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21

TL;DR:

Contribution:
Here is my application for the Treasury Committee on behalf of myself (bernard) and the web3 Studios team (w3s).

Key goals for Treasury Committee:

  1. Define mandate for the Treasury Committee - to make an informed decision on the focus of Yield Hunting vs. Yield Research vs. other focus.
  2. Set up the Yield Strategy - to unlock economic opportunities for the treasury holdings.
  3. Support Asset Management and Risk - to fuel protocol growth and reduce exposure against adverse market conditions.
  4. Establish Financial Reporting Standards - to establish transparency for DAO members and act as decision-making support.
  5. Community Activity - to facilitate and contribute to community discussions around DeFi risks assessment

Background:

  • Prior working for McKinsey’s Digital Practice. Quit to go crypto full-time.
  • Part of web3 Studios (w3s) - a team of DeFi/TradFi contributors (ex-Blackstone, JP Morgan, DeFi) to support DAOs in strategic finance topics (M&A, Fundraising, Treasury Mgmt).
  • While I would hold the committee role, we would contribute as web3 Studios for some deliverables to maximize impact, e.g., working on the yield strategy or creating financial reports for the DAO.
  • Steering committee at McKinsey-DAO (global community of former McKinsey employees incl. several top web3 founders).

Key contribution areas:

  • Portfolio Construction: Working with a team of DeFi/TradFi contributors who will support in setting up a differentiated strategy for the Gro Treasury.
  • Risk Assessment: Set up a risk management framework to guide portfolio construction and provide transparency of current exposure for DAO.
  • Financial Reporting and Analysis: Create financial reports assessing key financial metrics for DAO members to understand, incl. cash flow statements, balance sheets, income statements, budgeting / forecast expenses
  • Community Activity: Facilitate and contribute to community discussions around DeFi risks assessment.

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Below are some of my thoughts on topics I’d like to bring to the committee:

Overarching Goals for GRO’s Treasury Committee

Pre-requisite: 1. Treasury Mgmt System:
Design and implement an efficient and robust treasury management system. A fundamental part of this will be the question of what the Treasury Committee mandate should look like from a strategic perspective.

Supporting @chriswong suggestion to form a small yield-research task force / working group to enable outcome-driven work and performance tracking, rather than pure-decision making. And second @exa256.eth view on extend the scope of that group slightly. In our view, the Gro DAO could benefit from increased structure and transparency when it comes to its financial situation. I.e., we would include Financial Reporting and Risk Assessment as key areas for the group to work on.

Our ideal proposed set-up for this would be a 4-5 people team with one person filling the facilitator role. This person should wear two hats - understand the mechanics of the treasury task force in-depth and have the overview of what info is crucial for other DAO members to know at what time. Happy to discuss the ideal set-up in more depth.

2. Yield Strategy Research/ Treasury Unlock:
Unlocking the Gro Treasury to grow the protocol and its ecosystem. This includes researching and the development of different yield strategies. For this different DeFi products need to be continuously analyzed and communicated to the DAO in a comprehensive manner.

3. Asset Management and Risk
Allocating Treasury assets into selected yield strategies and managing these allocations. This includes the evaluation of liquidity needs for core business operations, as well as the continuous evaluation of risk exposure of managed assets.

4. Financial Analysis and Reporting:
Creating standards for financial reporting and delivering periodic financial reports. The reports will be transparently disclosed to the Gro DAO and give its members financial data that will support decision-making going forward. This is achieved by enabling the community, as well as external parties with interest in the Gro protocol to evaluate the following materials:

  • Cash Flow Statement
  • Balance Sheet
  • Income Statement
  • Budgeting / Forecasting Expenses

Super excited by the movement on this front, and happy to discuss this in more depth!

2 Likes
22

Putting up my hand to join the emergency multisig. As an initial contributor I’m very well acquainted with the yield and risk tranching protocol and its various parameters. I’m also readily accessible for emergencies.

Also happy to contribute to the people pod, whenever the people pod facilitator is elected and depending on how they want to assemble the pod.

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thanks for showing interest in the discussion related to Treasury. @exa256.eth @Bernard @karcharodon @Organized_Chaos ; pls kindly join the Treasury channel for continued discussion/collaboration on the proposal towards a research/financial report/assetMang working group. feel free to dm me yr discord name if u cant find the channel - chriswong#1034

2 Likes
24

Welcome to the Gro DAO @Bernard; Great proposal! I think you bring up some great points such as clarifying the mandate and associated work streams - which has been a bit ambiguous so far. Sounds like you’re an experienced group with some interesting ideas.

Care to come into the Gro discord’s #treasury channel and discuss it synchronously? Keen to discuss how you think about team composition and balance between complexity of treasury operations and achievable objectives/deliverables, as well as sequence of priorities.

1 Like
25

Hi all, responded in Discord. And I agree, let’s move the discussion there :slight_smile:

@graadient, agree with what you state at the main points. Order of answers slightly adjusted.

The response posted here for transparency (for people not following the #treasury channel):

TL;DR:

  1. Sequence of Priorities: Get Transparency → Set Objectives —> Perform Yield Research/Strategy —> Set up Risk Mgmt
  2. Team: Either (a) Facilitator-led working group (for more accountability) or (b) Self-led working group. Size 3-4 people overall.
  3. Complexity of Treasury Mgmt vs. Achievable Deliverables: Prioritize hard and set clear OKRs for agreed objectives
  4. Continuity: A compensation cliff could be a way to incentivize people not to drop out.

(1) Sequence of priorities

  1. Provide a clear level of transparency of financial situation + options
    —> Deliverable: One-off full status report for DAO (+after that: form core parts into a recurring report/dashboard)
  2. Decide on objectives of Treasury working group for next 3m/6m/12m
    —> Deliverable: Clear plan who does what + OKRs
  3. Perform yield research and execute strategy (core)
    —> Deliverable: View on treasury yield actions to take and execution
  4. Set up risk management
    —> Deliverable: Risk management framework to measure exposure continuously
  5. Others on-going: Community interaction; Facilitation of communication between pods/committees; etc.

(2) Team composition

In our view there would be two options:

(2a) Facilitator-led working group:

  • One facilitator with overarching responsibility for one core topic, steering, and „putting the pieces together“
  • A working team of 2-3 contributors, each with a different topic focus
  • We’d suggest to split core topics between contributors (each of the 3-4 topics is covered by 1 main lead, and 1 co-lead respectively; i.e., every contributor wears two hats (one lead, one co-lead hat for two different topics) vs. everyone does everything and discuss.

The risk of the committee being run without a facilitator is a lack of accountability and missing potential upsides of the function. I.e. while the minimum barrier will likely still be met (diversifying treasury), we would potentially forego the opportunity to create more out of this (e.g., yield research reports (I’m a fan of @ idea, if executable efficiently this can have great upside potential/secondary effects for Gro), new standards in financial reporting, coming up with creative ideas on how to use the treasury, fostering communication between pods and committees).

Not saying these topics couldn’t be realized otherwise, just that in terms of efficiency a person steering and holding people accountable could be a massive win (this obviously shouldn’t mean that person has more control or so than the others to prevent the risk of corruption. Does that go in the direction you had in mind as well? @chriswong).

Let’s discuss further. Also as it looks, @exa256.eth skillsets are quite complementary to ours (Smart contract/DeFi + TradFi and Reporting/DeFi). Happy to discuss what the optimal set-up would look like. Also obviously with everyone else who is interested in being part of this @karcharodon, @Organized_Chaos, but that just crossed my mind.

(2b) Self-led working group:

  • Working team of 3-4 contributors, each with different topic focus.
  • Same dynamics with lead, co-lead apply (see above)

This being said, there is no need to overload the function with a larger amount of people than this. For the case that we at some point realize this changes, we should bake in some flexibility for scaling up/down.

(3) Complexity of Treasury Ops vs. Achievable Deliverables

We agree this is probably the hardest nut to crack in the case of Gro DAO. With limited resources (vs. the larger strategic DAOs who „do it all“).

We’d suggest to approach this with a clear prioritization and sequencing of key objectives (see above) and the development of clear OKRs at the start of the working group cycle. These OKRs should be discussed in the wider forum, so we can jointly iterate on a deliverable proposal the working group creates and everyone knows what to expect.

To solve this topic the facilitator-led team set-up would be especially helpful, as the person would sense under-/overload of the group and could then propose changes accordingly.

(4) Continuity

As this group provides a crucial function to the DAO building its financial back layer so that operations can run smoothly, we need to ensure the continuity of the task force. What often happens and what we should avoid is that people leave the committee one by one. Therefore, I would introduce a cliff for compensation to incentivize and act as a selection filter for committed people/teams (tbd how to structure).

2 Likes
26

Ditto, happy to join the emergency msig - early contributor on yield and risk tranching and also available at most hours in case of emergency.