mmutablelawyer [Axis Advisory]

Wallet Address or ENS: 0xCA5dBD9Bc734dE621Cc5389a19Ae1E713F20403b

Tally Profile URL:

Areas of Interest:

• Improving Governance participation; and
• Supporting Infrastructure.

I've been active in governance across various ecosystems namely, dYdX and ArbitrumDAO. Throughout the past 8+ months, our goal was to effectively contribute to the ArbitrumDAO so as to earn our status as an ArbitrumDAO Delegate.

Background on Immutablelawyer (Joseph) and his initiatives within dYdX and ArbitrumDAO:

Joseph currently sits as the Supervisor of the dYdX Operations Foundation since July of 2023 [the community-launched entity responsible for setting up and overseeing the operations of the dYdX Chain - https://www.dydxopsdao.com/]. The dYdX Operations SubDAO has a 6.6 Million $ endowment for an 18-month period.

At the dYdX Operations Foundation, Joseph undertakes a role equivalent to what is required as a GCP Council Member; whereby he assists and oversees the proper administration (from a legal, regulatory, and product perspective), of the Foundation’s endeavors and ensures that actions taken by the underlying directors are in the best interests of the dYdX Community and in conformity with the mandate granted to them by such community.

Joseph also participated on efforts such as Xenophon Labs’ paper on Frontend decentralisation [https://xenophonlabs.com/papers/dydx_v4_report.pdf] and the proposal to transition forum-stage governance participation for dYdX so as to increase said participation [Common].

More specifically to the ArbitrumDAO, Joseph’s initial contributions emanated from his role within the TraderJoe Governance Council [a body set up within the TraderJoe community to facilitate & administer the voting power endowed within TraderJoe.xyz as a delegate].

Most prominently, as part of the TraderJoe Governance Council (together with fellow Council colleagues), Joseph contributed to the Council’s efforts in participating in the STIP Project Assessment by reviewing, assessing & voting on the various proposals submitted. In this regard, Joseph also authored a post on this model for delegates (The Delegate’s Handbook: A Primer on the Council Model).

Within the ArbitrumDAO, Joseph has also participated & spearheaded various endeavors aimed at optimizing and/or establishing pivotal infrastructure pieces to ensure long-term scaling & sustainability for existing projects & projects intending to build on Arbitrum. In addition, Joseph also spearheaded other initiatives such as the donation to Coin Centre and the DeFi Education Fund.

A TL;DR of my ArbitrumDAO contributions hereunder:

Snapshot 1 [Passed] This proposal aimed at establishing an industry-first procurement framework for security-oriented services within the ArbitrumDAO. In the drafting of this proposal, a public consultation period was initiated to solicit stakeholder feedback so as to optimally structure this framework.

Snapshot 1 [Passed] This proposal aims at establishing a collective of individuals and service providers to provide pivotal proposal-stage reporting to aid and enhance delegate decision-making. All members to be appointed by election with applicable caps. The members that were appointed were Delphi Labs, Blockworks Research, Open Zeppelin, Chaos Labs, and L2Beat.

Snapshot 2 [Passed] This proposal aims at establishing the ArbitrumDAO Procurement Committee to not only facilitate and administer the ratified procurement framework for security services, but also create new frameworks, propose a subsidy fund for services, & create a means test to assess projects’ eligibility for subsidization.

Snapshot [Passed] This proposal concerned the election of the aforementioned committee members. Here, Joseph obtained the most votes for this election to the ArbitrumDAO Procurement Committee.

Snapshot [Passed] This proposal concerned the creation of a $2.5m subsidy fund so as to subsidize the costs of security services for eligible projects building on the Arbitrum tech-stack.

Snapshot [Passed] This proposal envisaged a monetary contribution of 1,000,000ARB to the DeFi Education Fund & Coin Center from the ArbitrumDAO to continue their policy, litigation & advocacy efforts in relation to open-source software & software developers’ rights.

In Q2 2024, Axis Advisory received a grant from Thrivecoin for the creation of Arbitrum’s optimistic governance module. This development is being worked on in a collaborative manner by Axis Advisory & Tally.xyz who will be supporting its implementation.

In Q1 2024, Axis Advisory received a grant from Plurality Labs as part of its firestarter program to set up the initial infrastructure for the ArbitrumDAO Procurement Committee - which then led to the successful implementation of an industry-first DAO procurement framework that is currently in its RFP stage and has attracted the attention of the industry’s most prominent security auditors.

Please share your stance on overall goals for the DAO:

The ArbitrumDAO is at a stage whereby it has to earn it's status as a DAO in the first place. It's tech-stack and decision-making capacity is indeed one which is decentralised and autonomous due to the high level of delegated responsibility granted to ArbitrumDAO Delegates. However, we are yet to earn the badge of being an organised Decentralised Autonomous Collective. The initiatives we focused above aimed largely at facilitating the achievement of this prong - by setting up much needed initial infrastructure to organise the ArbitrumDAO in the long run.