDC was converted to ETH and sent to nine addresses. Each address already held approximately 3.9M DYDX tokens. Subsequently, eight of these addresses delegated all their DYDX tokens to the 0x…630f5 address, which voted with 35M tokens. Simultaneously, the ninth address delegated 3.9M tokens to Reverie.
The second part of the OTC deal involved 2.846M and 6.58M USDC being transferred to two addresses: 0x…4aB9 and 0x…a2b9. These two addresses delegated their tokens to the 0x…b11f address, amounting to approximately 20M tokens.
Reasons I believe the vote was manipulated:
The voters with 35M and 20M tokens appear to be acting as a single entity due to the OTC deal.
To explain how Reverie received a 3.9M delegation, I will reference an image posted on the old forum:
The 20M-token address cast its first and only off-chain vote.
The 35M-token address cast its first and only off-chain vote.
However, both of these addresses participated in the on-chain vote concerning the launch of the Operations subDAO.
The evidence presented above indicates that Reverie manipulated the vote through forceful means.
Hey, thanks for the follow-up info. Appreciate the breakdown.
First, I think there is a big difference between defending an ecosystem participant and asking for claims on the community forums to be adequately supported.
Second, you are entitled to your own opinion/views in line with the Forum Guidelines. I’m simply requesting that you chose your language appropriately when stating opinions, assumptions, and facts.
Firstly, the forum is intended to be a place for discussion, debate, expression of opinions, and requests. My opinion (and the opinion of a minimum of 8 other active forum members actually) is that @RealVovochka has supported his claims to the best extent possible - his claims are supported by transparent and immutable on-chain data and thus, this is the best anyone can venture to in regard to supporting one’s claim on a potentially (and probably) hijacked vote (what more do you expect? For @RealVovochka to go knocking on the relevant VC’s doors asking for clarification?). Furthermore, to put this theory to rest, the claim has to actually be clarified by the voter/Reverie itself (something which is improbable).
Secondly, I think we can all appreciate that not all users have an optimum grasp of the English language. However, in this case, I see nothing wrong with the wording chosen - however, feel free to direct me to the wording that you allude could have been chosen better (as honestly, I do not know what you are referring to here).
We should collectively start fostering a culture where free speech and unincentivised, yet sufficiently delivered contributions are praised - instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack to criticise one’s thorough investigation.
Is the dYdX Foundation actively seeking clarification in regard to how this vote was actually manipulated? (Lest we forget that almost half of the dYdX Token Supply was used by a VC here to manipulate a vote which otherwise, would potentially not have passed).
Given all the assertions against Reverie here, as cofounder, I wanted to chime in here too.
But first, a quick note on why we’ve largely shied away from these discussions. Initially, we tried to respond to the constant accusations, but for every reply we gave, we got two new accusations back. I think the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is to stop replying.
That’s why initially, I thought it would be best if we didn’t reply here either. Obviously though, the thinking has changed — in DAO land and in life, perception can be reality, and my worry is the uninformed reader reading this thread may perceive Reverie as the bad guys and the accusations as true. That’s what forced my hand to comment.
With that context out of the way, let’s get back to the accusations.
Who voted for us? We don’t know most of the people/entities who vote for our proposals or other proposals. Here’s what we do know though. Just like pretty much every other governance participant, before we put up a proposal, we try to socialize it with some of the tokenholders. Practically-speaking, all this means is we sometimes share a draft with tokenholders to see if they have feedback on our proposals. If they like the proposals, they usually vote yes, and if they don’t they usually let you know and vote no. This is routine governance 101 stuff. As the on-chain record shows, some large tokenholders clearly voted for our proposals. Zero “manipulation” happened here. To call this manipulation would be a bit like saying asking a cop for directions is fraud (on this accusation, one is reminded of this classic line “no one knows what it means…but it’s provocative…it gets the people going”).
Chaos grant. Chaos Labs is a grantee we’ve been working with for a while now, and they have previously delivered on every grant they’ve been tasked with. We’ve worked with their team before, we like the team, and most importantly, they do a phenomenal job on the work we’ve asked them to do. Because of the great job they did across several projects, we wanted to bring them onto a longer-term service provider agreement. That way, dYdX would become a priority customer for them. What happened was we agreed on a scope of work and they started working. But before we could make an announcement, new information about dYdX v4 and changes to v3 came out, forcing us to change the scope of the agreement. Since Chaos Labs had already completed some work and we wanted to secure their resources for dYdX, we paid them a portion of the previously agreed-upon payment. In short, the idea was to pay them now to lock down their time, narrow down the scope of work with them, and then publish the grant information publicly once the scope was nailed down. Since we were still in discussions around the revised scope, we opted to avoid a formal announcement before everything was clearly defined. We normally don’t pay grantees until the scope is finalized, but this was no random grantee — we’ve worked with Chaos before, they’ve delivered great work, and we trusted them to continue doing great work. Nothing, and I mean nothing about this situation is out of the ordinary course of business.
I like a good drama as much as the next guy, but I must admit, having false allegations thrown against you is no fun to watch. Reading some of the comments mentioned here, you’d think we’re some kind of wicked, shadowy organization that through some kind of strange, psychic power forces people to vote against their wishes. In reality, we’re five guys who are working around the clock to do right by our partners.
In all honesty I will not even bother replying to this in a detailed manner as it is a sorry excuse for a reply (yet again)
Firstly, your statement re. getting two accusations for each reply is a lie. These accusations have been the same since the first DGP review, and are even the same in the Osmosis Grants Program. You’re merely stating this to justify you not addressing the numerous community concerns that were forwarded to you.
Secondly, Chaos Labs’ reputation has never been put into question - your internal policies and procedures (especially those relating to transparency) are the subject matter of the criticism. To put these allegations to rest, all you have to do is publish the agreement with the scope of work (confirmed by Chaos Labs), that you had sent to them 11 months ago. You’re entering into these agreements on behalf of the dYdX Community - there is no legal issue in publicising them.
Re. VC-voting, you confirmed via Discord that you indeed lobby VC to vote in your favour (and here again you also did the same). VCs are not community members, they are value extractors. The community members did not want the DGP to proceed, the VCs you lobbied (and probably misled by virtue of an incorrect depiction of the real negative effect you’re having on the Ecosystem) did.
This victim card you’re consistently playing is not working out for you Larry - I would suggest venturing to Discord and answering the community’s concerns. Allegations are the fruit of uncertainty Larry - uncertainty you have created due to your lack of transparency and mismanagement of the DGP.
I cannot determine whether Chaos is a world-class provider. However, they failed to modify the trading rewards formula on their $240,000 website while retaining $300,000.
I would like to remind you that the trading rewards formula was changed more than six months ago. Whose fault is it: Chaos or Reverie?
