Controversy arose over the US$50 million DAO grant, revealing the chaos in OP’s public welfare fund application

Original title: "DAO funding dispute reappears, detective ZachXBT reveals chaos in OP public welfare fund application"

Original author: Odaily Planet Daily, Azuma

In the past few days, the discussion of the pros and cons of the DAO funding mechanism has become a hot topic in various decentralized communities.

The cause of the incident was that Bankless DAO recently initiated a proposal in the Arbitrum governance forum, which sparked outrage.

The proposal of Bankless DAO is to apply for a budget of 1.82 million ARB to help promote Arbitrum in the market over the next year. At first glance, it seems that there is no problem except for the slightly large amount, but the community has found that Bankless DAO has previously launched similar proposals in forums of other projects such as Optimism, and the actual promotion effect was quite poor. After receiving a budget of 70,000 OP, Bankless DAO did not publish all the content through official accounts, but chose to promote it through multiple small accounts, and the lowest reading of the promotional post was only in single digits.

So Bankless DAO quickly became the target of community criticism, and its actions were mocked as using its brand name to fleece project wool, opening up a new "business model".

Afterwards, the two founders of Bankless urgently came forward to do a lot of crisis public relations, clarifying that Bankless DAO is a completely independent entity from Bankless, and stating that Bankless did not participate in the proposal of Bankless DAO.

One wave has not yet subsided, and another wave rises again. While the discussion about the Bankless DAO incident has not stopped, there are controversies about DAO funding events that have surfaced again.

First, the Arbitrum community discovered some small-scale fraudulent behavior in the Short-Term Incentive Plan (STIP) - the two projects Dolomite and Umami falsely applied for funding support, while actually pocketing the money for themselves.

Later, well-known on-chain detective ZachXBT revealed some controversial situations in the third round of RetroPGF in the Optimism ecosystem.

RetroPGF is the "Retrospective Public Goods Funding Program" of Optimism, which aims to provide funding support to some public welfare projects. The total amount of funding for the third round of RetroPGF is 30 million OP, which is approximately 50 million US dollars calculated at the current market price.

ZachXBT said that many of the top-ranked projects in the current RetroPGF governance vote are not truly public welfare projects. Some of these projects have either received large amounts of VC financing or have not yet been open-sourced. This may result in true public welfare projects such as OtterScan, BlockScout, Revoke Cash, Defillama, and Rotki not receiving the funding they deserve.

ZachXBT also compiled a list of the top 100 voted projects and identified which ones have received VC investments. It was found that some of these projects have received funding of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and some have already issued tokens:

Gelato (raised $11 million in funding and has released its own cryptocurrency);

Rainbow ($18 million in funding);

ImmunFi (raised over $24 million in funding);

Mirror  (raised over 10 million US dollars in funding);

Zora (raised over 50 million US dollars in funding);

Synthetix (a nine-figure treasury with issued coins);

Hop (raised $2 million in funding and has issued coins);

Tenderly ($40 million in funding);

Snapshot (raised over 4 million US dollars in funding);

OpenZeppelin (raised $23 million through Forta financing).

Socket ($5.5 million in funding);

Alchemy ($545 million in funding);

Rabbithole (raised $21.6 million in funding);

According to the governance plan of Optimism, the voting phase of RetroPGF will end on December 6th. Based on the current voting results, the above project is highly likely to receive a substantial OP grant.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia