MEETING MINUTES
14 May 2022 - VIDEO LINK
ATTENDEES
Present: Gracie Lau, Michael O'Sullivan, Chuck MacDonald, Edgar Fernandez
Not Present: Brock Pierce
Meeting Chair: Michael
MOTIONED ITEMS
Michael motioned to enact the Eden Member Services. Seconded by Edgar.
All present voted yes. Brock was absent.
Michael motioned to increase the Eden treasury draw rate from 5% to 15%. Seconded by Edgar.
All present voted yes. Brock was absent.
Michael motioned to request an increase in funding to the Eden treasury by the ENF. Seconded by Edgar.
All present voted yes. Brock was absent.
ACTION ITEMS
Michael: Will provide some KPI for the beginning of the next meeting.
AGENDA
with Notes
Review individual updates as per CD election commitments: (2 mins each)
Edgar: Eden Delegate Accounting Standard update. Work is being done on EOS Costa Rica github for now but will be migrated to Eden Github when ready. Secured domain eosreports.com for this. Shared some wireframes of what this could look like. Looking for feedback from the community on this. Form to fill out when claiming Delegate funds also shown. This progress is from Edenia via Edgar’s CD funds.
Chuck: Met with several local people setting up more speaking events. More work on engagement and print material, and looking to automate that. Working with another Eden member on a project on engagement. Was on the Twitter town hall. Was active in Telegram. Had a speaking slot on the EOS Fireside chat. Collaborating on an Eden NFT creation engine to create other incentives.
Gracie: Projects from first EdenCN trial election are complete. Funds are being transferred from the EdenCN account to the projects. Preparing for the next election. Will hold the first biweekly consensus meeting to take place tomorrow to see how the test system works. Made a talent pool and job board for the community to submit to. Currently only accepting Chinese language folks for now. This week they tested EdenCN on the mainnet to review some errors. Ran several tests, pushing different actions. Sometimes the action failure rate was 30%. Feels that BPs are not providing the service they should be. Transactions failing is really bad especially when it comes to growing the community and bringing in more developers. This is a problem that should be discussed more. Edgar: During the tests for the Eden Accounting Standard, they need to access the member table of Eden, and for that they need a Hyperion history node. Currently there was only one found from EOS Sweden who is barely in a paid position. The underlying infrastructure is required to build all of these other projects. This highlights if Eden should run its own infrastructure for this to work, and if so, why are we as a community paying BPs. Called out the ENF that do not get involved in politics, and in BP voting.
Michael: Launched the twitter spaces, and the Eden discord. Have control of the main website. Spoke to Ray who will give access to the domain. Will build a new version of the website so it can be updated. Adding a content management system would make sense. The next election date isn’t up to date for example. The website where the election portal website is still under Fractally’s control. Been working on treasury report, and Eden Members Services. Looking to secure more funding for those departments.
Eden Treasury/Membership Report: (5 mins)
Eden Treasury Report: Michael: Will put this together weekly. Data from May 10. 420 members. Next election has 23 participants. Treasury has 181k EOS (~$250k). $37k worth of unclaimed EOS by Delegates. HCD was overpaid by 3189, so will be split across other CDs by 637 EOS to each. Presented a month by month breakdown of treasury payments. Risks are a reduced EOS price vs USD. Edgar: Around Risks/Warnings, what do we think about hedging the price. Holding the EOS is a gamble. In corporate risk management hedging is very common, you don’t gamble with public funds. Michael: As treasurer, he fully supports this, hedging is a logical position. As a CD he disagrees with it as its difficult and politically loaded by demonstrating fear in the currency they are promoting. Gracie: Thinks hedging is a good idea to protect the public treasury form the market price fluctuations. Chuck: This can be done by individual delegates. Edgar: It wouldn’t be at the treasury level. Risk is a two-way thing, downside, with upside. So not hedging the treasury or future payments, you’re hedging cash-flow needs. Chuck: Is most contract work priced in USD? Paying out in a stable coin, or EOS equivalency. Edgar: Could be paid at the market rate of EOS, but USD, yes. Chuck: Would it make sense for the Delegate payments to be in another currency in addition to EOS? Edgar: Would put the responsibility of the treasury of itself to do the hedge. Michael: Would need a specialist to do this work, and what if this individual made errors. Chuck: Is it an expectation or a recommendation to hedge? It is gambling in a sense. Edgar: It is a recommendation. See how many do hedge, and iterate. As soon as a CD’s funds are available they should hedge to a functional currency. That means using an exchange to buy a stable coin or fiat. Michael: Could this be added as a feature to your accounting software. Edgar: Absolutely, at first this will be a check-box question on if hedging to get data. A trust basis on this point. Would be awesome to have an API tied to a DEX. An Eden powered community exchange that we all commit some liquidity to. Chuck: Was thinking if the hedge would be automated from the treasury it would reduce the taxable implications of a CD receiving EOS to then sell for a stable coin. Edgar: Every time you claim you enter into a tax event, hedging or not. Easy and simple for Eden, with treasury management in a more institutional way, data gathering for now is the next step.
Motion and/or Vote to Explore Building Eden into a Legal Trust: (10 mins)
Eden Legal Trust: Michael: Believes we will need a legal entity to place assets into. Assigning CDs will be a temporary solution. Using an Eden Members Services to select an individual will be a bottleneck, point of contention, or a problem in the future. Edgar: Needs time to think about this as there are pros and cons. Would love to get Eden.DAO, and it can be a multisig with a web3 domain. Some assets would need a legal entity. Could be an arm of Eden to do this. Would be a marketing boost for Eden. Wyoming is friendly in the US. Uruguay in Latin America. Other options listed. There would be legal costs, but is certainly something to look into. Cons are, a legal entity means regulators, tax authorities, and a central point of failure against people coming after a DAO. Michael: Legal pros make this a necessity. If its limited in scope it could work. Chuck: A jurisdiction that recognized a DAO as a person, like Wyoming does. Could spin up organizations to see what it entails. Could be a service Eden could provide for others that also want to do this after Eden first learns how. James Mart was encouraging people to dig into the code to learn about it. Whats the worst that can happen if the org isn’t tied to this. It could be a disposable entity. Then can decide what assets to put into it later. Gracie: Prefers more to work on decentralized governance first, then see if getting involved with legal things makes sense later. Michael: If we do need to put assets into ownership, how do we do that? Gracie: Not so sure. Edgar: What are these assets exactly? Could reach out to the community to see who has expertise on this. Michael: Domain names Edeneos.org. If there was a trust/msig or something similar it would be easier to not have to transfer after each election. Maybe put forward a motion on this. Would any second that? Chuck: Maybe we form a committee to explore this. Would have cost, and would need to be set up to not have repercussions on the whole. What is the worst that could happen with a trust. Edgar: Any legal entity will have directors, an address, telephone number, etc… Not really viable at this point. Important to plant a flag in certain things that move. No such thing as an anonymous entity. Michael: Was suggesting an investigation approach to see if there is value in this and review the risks. Edgar: Maybe something Brock could help with. He’s looked into several foundations and blockchain projects. There is a DAO uses EOSIO (American DAO). Brock was talking about doing public events. Those events will need an entity. The small committee is this group for now, and get Brock’s input.
Proposed Eden/EOS Governance/Funding Structure: (10 mins)
Proposed Eden Membership Service: Michael: Shared a miro board visualization. Looking to build a system with the flexibility to have fair remuneration of time, and also each department with enough resources and governance to function freely and with some oversight. Circles are controlled by CDs, and function independently. Treasury receives funds from ENF and sends to Eden. BPs decide how much funding goes to ENF and who is appointed. Each individual circle forms its own consensus. The roles within each circle would need to be filled. There is a Delegate circle that has roles, which includes CD oversight, to call a snap election. Eden should be able to have a say on BPs and on the ENF, and possibly voting on the ENF board. Idea is there is no hierarchy other than the CDs who were elected. Shared a spreadsheet. Has two proposals. Instead of spending just 5% of the treasury per month, spend 15%. This would allow for 8 months to demonstrate Eden’s worth. Fix the salary of Delegates and CDs. This frees up funding to go to the circles. Circles could be Marketing, Tech, Admin/Support. Could also request to have the ENF double the current treasury. This would provide a year of funding. Edgar: On the governance side, it was pointed out that the BPs vote/assign/appoint the ENF, and the ENF provides funds to Eden. Then Eden is supposed to have oversight of governance. There are some value extractors from BPs, who are not running any infrastructure, or at least minimal (as pointed out by Gracie earlier in the call). These are the same people appointing the ENF, and are then funding Eden. There’s something broken here, the DPoS/BP layer is fundamentally broken. Every layer built upon this broken layer is building on sand. On the financial suggestion, would there be other accounts made within the treasury for these circles? Michael: It would be manual to start off with, but the funding of the Tech department should be able to implement the changes in code. Each circle could have an msig, to be a trustless service. This allows for real budgets to get real work done. Open to ideas but didn’t want to radically change the way the community works. Would like to vote for BPs and the ENF, and would be symbolic. Edgar: If this is coded up they need access to the Eden tables and working infrastructure. The underlying infrastructure is a problem. Michael: CDs could call out the underperforming BPs. Or create a process to stop them from having ghost (sock puppet) BPs. Chuck: Edgar’s work as a disadvantaged BP his work has been on transparency, and his Pomelo project MyVoteEOS. Is this something that Eden can do, that can be incorporated into Eden’s role. Maybe a circle to create is network intel. What is DPoS, what makes us special, how can we remove the value extractors? Maybe many token holders are unaware of how they can and should self custody and vote for BPs. What BPs are interested in running full history nodes but can’t because of funding. What can’t Eden fund these? A lot of talk around separating governance from Block Production. Maybe Eden is the organization to develop these transparency tools and make them big. The sustainability of blockchains are in question right now. Michael: The beauty of this proposed system is that a circle could be focused on DPoS and BPs. Gracie: The Membership Service idea is great. Holding back a bit on the scale of this. We can really change the BPs with a very strong proxy. Can’t really do anything to punish the bad BPs. Can’t do anything because they have the vote and therefore power. Need to tell people who still have EOS why they need to support another proxy. Tell them to withdraw their EOS from exchanges. BPs have been slow to respond in the past. Many big holders of EOS are not doing anything with it because they are sad and so just leaving their tokens not doing anything. Chuck: Max Keiser in 2010-11 he started/pushed the idea of “Crash JP Morgan, buy Silver” the price of silver reached an all time high during this. Point being asset prices are being manipulated by banks/exchanges. There are many side benefits to withdraw EOS from exchanges. The link between EOS and BTCwould be reduced if more tokens came off of exchanges. Edgar: Would be ecstatic to lead a circle around this. An old saying in EOS is the only rules that are enforceable are done by votes. People who left blockchain recently could be looking for a reason to return. The MyVoteEOS proxy is trying to do this. Chris Barnes started the Eden proxy for this. Eden can vote with its treasury. The ENF that has EOS in their treasury can also vote for a proxy or BPs that are running infrastructure. The reason why the ENF won’t vote is because they are appointed by the BPs that put them into power. Block One was voting with their tokens. Michael: Agrees with all. The circles can give the mechanism to do this. Hopes circles will give clear lines of delineation, and can request things from the ENF. Motioned to create an Eden Member’s Services. Seconded by Edgar. Motioned to increase the treasury draw from 5% to 15%. Edgar: Confirming this is to increase the monthly treasury distribution. This was seconded by Edgar. Chuck: Without the keys to the Eden account this can’t be implemented today. Edgar: Understands this would be put into bylaws that would be ratified for the next CDs. Michael: Motioned to request an increase in Eden funding from the ENF. This would be to double the June budget. Edgar: Originally there was no ENF when Eden was formed. Eden was supposed to be self funded by membership. Is concerned with dependencies on the ENF. Will still second this motion with those points being made. Michael: We’re trying to move fast, and the ENF is the only organization that can give this shot in the arm to Eden. Need the funds to build this. Hopefully this is the last payment from the ENF. This allows for 12 months to prove itself. Edgar: Agrees with activation energy. Chuck: In favour. There’s still discussion that Eden doesn’t have a role as an organization and is just a funding disbursement mechanism. Thinking of Eden has been limited by the vision of what we’re doing right now. Opening up Eden’s purpose to be able to impact the network positively and be brutally honest about the state of the network. Eden needs to be the estate to provide this information. We want to provide transparency to the network, via something like a DPoS engagement circle. Eden’s mission is transparency and democracy. Gracie: Doubling the treasury will help them move faster and further. A little reserved on this, but will vote in favour. Feels as though Eden should prove something before it asks for more funds. Edgar: The price of EOS did just halve, so doubling the treasury would put Eden back to square one. Michael: confirmed the vote, all present were in favour. Edgar: Increasing the treasury pull is an acceleration, and increasing the treasury is to allow Eden to run further.
NEW BUSINESS
None
NEXT WEEK’S MEETING
Edgar will be chairing the next meeting.