Create a DAO Treasury Dashboard

Proposals by Gotchi Gov'nuhs
1

I have been working with @eitri on the creation of a DAO Treasury Dashboard to track Aavegotchi DAO’s income and assets. We have written a spec (summarized below, or see complete spec), and are planning to submit a proposal in the near future.

The dashboard will provide an overview of the DAO’s total assets and income, break down assets by type, and track income over time. The dashboard will be built in Dune and/or other reporting tools.

Overall, the dashboard should provide an easy-to-understand snapshot of the Aavegotchi DAO’s financial health and activity, allowing stakeholders to make informed decisions about the DAO’s operations and governance. It will also be useful to a bookkeeping and accounting team in the future, as it will provide access to aggregated transaction data that can be posted as individual accounting ledger entries each month.

The dashboard should provide an overview of the Aavegotchi DAO’s total assets and income for a given period. This should include the total value of all relevant income and assets held by the DAO as outlined below. We have assembled a list of 13 addresses that currently hold or have recently held DAO assets.

The dashboard should take into account the latest 365 days of transaction history.

Income

Include the income sources below. Display an overall summary of income (total and broken down by source) for the past 7 days, 30 days, and 365 days. Include time series charts of income by source broken down by week and month.

  1. Alchemica earned from Gotchiverse Crafting
  2. GHST earned from Baazaar Fees
  3. GHST earned from GBM Auctions (at auction.aavegotchi.com)
  4. Alloy Earned from Forge Smelting

Token Assets

Include the tokens below. Display an overall summary of current assets (total and broken down by wallet). Include charts showing change in asset balances by the end of each week and month.

  1. GHST
  2. DAI
  3. USDC
  4. Alchemica
  5. Alloy (ERC1155)
  6. Matic

Other Assets

Show the DAO-owned liquidity positions and the current token balances.

Funding Request

Currently, our anticipated budget for this project is $2,000 USD equivalent, paid upfront as a one-time fee.

Feedback

All feedback is welcome. In particular, if you are aware of a source of income or a DAO asset not included above that you believe should be reported on, please let us know.

8 Likes
2

Am I correct in assuming that the entire development budget will be $2000 and no more will grow?

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You are correct. The proposal will specify a fixed cost, which we expect to be $2000 unless there is significant change to the spec based on community feedback between now and when the sig prop is posted, which seems unlikely.

The only additional cost in the future would be if and when the DAO adds new sources of income or assets that need to be accounted for in the dashboard queries, which could require additional work. At that time, we might apply for more funding to expand the dashboard, but that will be up to the DAO. Dune Analytics queries are also open-source, so anybody in theory could fork the dashboard and expand on it.

2 Likes
4

You might want to see how far daolens goes before you start. I know it does dashboards, and is wired into everything we use, and we can probably get on the AI alpha, so… this might be mostly handled or better handled, using daolens.

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I agree that there is an immediate need for better financial communication to the DAO, which this proposal can address in the short term. I’d be more inclined to support this proposal and expenditure if it was being considered within the broader context of a strategic conversation regarding DAO accounting and financial management.

If Aavegotchi achieves the level of success that all we hope for, DAO contributors and tokenholders with swell in numbers and the need for DAO financial reporting and operational management will grow significantly. Add to that the impact of impending crypto regulations and financial compliance and it is clear that the proposed dashboard solution is at best temporary solution.

DAO organizations are new type of entity for collective financial activity. Most national jurisdictions and international standards organizations haven’t a clue how to characterize or regulate DAOs. So the accounting and reporting requirements for the Aavegotchi DAO will of necessity evolve as these organizations clarify their rules and regulations. Rather than attempting over time to develop a complex, multi-sig, multi-token, multi-national DAO accounting system from the seed of this proposed dashboard, I’d like to see a strategic plan for our eventual DAO accounting solution.

If we have requirements and benchmarks for this strategic accounting capability it will be easier to evaluate this proposal’s value proposition. For instance, how long do we expect this dashboard to be viable - 6 months, 2 years? Are we considering other software services or platforms for an accounting solution in the long term? For your consideration I include this link for an interesting paper discussing DAO Accounting issues and considerations [DAO Accounting].(DAO Accounting by Kristof Lommers, Muzammil Ghanchi, Kevin Ngo, Qirong Song, Jiahua Xu :: SSRN)

1 Like
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Thanks for your post, and to be honest you are speaking my language here and I couldn’t agree more. I really wish this proposal were part of a larger more comprehensive financial reporting plan for the DAO, and I’ve said this on many occasions. I did try and make this happen, but there was nothing promising on the horizon, so I decided to move forward with this limited scope proposal - also due to the fact that there has been many complaints in the community about “bloated” proposals as of late.

Several months back, I raised the idea of a Finance and Operations Lead role which I was prepared to campaign for. Part of that role was to be responsible for a more comprehensive set of periodic financial statements. Ultimately, that was part of a larger DAO org structure idea which was not received positively (for reasons I entirely understand), so it pretty much died there.

Since then, I’ve said numerous times that the DAO needs proper GAAP-based accounting and should hire a crypto-savvy bookkeeper or CPA firm to take on this task. Personally, I no longer have the bandwidth or desire to take on such a task at this time, but hopefully somebody will. From my experience working with such firms before, I can say they are quite likely going to need aggregated transaction data to make monthly summary entries, as making thousands of individual ledger entries will not be feasible. This dashboard will provide that aggregated monthly transaction data they will require.

So yes, this is somewhat of a short-term measure so at least the DAO has some idea of its income and assets, but I do believe it can be applicable over the longer term term, with only minimal occasional maintenance if the DAO adds new types of assets or income streams to its books.

In short, it’s a start.

1 Like
7

I propose that mikey be the reviewer of a bounty to do the job he just described.

8

I appreciate your response. Some significant personal issues greatly curtailed my Aavegotchi bandwidth of late, so I completely missed those previous discussions regarding financial reporting and operations management. I can well imagine that other issues like game play mechanics, the Forge and the Curve were more immediate concerns. And probably rightly so. But playing catch-up in financial reporting and management really sucks, which is what will happen if the DAO is caught unawares by circumstances.

I’m not convinced that CPA firms have any greater grasp of DAO financial reporting needs than some of the upstart DAO software and services projects. The on-chain nature of DAOs should support a greater amount of automation of financial reporting compared to a conventional shareholder enterprise, I would think. Maybe not. In any event, I don’t think we want to roll our own DAO accounting and reporting system. So long as enough DAO members are on top of these issues then the financial dashboard you propose is a practical, interim solution.

As new DAO projects are increasing spawned by the evolution of the Gotchiverse we’ll have turn to more sophisticated financial and operational systems that are tailored for decentralized management and governance. Most existing accounting tools just don’t meet that need. We must stay on the lookout for breakthroughs in that space.

1 Like