February 2023 Update

As a reminder, the team is currently working on two deliverables for the dYdX Ops subDAO:

• Publishing a dYdX DAO playbook to guide the community in subDAO formation best practices
• Opening a fiat bank account to manage service provider expenses

We’ll share quick updates on both below.

Playbook

In February, the team made significant progress on the playbook. The initial draft has been written and is being reviewed internally. Given the size and numbers of topics covered, we are going through lots of edits and rewrites. However, we’re excited to share that a public draft will be ready to share in March.

Banking

Unfortunately, we hit a few barriers when looking for a banking partner. Two elements of the Ops Trust have made banking support difficult:

• Traditional banks struggle with the complexity of our Guernsey Trust entity.
• The deposit amount is not enough to meet onboarding requirements.

We’ve come to learn that the main feature we appreciate of the Guernsey Trust structure, a trust that gives DYDX tokenholders beneficiary control through on-chain governance contracts, is difficult for banks to understand. Banks have a preference for sole beneficiaries and owners of funds. Explaining to a bank that the beneficiary includes all DYDX tokenholders has not been easy.

Going forward, we suggest future subDAOs in need of a bank account explore alternative entity types, like a Cayman Foundation.

For the banks that have been open to understanding, most back away at the deposit amount available in the Trust, $100,000. Unfortunately, this amount hasn’t been enough for many banks to justify the operational cost of onboarding the entity.

Thankfully, despite these barriers, we are now in the final stages of onboarding with a UK-based bank. The team has been responding to all onboarding requests, and we are now in the final stretch of opening an account.

Expenses + Compensation

The following payments were made in February: