Over the previous months we have seen increasing confusion to make payments and operate the technology of the DAO within the constraints of the Charter. The main issue is the feedback loop for technical issues that we are facing such as with USDC payments. The members who have been waiting for USDC have been kind to us so far and their patience has not gone unnoticed but it is an untenable situation that needs to be solved ASAP as the number of payments increase.

The core portion of this is I would like to propose that for payments we use a Multisig. There are a number of reasons for this.

Speed Up the Feedback Loop on technical errors
Payments that have been approved should need not need to wait seven days to be paid out

There are then two options identified for spinning up a multisig for payments in the current structure.

Option 1

transition the Executive Sub-DAO a multisig with the ability to make payments. One of the core pieces of feedback we have received is that it is complex and unclear how payments are currently being made to contributors.

For this to pass I would propose increasing the membership from 3 to 7 and building a multisig which would have the responsibility of approving financial proposals and spinning out workstreams that support the network, it would also be able to approve grants for the DAO (4 out of 7 signer wallet). I would propose merging the ops proposal together with this to make one larger workstream:Core DAO Operations - Funding proposal 1
This would operate efficiently at first but may need to be spun out into separate work streams down the line. In the MVP form of the DAO, separation of these functions is probably a hindrance to the DAO becoming an efficient entity.

Option 2

Option 2) Remove the responsibility of Payments from the Executive Sub DAO to a Ops multisig which has the sole purpose of making payments. The Executive Sub DAO can then focus their time on more valuable endeavours such as grants. This Ops multisig would then simply be acting as the escrow account for the DAO and make payments.

Both of these will benefit the whole DAO as we will have the ability to make payments quickly. To be clear the use of a Multisig does not solve all the challenges such as complex batch payments.

Multisig Rules

Included in this change/ transition to a multisig in both options there should be rules around the signers including:

All transactions must be signed within 1 week
All transactions must be signed (can be abstain)
If three transactions are missed without a valid reason, signer is removed and replaced with an appropriate member

To help make this change, I would like to propose that the responsibilities and technical structure that the sub-DAOs currently operate in be removed from the charter and referenced as a IPFS document or reduce the quorum required to make changes to this section. Rational for this is the AN DAO needs to be flexible and responsibilities need to be able to be updated and spin out new sub-daos as a result changes would only need a simple majority and not the 0.5% that is currently required for charter changes.

At the same time we would like to update the Sub-DAOs responsibilities to make it clear what their roles are within the DAO and remove the ambiguity.

This is a large topic, as such would appreciate it if we can keep feedback on this to the use of Multisigs, the options proposed (any other options) and other ways in which speed and efficiency could be improved.

Thanks,

Alex

Proposed Update to Charter - Journey towards Multisig for Payments