PGM-51: Mithras Labs Q2-24 Budget Request

[Dydymoon]

Thanks for writing this proposal.

Overall in favor of supporting Mithras efforts and using these funding requests to reduce the debt denominated in ETH (especially since the DAO is now losing money on this loan as the assets were lended at $3K iirc & the price to buy it back is now up 20%) but I have some questions:

@Figue

Additionally we are requesting 2000 EUR per month for gas expenses. For the past 3 years we have covered these without a hitch for operating Quest (pushing rewards weekly) and Warlord (swapping and distributed), these expenses have ballooned with gas from 1500 EUR / month to 8000 EUR / month. We have already taken measures to heavily reduce them and feel confident they will be halved or more by the beginning of Q2.

It’s worth mentioning that since OnChainDen was implemented (more than 1 year ago) the DAO has the ability to pay gas costs from the multisigs if holding enough ETH, which in addition to be a huge gain of time and efficiency by avoiding the need to wait for someone to execute and then ask a refund, it also allows to cover this costs from the treasury directly.

Despite that, Figue refused several times to activate this functionality when creating transactions because he’d rather the DAO to not cover these costs, and even executed personally some transaction that had it activated.

(The above is only valid for Quests creation managed by DAO multisigs, not for Warlord swaps managed by core team multisig but this should not prevent the DAO to transfer ETH over time and cover these costs as well)

Which leads to my first questions:

• Why not just use Den and/or pay these from the treasury directly ?
• What are the measures that would enable such a drastic reduction ?
• If you estimate these costs to be halved or more and since the current max estimation is $8K monthly, why request only $2K instead of $4K monthly ?

@Figue

This proposal is a continuation of the proposal of the past quarter, with targets enabling Mithras to entirely run on these amounts over the quarter.

As Mithras Labs seems to be fully running with the DAO funding requests (which are the highest DAO expense by far atm), this proposal is lacking context & information on the beneficiaries which leads to next my questions:

• How is core team acting as the main DAO Service Provider composed ?
• What’s the role of each member ?
• When did they join Mithras ?

Also, it’s not mentioned as the proposal focuses on the EUR costs, but most (if not all ?) core team members also received a PAL allocation vested coming from the 15% of the supply allocated to Mithras in PGM-1, which leads to the topic where I have a concern.

I highlighted this a 1st time in PGM-50 (noticed when fact checking some data) but since it was unrelated, the answer received was to talk about it on a related topic, so I’lll ask again here since both topics are about Mithras funding requests (the total 7,5M PAL allocation is currently worth $1.05M)

The core team allocation was voted as visible in PGM-1 forum post & vote. Duration terms voted seems to be 6 months cliff + 3 years vesting, so a total of 42 months leading to an end of vesting in May 2025 (at least for genesis team members)

However from my understanding, the duration from the vesting contract returns 30 months, which seems to corresponds to one of the following options:

• 6 months cliff + 24 months vesting (if cliff is accounted prior to the vesting, which is how I understand PGM-1, in which case 1 year was skipped)
• 30 months vesting including 6 months cliff (if cliff is included in vesting duration, in which case 6 months was skipped)

To verify the proportions, I used the following formula: Total vesting amount - Claimable amount - Claimed amount for some addresses, which seems to show the vesting ends in less than 3 months (May 2024).

Vesting contract here: Read Contract → lockedAmount = total vesting; releasableAmount = Claimable; TotalReleasedAmount = Already claimed).

Assuming it’s a mistake made when setting up vestings, then it should be fixed by taking the following actions:

• Start a new vesting contract for missed duration & the correct amount
• Clarify the situation and communicate on changes via a PEP-XX

Of course, I could be wrong on this as I’m not an expert at reading smart contracts, in which case I’d appreciate an explanation and apologize in advance for the misunderstanding.

I also think that the DAO biggest PAL allocation ever should be more transparent, which leads to my last questions:

• What happened with the vesting duration issue described above ?
• What was the repartition & vesting for newcomers ?
• Was there any vesting stopped if old team members left ?
• What’s the unallocated part left if any ?
• If there are some left, what’s preventing Mithras from doing another fundraise ?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer.