Funding Request from the SuperUMAn DAO

[EAsports]

Name of Project: SuperUMAn DAO

Proposer: EAsports

Proposal Summary This proposal requests 85,000 $UMA of funding from the UMA DAO to the SuperUMAn DAO for operating expenses over the next quarter in order to continue our ongoing efforts and support the adoption and awareness of UMA.

Project Description Who are the SuperUMAns? Before you decide if you would agree to continue funding the SuperUMAns, we wanted to provide a little background for those UMA DAO stakeholders that may be less familiar with us.

SuperUMAns are an indispensable component of the machine that helps UMA reach the greater DeFi community. They know how powerful UMA is, the kinds of things that can be done with UMA, and they are determined to spread the word. SuperUMAns come from all walks of life and are the people that bring the community to life. They have a deep desire to participate in building something bigger than themselves. They feel drawn to the crypto ecosystem because of the potential they see, and they believe UMA provides some amazing tools to help build the future of DeFi. Some examples of things SuperUMAns do include writing articles, making videos, brainstorming new use cases for existing UMA products, and looking for opportunities to collaborate with other communities.

Some additional Links:

SuperUMAn Homepage

Who are the SuperUMAns?

Value Add Over the past year, the SuperUMAns have grown from a small group of a dozen community members to a robust DAO with 100+ people bustling with constant activity focused on increasing awareness, collaboration, and adoption of UMA across the ecosystem.

To support this goal, the SuperUMAns are composed of 9 formal teams including: Ambassadors, Content, Education, Governance, Onboarding, Operations, Products, Social Media, and Treasury Management. For more information on these teams check these links out:

DAO team structure

DAO team structure

As we have been a DAO over the past quarter, the SuperUMAns continue to offer ample value both with discrete deliverables as well as more qualitative awareness of UMA, amplification, and strong relationships and goodwill across the DeFi ecosystem. In addition, they have served as a pipeline of valuable personnel resources to the UMA/Risk Labs team as multiple previous SuperUMAns work for Risk Labs now in addition to a handful of others being regular contributors.

Below are some specific examples by team of the accomplishments and value add deliverables over the past 3 months:

Ambassadors: The Ambassador team internalized this epoch and key members splintered off to form new teams. Through these DAOification efforts, the team prevailed with incredible successes to boast.

• Assisted with the ShapeShift (FOX) Success Token by keeping strong cross-DAO relations. KPI options are now in discussion.

• Defined and installed a team structure consisting of Research, Outreach, & Technical Strategy branches.

• Took ownership of the LSP contract creation / deployment process by launching our own suINT KPI options, as well as the OneTree KPI Option.

• With a new User Interface nearing release, cooperation with the Education team to teach fellow Ambassadors LSP contract deployment skills is our main goal.

• Several more UMA product integrations are currently in the works.

Education: As part of the onboarding process all new recruits take a moodle course on the SuperUMAn Learning Zone to learn the mission, values and goals of the DAO. Other courses are being developed for the Ambassador, Product and Social Media teams. This includes topics such as, Data Verification Mechanism, KPI Options, Proposal Writing, etc., and will be expanded upon in the next epoch.

In addition, each week an Internal Learning Session is held. Technical topics include, Optimistic Oracle, Optimistic Governance, Writing an Implementation Document & Deploying KPI Options, and using Dework. Non-technical topics include, Decentralized Leadership, How to Contribute to a DAO, Positive Communications and Cross-Cultural Communications. This continual emphasis on education and upskilling of DAO members helps them to align to the ethos and goals of the DAO as well as making them more confident and effective in achieving their individual, team and DAO goals.

Social Media: One big gripe Twitter followers had about UMA was a lack of CT presence. The SU DAO Social Media team changed all that. Towards the end of the uDAO epoch the SuperUMAn Twitter was at 100 followers. At the end of the uINT epoch, the SuperUMAn Twitter page had a 400% increase, having 500 plus followers, along with an increase in engagement; impressions, likes and retweets. And in the SuINT epoch, we’re at a solid 760 followers and heading towards a thousand. And organic growth (no Ads whatsoever). All these have been made possible through consecutive media Projects, Social media campaigns (integration promotions, Treasure hunts, etc) along with the collective effort from other members of the DAO. The social Media team has also been working closely with the content team to create written content (blog posts) for the SuperUMAn Blog.

Content Team: Restructured the team and we have more contributors ready to create content for the DAO such as POAPs, YouTube videos, educational graphics, etc. Launched the Official Youtube channel for SuperUMAns. The Content team is also currently working on creating the ‘official’ SuperUMAns website.

Onboarding: Received high praises from Dr. Lisa Woken who walked through the entire ‘getting started’ experience. Nuf said! Onboarded X recruits and fine tuned an onboarding process. Implemented a new onboarding structure for the DAO, created new sub-teams within the team.

Products: High level coordination between Education & Ambassador teams continues to grow, helping to build CbaaS, SUPE, Optimistic Governance, and other cool shit.

Treasury: Ran test batches through governance and then full distribution of Stablecoin and KPI Options as DAO compensation for the epoch. Designed an expense tracking template in coordination with all teams to fulfill accurate reporting.

Governance: The Governance Team spent most of the epoch with setting up our Governance structure with the use of Galaxy NFTs to reach consensus on snapshot. We’ve also been assisting with scheduling UMA Voting announcements which include UMIPs, UPPs & Disputes.

Operations: The glue of the SU DAO. The operations team works with many tools and discord bots to help the process flow smoothly. Some of the key efforts include scheduling, task management, and communication. A Community Management Process that provides clear behavioral guidelines within the DAO is near completion.

Deliverables The SuperUMAns are excited about continuing to work with UMA and strive to be good stewards of the resources from the UMA DAO. Here are some of the priorities that we aim to accomplish over the next quarter.

• Achieve a minimum of six UMA product integrations with other DAOs.

• Continue expanding our educational efforts with a minimum of 8 learning sessions and 6 Community AMAs or external events/Twitter spaces.

• Reach 200 followers on the YouTube channel. Continue to support other teams such as social media, governance, and ambassadors with content.

• Twitter followers over 1000 this epoch

• Build stronger continued collaboration with the Risk Labs team to understand priorities and assist with those efforts.

• Search out more audiences and elements inside and outside DeFi to amplify the message of making market access universal.

• Slowly but surely strive towards self sustenance through partnership building and smart investment of liquid funds.

Funding Detail

The formal request for this proposal is for additional funding from the UMA DAO to the SuperUMAN DAO in the amount of 85,000 $UMA for Q2 2022.

The wallet that these funds would go to is the smart contract controlled SU Polygon treasury safe: matic:0x7C7a1407c35B695E4eE530D80d4bd4C1aF8569E5

Some key elements that we plan to use these funds for include:

• Retain comparable compensation for existing contributors Previous plan here (~55k UMA)

• Anticipated 25% growth in recruits and onboarding/compensating experts including development talent, accounting/reporting, and content creation (~14k UMA)

• Funding for a SuperUMAn incubator/experiment/collaboration fund. We have seen the Risk Labs team do some of this activity previously, and would like to expand the reach of these endeavors. A recent example of this was the SUs investing in POAPathon for ETH Denver that was a great promotional success and there are many opportunities that we would like to explore. Some initial ideas include: becoming a Polygon ecosystem DAO grants committee member, collaborating with CRE8RDAO and Clipto DAO on content and developing a pipeline for UMA use cases, further participation with POAPathon, scavenger hunts and educational promotions, Flipside. Collaborations with other strategic partners, etc. (~16k $UMA)

Team The SuperUMAn DAO has many members that can be seen here. SuperUMAn DAO Members

The SUs use a NFT based governance system and the main treasury where the funds would be sent is contract controlled through a quorum of votes with snapshot integration. Then underneath the main treasury there are team based multisig safes that are controlled by members of a given team such as ambassadors for smaller amounts.

Additional Information

We also wanted to include a current treasury summary for UMA DAO stakeholders. While the SuperUMAns have not finished our first full epoch as a DAO (Ends on March 31) we did want to provide some initial background on where our treasury stands after being seeded with 100k $UMA prior to the start of 2022.

• Initially Risk Labs seeded the SuperUMAn DAO with an initial 100k of $UMA. At the time, market value was approximately $1,000,000 USD.

• We swapped 36,338k of our $UMA at $6 valuation to $197,511.70 USD + 8.05 ETH as part of our compensation plan needing stables to provide some stability in compensation to more tenured members as well as pay for some fixed expenses for platform usage. Due to macro market conditions, this swap was costly to us.

• While not finalized, here is what we anticipate spending thus far this epoch (Q1 2022):

• Spent 14,405 $UMA in KPI options distribution for integrations this epoch. This is a core part of our DAO member compensation.

• $130,000 USDC in stables compensation.

As we round out this epoch, we are anticipating a remaining balance of 47,202.18 $UMA to rollover moving forward.

Due to a downturn in market conditions,the treasury shrunk to $600,000 USD and with the addition of the stable swap, we spent half of that this epoch. So effectively we spent approximately 30% of the initial seed grant (at initial funding prices).

As part of our long term plan, we plan to use the remaining treasury amount for strategic investing and treasury diversification to grow our DAO treasury, continue to seek additional opportunities to seek further adoption and amplification of UMA, and start down the path of becoming more financially independent.

For clarity, the funding request for this epoch is intended to cover operational expenses and we will use the remaining treasury amount for the above stated purpose.

[inalittlewhile]

As a highly biased member of the SU DAO, I fully support this proposal. As you would have guessed, right? But honestly, looking forward to all feedback and happy to help answer any questions about the proposal.

[TheRealTuna]

As a SuperUman I look forward to continuing to spread the word about UMA products and am excited to see the Optimistic Oracle get mass adoption. Very happy with this proposal.

[Absolute_Unit]

The SuperUMAns are a vital part of the UMA ecosystem (totally non-biased opinion)! We are UMA evangelists and highly focused on growing adoption.

[arcology]

The SuperUMAns and their commitment to promoting the UMA ecosystem is unparalleled. The fact that the SU DAO has been successfully spun off and getting off the ground is testament to the longstanding loyalty and dedication for these contributors. I will support this and I encourage UMA holders to do the same!

[poopster]

Well thought out and worded, thanks for putting this together, amazing work. I vote yea

[Bananachain]

A well balanced and thoughtful proposal with ambitious yet realistic and attainable deliverables. The Superuman team has amply proven over the last epoch that it can deliver in a competitive environment. This budget presents an exellent value for money proposition. However, many of the commentators have expressed their concerns as to the lack of sustainability and perspective in the long run which needs to be addressed clearer in the proposal.

[fruitycup]

As an UMA token holder before the SuperUMAns were created, by Clayton | UMA, there wasn’t much of a community presence before the SUs came along. It gave token holders like myself an opportunity to help UMA achieve their goals and an incredible community to be part of. We love UMA and being a SuperUMAn created an opportunity for community members to use their skills to help further the adoption of UMA. This proposal has accurately reflected who the SuperUMAns are, our aligned goals with UMA, and our drive to continue to help make others aware that UMA is one of the best DEFI protocols out there.

[Ponmile]

Great job putting all these together EA and everyone involved, you guys rock.

[SBSINGH]

Well thought EA , Superuman are a powerful team of 100 + community members creating awareness about UMA and products. Superuman have the reach and ability to take things forward. I support the proposal.

[nithin_shylendra]

A very well put together proposal for the vital functioning of the SU DAO EA. Support this proposal and would like to keep contributing for the growth of SU DAO aswell as UMA.

[smiley7]

Thanks for putting this together, EA and everyone else involved! I’m in favor, of course.

[Hassan_Oluwatobi]

I vote yes. Great proposal and very well worded. Kudos to everyone who put it together.

[Mhairi]

It is really exciting to see our first funding proposal presented to the UMA DAO.

The SuperUMAn DAO has very high alignment with the UMA DAO in its mission to …communicate the true power of universal access to markets and its benefits to the world with complimentary values of Playfulness and Curiosity; Growth and Learning;Community Focus; Onwards and Upwards and Creating Cool Shit embedded in its design principles.

I believe continued funding of the SuperUMAn DAO is an extremely efficient use of UMA resources which has been amply demonstrated to add high additional value to the UMA protocol and contributes to UMA DAO’s decentralisation and growth by

• Supporting an established DAO with strong alignment with UMA’s mission
• moving $UMA into the hands of people who understand and appreciate the UMA protocol
• demonstrating in practice the power of a key financial primitive in KPI options
• Raising awareness of UMA within the cryptosphere and contributing to protocol sink.

My reservations around this funding proposal are three fold.

1. The intention to offer regular compensation in a dollar stablecoin

• UMA is a global protocol, the privileging of any particular nation-state currency is undesirable, rather than offering compensation directly in $UMA (or even in a dollar equivalent value of $UMA)

• members of the SuperUMAn DAO who wish to use their regular compensation to secure UMA’s protocol through the DVM are required to swap then bridge to mainnet.

• The requirement to meet a dollar liability introduces management complexity for the SuperUMAn DAO treasury, potentially denying them the benefits of UMA’s growth which they work so hard to achieve.

2. The wallet for proposed transfer is insecure.

• There are known vulnerabilities in the escalation game of the reality.eth module integrated into safesnap, where an attacker can continually dispute proposals paralysing the DAO, or introduce flawed proposals which they continually escalate to push through.

The SuperUMAn DAO is aware of this and have taken mitigating action by limiting who can make proposals, secured the support of RiskLabs who have pledged support for the DAO should such an attack occur, and are working with UMA to initiate an alternative security layer through a Zodiac module which integrates UMA’s Optimistic Oracle. So while a known vulnerability exists, effective mitigation is in place while a more permanent solution is developed.

• The proposal process is restricted to a limited number of wallets.

This is an undesirable situation, but required at least in the interim to mitigate the effects of the known vulnerability described above.

• The level of dependence on an external protocol for treasury access.

• • The SuperUMAn DAO treasury Gnosis safe is fully controlled through NFTs minted through the Galaxy.eco protocol. This protocol is primarily used for credentialing where security is a lesser concern rather than focused on governance.
• • a recent contract upgrade within the Galaxy protocol on 18th March necessitated the reissue of all governance NFTs.
• • One established DAO member was unable to vote following this upgrade due to a Galaxy issue. While this issue is now resolved, it demonstrates a notable vulnerability.
• • The issue of NFTs to new recruits has been delayed on occasions due to Galaxy issues.
• • The minting of NFTs is a centralised process and admin access to minting is under the control of the galaxy protocol.
• • the exchange of NFTs following tier changes is a trust based process, which relies on members returning the NFT for their previous tier in exchange for their new tier. Should the member not return the outdated tier NFT, their wallet is banlisted from voting, effectively disenfrancishing them from voting at the appropriate tier level.

3. The funding proposal is somewhat modest and quite short term

As can be seen from the above, the SuperUMAn DAO has provided substantial value to the UMA DAO over the past three months since its inception. There is no reason to believe that this will not continue and indeed escalate as skills, confidence and membership grows. The level of compensation offered by the DAO to its members is quite modest (even rather stingy, particularly at the lower tiers), given the value that the DAO provides and the commitment that its members have demonstrated, which may compromise its ability to retain established talent and attract new members with specialised skill-sets.

While it is understandable that the DAO may wish to take things slowly as they grow, a more ambitious approach may allow for higher growth, secure retention and establish greater autonomy.

(NOTE: I am posting this as my personal opinions as a member of the UMA DAO, rather admin of this forum)

[Mhairi]

Community Review Call outcome (technical check) - 4th April

• recommend change from Polygon safe to mainnet safe for receipt of funding
• recommend investigation into methods of increasing the security of the intended wallet for funding given identified vulnerabilities of safe.

(NOTE: posted as forum admin)

[mrice32]

First off, I’d like to say that I don’t work closely with the SuperUMAns, so I certainly don’t understand the full value of what the SuperUMAns bring to the table. I don’t want y’all to feel blindsided by my response, either, as I have a deep appreciation for all the work you all do. However, I think a funding proposal of this size and regularity deserves scrutiny, especially from third parties who are just reading the proposal as is without deeply understanding the SuperUMAn organization.

I’m obviously supportive of the community and SuperUMAns, but if I were to be critical of the proposal, here’d be my argument.

Assuming we remove the $100k polygon grant, it’s a little higher than Risk Labs’ quarterly salary expenditures at $580k.

The question I keep asking myself is “Are the SuperUMAns doing as much work or providing as much value as the Risk Labs team (or a roughly comparable amount)? If not, why are they paying out aggregate salaries that are higher than Risk Labs?” This isn’t meant to be a comment on the quality of the SuperUMAns, but more about resources/time. Risk Labs pays 24 people’s full time salaries, and I think it gets a lot out of that.

Maybe framed a different way, have the SuperUMAns achieved $680k (or $580k without the polygon grant) worth of results or are likely to in the next quarter? Their measurable objectives listed above are to get 200 youtube subscribers and 1000 twitter followers, both of which seem extremely modest in my opinion (note: these sound like achievable goals for a single PR consultant or marketing team member). The other is to get 6 UMA integrations, despite only listing one integration in their results from the previous quarter.

On top of that, it’s worrisome to me that the proposal indicates that the SuperUMAns would need to be given more money to hire anyone full time.

From a treasury perspective, I was disappointed that 1/3 of the initial grant was sold for stables at $6 per UMA. For reference, the UMA token traded at $6 or below for about 2 weeks (non consecutive) according to Coingecko. If the treasury had been managed more effectively by taking a slow and steady DCA approach to selling for stables, there would be significantly more USDC to show for that sale.

I want to support the SuperUMAns and love working with them, but I’m really struggling to justify such a large grant for the modest results and goals that the SuperUMAns have set out/achieved.

A few things I would really like to see:

1. More measurable outcomes. If the SuperUMAns are a DAO meant to spread the word about UMA and its product offerings, there are lots of metrics that the SuperUMAns could use to quantify how well that’s going. I would be excited to see goals and information on marketing metrics like impressions, clicks, inbound requests for information, newsletter subscriptions, youtube views, unique event attendance numbers, etc. There are also some crypto native sales-y metrics that I could imagine being useful to go in this sort of grant request: how many official proposals have been made for using UMA products at other DAOs or organizations? How many ongoing leads are the SuperUMAns pursuing? Note: this is not my area of expertise, but I think more metrics would help me understand the value that the SuperUMAns are creating and understand the focus.
2. More ambition: I think the social media metrics that were listed in the goals above aren’t super inspiring. In addition to providing more metrics, I would love to see these goals get more ambitious given the budget.
3. More long term alignment in payout structures. Most of the grant money is being used for short term liquid payouts to DAO members (which there are a lot!), both in UMA and USDC. This results in a lot of sell pressure in the short term, but it also doesn’t lean into the long term alignment that SuperUMAns have with UMA. I would support larger grants if I knew that the bulk of those grants were going into lockups that incentivized DAO members to contribute to the project for an extended period (1 year cliff typically) before receiving the bulk of their payouts. I think this could work well in addition to modest salary-like payouts in USDC or UMA. To be totally honest, I’m not sure how exactly to structure this in a DAO, but I think these sorts of structures work well for other crypto projects.

Note: all of the above is just my personal opinion as an UMA token holder. I don’t speak for Risk Labs or others that work at Risk Labs.

[Clayton]

Really helpful analysis here, Matt. Everything you wrote in bullets 1-3 are solid suggestions that I would like to see, too.

I would push back on one thing and it touches on something that I struggle with here generally:

modest results and goals that the SuperUMAns have set out/achieved.

I don’t think their results have been modest. I also think ‘building the DAO’ was very much a major accomplishment this quarter. I think that this “thing that is the DAO” still needs some work, which I’ll explain elsewhere. But nevertheless, it’s an incredible [ongoing] accomplishment and something I’ll defend as justifying the expense. I also think it is a measurable outcome that is * a good thing * for UMA and how it is perceived.

I would also say that the sum total hours of human attention that the UMA tokenholders get from the Super Umans are far greater than those from Risk Labs just by sheer volume. There are tons of people showing up every. single. day. to conversations and meetings.

This time is a sort of raw input, and our refining process for that raw input into measurable outcomes needs to improve. Which is why I really like everything you put into bullets 1-3. That kind of critique will help that process improve. But I think we need to have patience and see this as a longer term investment.

One comparison I would like to highlight as we evaluate this: We gave away 50,000 $UMA per week for over a year(?) doing developer mining. This is asking for 85,000 $UMA for one quarter.

I’m posting this as Clayton, who wears many hats, and frequently forgets which hat he has on

[Clayton]

I have a couple clarifying questions:

• Are you expecting to spend the entire 85k $UMA in Q2 '22?
• Are you expecting to also spend the rolling-over 47k in this same period?
• What percentage of the 85k will be outcome dependent through a KPI option?
• What will your KPI be?

Some of the replies I’m seeing seem to imply that the entire treasury will be spent. In fact, you have only spent half of what was given as seed money, right?

[inalittlewhile]

Hey Matt. Thanks so much for your critique as it presents us with the opportunity to both refine the proposal and perhaps help alleviate some of the concerns you raise.

As lead of the SuperUMAn Ambassador team, I’ll answer the points I feel comfortable speaking to and allow others to chime in respectively. It is an eye opener to realize our fund request (minus the Polygon grant) is comparable to quarterly Risk Labs payroll. How can we justify this?

More Measurable Outcomes

Very good feedback you provide here. We’ll dive in as DAO and provide what additional metrics we have. I’m sure the Social Media can provide some and others are goals that are under construction. Our Education and Content teams can also help fill in these blanks.

On the Ambassador team side, we can come up with some metrics such as total cumulative integrations, TVL of those integrations, amount of governance proposals to integrate UMA products, and more. There are educational metrics we can also explore as we build out our Ambassador courses.

As for immediate metrics, we can report 3 integrations last epoch (ShapeShift, Volatility and OneTree), and seven the epoch prior. Without drawing on too much support from your colleagues, I want to stress the intangible value that the Ambassador team will bring.

Besides boasting a stream of 4 current working integrations and some ten more in the pipeline, we have a large infrastructure now in place. What do I mean? We learned to write our own Implementation files and created our own SU GitHub account. We do the pull requests for both our own KPI Options and those of protocols we work with that may need that lift.

The Ambassador team helped create a working UI that makes deploying KPI Options and other LSP contract types a non technical task. I believe this coordinated effort will take a large lift off of the Dev-X team as we continue to learn and teach these skills.

More Ambition

I’m unsure that the Social Metrics are too modest if viewed from an Organic approach. We’ll dive in as DAO and reasess our goals to ensure we aren’t undercutting the value proposition in this regard.

As for the Ambassador team, it was a DAO decision to set a more modest goal and one I prefer to raise. I think with the development we had last epoch, the integrations currently on the table, as well as integrations in the pipeline, we should be setting a higher goal.

I think there’s room for some input here from the Education team too.

Long Term Alignment In Payout Structure

I do agree on two points here and I believe the SU DAO also does as a whole (although they can speak to this as well).

1. Our handling of the UMA to stable swap, despite having our hands tied due to mechanics, was far less than ideal. We are in discussion around improving our processes, as well as our compensation plan, and look forward to sharing those ASAP.

2. Long term vesting for DAO members is a valuable suggestion without the easiest of solutions. We are brainstorming ideas here within the Treasury team. We also want to encourage members towards UMA voting participation. Vesting incentives and a greater emphasis toward KPI Options are high on our list of compensation topics.

Thanks again Matt for your time, honest feedback, critique, and opportunity to improve our Funding Proposal. Inalittlewhile aka Geoff.

[gruadus]

Matt,

I appreciated the thoughts and would agree with most if not all of them. For a little bit of context on managing the stables, we had a set of outstanding liabilities that were denominated in stables but due to the genesis process and opsec for the Treasury safe for the DAO were unable to transact with the UMA that was reserved for the DAO until March. So we were well into our epoch when we actually had access to those funds and outstanding liabilities. I think that was a unique position we were in at that point in time. We do have a balance of USDC currently, we are planning on TWAP’ing into non-UMA currencies moving forward as needed. Moreover, because of the efforts of the SuperUMAns we are developing additional money market options as well as option markets for UMA for creating financial hedges. All of which were not available to us at the beginning of the first epoch and will create value for ALL UMA holders. So in conclusion I think we were all disappointed by the timing of when we could transact and would have made different decisions at different times if we had the ability and opportunity.

On stables compensation, I have personally had several conversations about how to structure alternative mechanisms to move away from stables compensation but still allow specific individuals who need this stability to operate within the universe of UMA and its associated financial products. Again, I see stables as a stopgap until the SuperUMAns can develop the ecosystem necessary to provide those same benefits using UMA products. Those who have participated in such calls know that I have been passionate about this topic since at least November when I first started participating in discussions regarding possible compensation schemes.

In conclusion, I would agree with your concerns and I think we have been and continue to be engaged in addressing them.

Thanks again for your comments.