hey there!
I’m Paulo Fonseca, and I applied last week for the Head of Governance role in House of Stake.
let me start by saying that I’m posting this because I believe that the community should have at least some say on who gets hired for this position at the NEAR Foundation. I decided to apply and do this public post about it because I do think that House of Stake needs more active focus on its governance and community, not less, and maybe I can be the right person to help with that, in my own particular way.
so, a bit about me and why I think I’d be worth considering for this role:
I got hooked on DAOs back in 2016 with The DAO drama where I aped in $1000 USD, which straight up pulled all my attention from my UX design career into the crypto rabbit hole, which eventually led me to become an Ethereum miner (so that I could vote on future hard forks), which then made me transition into working full-time in DAOs and finally ditch the “traditional corporate world” by late 2021.
I co-founded RnDAO to do research into the biggest decentralized governance pain points (stuff like this) and experiment with bottom up self-governance as a community, then launched Senate (a DAO tooling startup) in 2022, where we shipped an MVP to help DAO delegates in their governance work, mostly in Uniswap and Aave, which lead us to raise a pre-seed round from some cool angels and VCs, only to figure out that DAO governance tooling shouldn’t have a business model, so we decided to wound down Senate and return the money back to our investors.
After that, I started an open-source version of Senate called proposals.app and ended up winning the ETHcc Arbitrum GovHack in Brussels on July 2024 with a bigger vision for it, and since then, and for the past year, I’ve been building proposals.app out in the open with Andrei, while also being a very active Arbitrum DAO delegate, voting diligently, pushing for more transparency in the DAO (like with my voluntary earnings disclosures example), and even running a somewhat crazy 10% kickback public experiment to boost delegation to myself.
Over the past year, I’ve also seen firsthand how community engagement can tank without proper checks and balances on institutionalized power, like in Arbitrum’s recent shifts put forward by the Arbitrum Foundation that I very openly criticized in the forum, and in this podcast episode.
Honestly, that’s why House of Stake’s explicit stated goal to be transparent in its operations, to work in public as much as possible, and its focus on an AI centered governance tooling roadmap, are exciting to me.
for a more official résumé, you can check out my very dusty and not very complete, LinkedIn profile.
I’ve also been giving workshops about DAOs and talking publicly about governance for a while, and how I believe governance is THE endgame of everything we are doing here in the crypto space. I believe governance of anything humans touch is a wicked problem that should be approached with an experimentation mindset, and that DAOs are the best experimental test beds we have right now to figure out how we can govern ourselves, our commons, and our infrastructure in a better way than what we’ve been able to, up until now. I truly believe our survival as a species depends on us figuring out better ways to govern ourselves and our commons, and I believe blockchain technology will play an integral part in that, so that’s why I’m here.
more specifically and practically, lately I’ve been thinking about discourse forum customizations to help with DAO governance, how to structure delegate incentive systems so that they are more fair and efficient, transparency frameworks for DAOs including interesting whistleblowing mechanics and incentives (I even created an interesting proof of concept in a hackathon a few weeks ago that I believe can help with this), and stress testing new AI governance oriented tools like simocracy.org (it’s impressively good), while heavily using and giving constant feedback and advice to a myriad of other DAO tools, like LobbyFi and Event Horizon.
I’ve also been lurking in the House of Stake telegram chat for a few weeks now, checking out what’s going on in there, who’s who, and the overall vibe of the community. I even gave some quick feedback on the proposal template work @UhthredB has been doing. I also attended last week’s governance office hours google meet call that @KlausBrave hosted, to check the actual vibes.
to be candid, my initial reaction (and honestly still very superficial so take it with a grain of salt), is that House of Stake is not in a good place right now. mostly because it seems that the trust between the NEAR Foundation and several members of the community seems to be… very faint, to say the least.
and that’s… a big problem. a show-stopper kind of problem that should be openly addressed.
in my mind there’s only one kind of solution to this kind of problem:
radical (and maybe even somewhat irresponsible at times, if need be) transparency.
and the type of transparency that I’m talking about is financial transparency, obviously.
in a decentralized community, how much everybody is being paid, and for what, should be public information, ideally with the precision to be able to see how the money flows from the treasury, to the last human in the chain (and very soon to the last AI agent in the chain and their creators as well). that’s the only way for community members to keep themselves, and each other, accountable, and for a healthy decentralized community to thrive and be effective. that’s how trust is built in a decentralized community. if there’s no transparency, there’s no trust. if there’s no trust, there’s no community. if there’s no community… well… you know.
and by the way, please remember that this take is coming from me, the guy that is crazy enough to be the only DAO delegate in the world (to my knowledge at least) that diligently and voluntarily shares all of his earnings that originate from the DAO’s treasury in a public internet forum for all to see.
so yeah, radically increasing transparency in House of Stake affairs would be my first order of business, starting with my own compensation package and terms, if I’m hired for the Head of Governance role. I will put my money where my mouth is, of course.
I believe House of Stake is an incredible opportunity to build something truly amazing in decentralized governance and we can still totally make this work. There’s a lot of wrong reasons to create a DAO (or DINO – DAO In Name Only) and we’ve seen plenty of examples of that since 2016, but in this case, a blockchain for AI that belongs to us all, really needs to be governed in a decentralized fashion. It really needs to be a proper DAO and I would love to get a chance to help shape it.
also, from all my adventures and experiences in DAOs and in decentralized governance throughout the years, I believe healthy DAOs in general and House of Stake in specific needs, in not so much of a particular order:
- clear separation of powers, with checks and balances in their org design
- which can be achieved by combining: token-weighted voting for some decisions, one-person one-vote voting for some other decisions, security council for technical and emergency actions, optimistic approval processes for operational decisions, veto-based governance processes for high-stakes changes, etc.
- transparent operations, finances and a “working in public” mindset
- with a whistleblower program (that pays for leaks) to keep all actors accountable
- very precise and reliable treasury management capability
- with live dashboards showing available runway, expenses, revenue, etc.
- a grants program that fuels the growth of the ecosystem
- fully transparent and accountable, that disperses funds based on achieved milestones
- open-source and custom-made governance and operations tooling that are DAO owned and can be easily changed
- so that we can proactively and routinely experiment with new governance rituals, processes, and mechanics by improving the tools we use for that
- a deliberate effort and process to decentralize power over time, to prevent governance apathy, and future ”can’t reach quorum” problems
- this would include a reputational and reward system for delegates and contributors that consistently keep adding value to the organization, giving them more power and paying for their work
- among other things… but look at this as just a preliminary list of things I would prioritize in House of Stake.
I also get the feeling that there has been a little too much effort put into AI tooling, at this stage of House of Stake, and not enough actual governance going on. It feels to me that the whole roadmap focus on AI governance is a little bit like putting the cart before the horse.
I believe we should first make sure we actually have an engaged community that proposes, discusses, votes and governs itself, and that does so in its very particular ways, and only then we should start building tooling, powered by AI of course, that will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of governance operations.
I also believe we should be prototyping our governance here at House of Stake, with live and real experiments, that decide on the allocation of actual resources (small amounts at first, sure) so that we can learn how this particular community governs itself, from a bottoms-up approach, and only after that should we start to optimize it with AI. Of course that this will most likely lead to some mistakes being made and some failures, so we also need to build a culture that is comfortable with failing fast and early, so we can learn as much as possible, as soon as possible, for NEAR to succeed.
so yeah, that’s me and my (very draft and probably a bit naive) vision for House of Stake =)
and please, if you took the time to read all of this, you’re an integral part of this community and I would love to get, first and foremost, your harsh and direct feedback on this vision of mine.
I’m fully aware this vision is not even a full vision yet, it’s more of an opinion really, and that it is coming from an outsider with very superficial context about NEAR and the previous decentralized governance endeavors in this ecosystem like NDC.
…but I can tell you that, I’m a user researcher at heart, so I love to understand people’s problems, and I’m also an experienced designer and builder in this space, so I love to build solutions for those problems, and test and iterate on them until they work.
but for this whole process to work, I really need your candid, unfiltered and raw feedback.
so… drop a comment below (you could do it from an anonymous account as well if you prefer), join either the first Google Meet call next Monday, September 1ˢᵗ at 8pm UTC, or the second Google Meet call next Tuesday, September 2ⁿᵈ at 10am UTC, or book a private call with me here, to chat all things NEAR governance face to face, or send me a DM on Telegram or on X.com.
Thank you!
Thank you for your application and for being open to dialogue with the community.
