Hi @ericnakagawa , thanks for the proposal.
I’m all for progressive decentralization and protocol self-sufficiency, this feels partially like a step in the right direction.
I don’t want to be obstructionist in any way, if things need to get done and get paid, then that needs to happen. However, this proposal reads like a straight up funding top-up from the protocol treasury to the Foundation.
Who are the counterparties to these agreements? If one side of each agreement is the Celo Foundation in each case, isn’t this simply “we need to pay our previously contracted agreements, and we need the community treasury to pay for it”? Even worse, these agreements are not public, and we wont even know who is paid or why. Why can’t we transparently list who the providers are who make this operation tick? They should be proud to be supporting Celo, and the community should be pleased to be working with them and the services they provide.
Again, no one wants to scuttle a piece of core infrastructure funding (even more so since my own company could even be a beneficiary of some of this funding in the future), but this proposal doesn’t feel in the spirit of blockchain as an open movement. Is there a way we could get more insight into the existing liabilities and exactly what is planned for the future? Otherwise, the community is just writing another huge blank check to a proposal with trusted names attached to it.
I guess I missed the window to comment on this over the Christmas period and only getting to it now. I trust the signers here implicitly and don’t expect anything awry to happen, but it’s really hard for me to shake the optics of “trust me bro”. I hope in the future we can start to move away from closed-door B2B fee schedules and private contracts.