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.
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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”).
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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.