I’m not sure it’s well-known or common knowledge yet, so I wanted to get this documented: GridPlus is of the opinion that the Phonon DAO won’t be fully decentralized for 1-2 years (with the implication being that GridPlus will be heavily involved in the beginning).
According to Karl, GridPlus has five people working full time on Phonon. Personally, I think this is good because they have the technical expertise and the DAO definitely needs them to kickstart Phonon. One potential negative I could see is that – in the absence of a formal agreement – GridPlus could pull out and leave the DAO hanging (though I think this is incredibly unlikely). Additionally, the DAO can only be effective if they have full visibility of ongoing efforts, so it will be very important for GridPlus to continue to share routine progress updates, which I do believe they are already doing.
With respect to PDBG, I think this will most affect the roadmap, as GridPlus (as technical implementers) will need to be intimately involved, unless the DAO wants to hire shadowy super-coders.
Something to keep in mind as we get rolling.
3 Likes
It’s a critical responsibility of GridPlus to both ensure and demonstrate that this project can thrive even if the team that did the original protocol spec and implementation isn’t around any longer.
The seed for this is already there from the code which has been given an open source license, but I think what Karl is addressing is that after over a year of dedicated team working on implementing on the spec this group is going to be a critical resource for a while.
I get what he was saying with the 10% estimate, but it’s more just arbitrary feeling rather than quantitative assessment of the remaining steps on that path.
There’s a lot of dimensions by which the decentralization of a project can be judged - when he is speaking to the technical side with the original implementation that has been shared done entirely by a single team, that makes sense at this stage. It will be important to draw additional technical contributors and as the effort moves forward that’ll happen organically.
In terms of governance, GridPlus jumped into the deep end by ceding control on day one. GridPlus and founders do not have the voting power to retain control over decision making or the treasury. And I also wouldn’t frame statements from people at the company as representing that company because each of us has our own perspective and the ultimate decision maker is the DAO itself.
3 Likes