Edit: All of this is ofc IMO - and should not be seen or understood to be a formal statement from the foundation, etc etc…
I do not understand the point of this prop, aside from making us - i.e. Hub/Cosmos - look bad for media, investors and hodlers.
First off, this prop - yes or no - can’t be enforced in any way. Of course, the Foundation won’t ignore the vote - social consensus is key in our passionate community - but just pointing out that the vote on this is almost meaningless…aside from negative publicity.
Secondly, on the “randomly listed” points on the prop…which IMO doesn’t form part of any cohesive argument…much of it is written in bad faith. My thoughts:
- The ICF (Interchain Foundation, hereafter “the foundation” or “the ICF”) has not issued any reporting to the Cosmos community on its activities in nearly two years.
This is almost true. Almost in that, this statement would have been 100% true as of a few weeks ago. But this Funding Overview for 2023 was published in Feb’23.
Additionally, I personally believe this statement is being made in bad faith - you are fully aware that we are about to publish our annual report for 2022 - something that will probably happen during this vote or straight after - COMPLETELY unrelated to this governance proposal.
- Numerous current and former, ICF funded teams have come to Notional to voice distress. They fear retaliation if they speak out.
In light of the above bad faith, I’m calling BS on this. Granted the Foundation maybe should adopt a whistleblower policy or something to formally protect the rights of whistleblowers, but I think it’s in the Cosmos-spirit for people to speak their mind. And I strongly believe we won’t be “litigating disclosures”.
So please, ask these people to speak out! Anonymize their statements if you have to - but lets hear what they want to say. We can’t address criticism and correct out issues if we don’t know what they are.
- Teams applying for grant funding have informed Notional that grant funding is not open to non-incumbent teams.
- Notional has been informed by the the Interchain Foundation that grant funding is not open to non-incumbent teams.
Both of these statements are correct in that our small grants program is closed, and has been since last year. The application form has been removed from the website, anyone who approached directly has been told its closed, and we even wrote 5 paragraphs worth of why its closed, when will it open, and what you can do in the meantime in the aforementioned Funding Overview for 2023.
Once again, this seems to be some type of bad faith messaging going on - like you are trying to imply something shady happening!
- The interchain foundation owns around 10% of the total supply of ATOM.
This too is a bad faith statement IMO, cause:
a) I know you know our total holding is about 14M atoms
b) I know you know how to use a calculator
14M / 336M = ~4%. Substantively different to 10%.
The 14M figure has been mentioned numerous times, but concretely, I can point to page 6 of the Atom Delegations Policy, published in October 2022.
Of course a valid question is “Foundation started with X atoms and now hold Y atoms” - what did it spend it on? But that’s not the question being asked on the proposal.
And while I know you are aware of what the foundation spends money on - developing the stack!!! - and in Feb’23, we said our spend even in this market will be ~$40M for the year, you can quite easily estimate the cost of the stack over the past few years.
That being said, of course you shouldn’t have to to the calculations yourself, the Foundation should have been publishing reports regularly. But it didn’t. It messed up. But it’s fixing it - and you know that intimately.
tl;dr
This prop is written in bad faith, with statements that can lead to misleading and wholly incorrect assessments.
To the larger audience of atom holders - i.e. those who haven’t got any idea about even our delegations program (check posts on Reddit - i.e. not in our twitter bubble) - a prop like this reads as follows:
- ICF holds 10% of all atoms
- ICF is being shady - they aren’t giving any grant money
- So what are they doing with this money
- Oh look, all their atoms are also liquid rn - non staked
- If the ICF doesn’t believe in atom and being shady, why should I have confidence in this?