On July 11th, the dYdX Foundation hosted a discussion on Discord regarding general updates, current governance proposals, and an Epoch 11 review. The discussion was followed by a community hangout and AMA with the dYdX Foundation team.

A redacted transcript is available below:

James (dYdX Foundation): All right, let's get started. I think we'll try and change the format a little bit today. I know Cliff, Josh and David have been trying to produce the Epoch Review content prior to the AMA that we're hosting today. We’ve reformatted it into a presentation that's gone out on Twitter and YouTube, so hopefully a few people have managed to have a look at that before this AMA. Historically, we've talked through the Epoch Review metrics at the start of the AMA and then we get into the pre-populated questions. After that, we generally open the floor for anyone's questions. This time we thought we would try something new and move directly into the pre-populated questions. We’re open to your feedback, how you feel the new system is working. Have a look through the presentation and the video and let us know your thoughts there. We’re open to continually changing that and making it more interactive for everyone to have a look through and take the information in.

So how we'll structure today is instead of reading through everything metrics related, we'll go straight into the pre-populated questions that I've taken from some people on Discord, Twitter, and the Ambassadors. Next, we can go straight into the AMA and have an extended period of time for more intimate questions that you can ask and we can razz on in the audience here.

So David, if you're ready, let's start with you. We'll start with the first pre-populated question. "With V4 being announced from the dYdX Trading team, how has this impacted the Foundation's goals?"

David (dYdX Foundation): That's a great question. Obviously over the course of last Epoch, the dYdX Trading team announced their plans to launch version four (V4) of their protocol. For those who haven't read the blog posts, the TL;DR that dYdX V4 will be developed as a standalone blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol. V4 will feature a fully decentralized off-chain order-book and a matching engine capable of scaling orders of magnitude more throughput than the other blockchains can support. The dYdX Trading team, which is mostly engineers, have been building this over the course of the last few months, and certainly have been scoping this out for much longer than that. Overall, I think the news certainly made a lot of headlines across the industry.

Generally, from my personal standpoint, the news was well received, and I encourage everyone to read through the blog posts that the dYdX Trading team published, which gives a lot more details around the implementation and the reasoning behind this decision. Ultimately how that impacts the Foundation's goals, I think generally speaking, it doesn't have an immediate impact on them. The foundation at this point is an independent organization from dYdX Trading. We were established a year ago, or a little more than a year ago, and really our vision was, and continues to be, to foster community-led growth, development and self-sustainability over the dYdX protocol, whether that be the current version or the future version. In that light, our goal really has been to accelerate the progressive shift of the protocol to community governance and decentralization with a continued focus on censorship resistance, trust minimization, security and reliability.

Overall this announcement of dYdX V4 is very much aligned with that vision and mission. Ultimately, if you look at the history of the dYdX protocols, maybe just to give a little context to everyone, dYdX Trading was founded over four years ago now by Antonio Juliano, who was an early engineer at Coinbase. In the first few years of their existence, they really focused on building different types of products to try to find product market fit, and so in the early days, dYdX Trading developed three unique protocols and in a lot of ways achieved product market fit, proving that margin trading and spot trading and flash loans and atomic swaps could happen on layer one (L1), as well as perpetuals trading on L1.

In the last two years or so the Trading team has been focused on scaling non-custodial trading, and so really the dYdX Trading team was one of the first teams to really make the decision to move to layer two (L2) and using StarkWare and ZK-rollups to scale perpetual trading. That product has seen over $600 billion in volume in 12 months. I think this demonstrates a strong track record of seeing how the technology landscape evolves and then not being afraid to take risks and building as the tech improves exponentially. Since last year with the launch of the dYdX Foundation and the launch of the dYdX token, really our goal has been to bootstrap community governance and commence this process of progressive decentralization. We recently hit our one year milestone and shared some stats on Twitter about some of the achievements that we as a community have achieved and certain activities that the Foundation has been active with.

We have progressively decentralized the community and handed dYdX tokens to over 50,000 unique wallets who have all participated in various decisions that have affected the protocol at large. I think mostly, and what gets me really excited, is at the end of this year, V4 will launch. This really marks a new inflection point for our community that really enables full decentralization and community control over the dYdX protocol. If you read the blog post dYdX V4 will have no central components, the community will have full control over all aspects of the protocol that can be controlled. The dYdX DAO, which obviously is still somewhat of a nebulous concept for a lot of people will have a much more active role, not only in the governance contracts, but on the product side of things as anyone can build on top or around dYdX V4, no central party.

Lastly, the current version of the protocol (dYdX V3), will eventually be deprecated after the migration. To me the V4 announcement is extremely encouraging and very much aligned with the Foundation's original mandate and vision, which was progressive decentralization and supporting that transition to community control. Overall I don't think this has materially impacted the Foundation's goals, if anything, it really makes our mandate clearer with a clear milestone that the whole community can focus on and execute against.

James (dYdX Foundation): That makes sense. Thanks, David. The next question has come from the community as well, and this might be specifically relevant to the Governance Burrow members that are in here today. Can we touch on governance changes come V4 and the knowledge that we have so far?

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah, I think that's a great question. Obviously, the dYdX Trading team has been heads down building. Right now, my understanding is their focus has been on actually building the exchange part of V4, and I think there are still a lot of open questions around the governance contracts, whether those will ultimately get moved to Cosmos as well, subject to dYdX token holders' decision and vote. I think most importantly, again, if you read through the blog post from dYdX Trading they make the case that the V4 of their protocol will need a L1 governance token, and even though the dYdX token is currently based on the Ethereum blockchain, it does appear that the dYdX token would be a natural fit for staking to validators within kind of the V4 ecosystem.

In terms of what this means, there's a world where the dYdX token, should token holders vote and approve this, could be bridged or Cosmos and used as the L1 token as part of V4 and be used for governance and staking to validators more broadly. So what that means for the existing governance contracts, I think is very much TBD. I certainly encourage the community to kickstart that discussion around the role of dYdX tokens within the V4 ecosystem. So that's kind of point number one.

I think point number two is, again, for those who have looked at the history of governance contracts, certainly on Ethereum, I think there's been various cycles of governance contracts. Clearly there was some governance activity and some governance with Uniswap. I think Compound Alpha was extremely innovative and then Compound Bravo iterated and improved on Alpha, and then a lot of ways Compound Bravo became kind of the standard governance across many protocols out there supporting things like delegation of tokens to other people. Aave then forked Compound governance and then made some changes. We then forked Aave's governance contracts and also made some changes that we thought were additive to governance overall.

I think from my perspective, there's certainly been a lot of lessons learned around governance, what works, what doesn't, how do you weigh getting buy-in and having community consensus around decision making while also making sure that a fully decentralized community can make decisions effectively. Again, the community already has control over making any changes to the existing governance contracts, and from my perspective, there's room for improvement. So as part of this transition to V4 at some point, I expect there to be the next version of governance within the dYdX ecosystem as well, really leveraging all of the lessons learned that the community has come to over the last 12 to 18 months, and trying to then build a better product around governance that helps drive that forward.

So maybe just to recap again, what changes to governance will happen come V4? I think that's still largely an open question from my standpoint. I do think the community has to have a debate and discussion around using the existing dYdX token as part of V4. Should they decide to approve that, the next question then is how does the migration happen and what changes to governance should occur to make sure that governance can be as effective in v4 as well.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, David. Moving on to a few Commonwealth posts that touch on governance. I know there was a post last week about the DAO values. Can you touch on why you feel it's important for the community to spend time reviewing these?

Josh (dYdX Foundation): I can jump in there. Yeah. So if you guys had a chance to check out the post on Commonwealth, there's a DRC up right now that explains that the CEO and founder of dYdX Trading, Antonio, shared dYdX company values in the middle of June. Last Friday the dYdX Foundation publicly announced on their blog that they would be adopting the same values just to better align the Foundation and Trading to make sure that they're on the same page. The DRC post on Commonwealth was to start a discussion, basically an open call for comments from the dYdX community to start brainstorming and thinking about what values we as a dYdX community value, and whether the dYdX company values should be adopted across the entire ecosystem. It is totally up to the community whether the values will be iterated on and added to or if the community feels that they are broad enough and in-depth enough in their current form to be adopted across the dYdX ecosystem.

If you take a step back and just think about what's going on, you have dYdX Trading involved very much on the product side, the Foundation who is heavily involved in governance, ensuring the self sustainability of the protocol, then as we're building out things like the Ambassador Program, the Grants program, SubDAO groups,functional working groups, there's so many different moving parts and contributors coming in. I really see these values as a guidepost for individual contributors to the dYdX ecosystem to fall back on in the event that they're struggling to make decisions or if they're looking for guidance in terms of what decision to take when discussing with other people in the dYdX ecosystem. Everything stems from just getting better aligned between the core contributing members of the dYdX ecosystem. Be it again, through Ambassador Program, Grants program, and/or delegation, it's really important for execution purposes to make sure that we're all moving in sync to achieving the respective goals of the different entities. I mean, dYdX Trading is very focused on being the world's leading crypto exchange, whereas the Foundation is focused on building best-in-class governance and ensuring community-led growth and self sustainability.

The DAO assists with both of those things and will eventually develop its own specific goals and missions to bring about better feedback for the ecosystem in terms of becoming the best decentralized workforce to contribute to developing best-in-class governance and developing the world's leading crypto exchange. So I think it’s great if everybody could review and give feedback on that post. In terms of next steps, once there's been adequate community discussion and there's been good consensus on the values of the dYdX ecosystem, the values will eventually need to be ratified by a Snapshot vote. The vote will be subject to the minimum requirements for binding snapshot votes, which you can find the details posted on Commonwealth as well.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks for that, Josh. That was great. Okay, the next question has to do with the Ambassador Program, so I can touch on this. So it's a Season 1 update. Just to recap, the Ambassador Program has been going on now for about 10 weeks, from Season 0 to halfway through Season 1. The quality of work and the contributions have been amazing. I think the community has seen through Commonwealth what they've been working on, but I'll just provide a little recap on some of the things that the Burrows are working on. What I'll go through now is pretty much additional to a lot of the things they're helping out at the Foundation also. So they're providing significant support to a number of initiatives that we are running in addition to the following.

So just to touch on what the Analytics Burrow's working on. They're doing multiple analytics dashboards that'll hopefully be ready by, I think, over the next couple of weeks, and if you are interested in that then by all means reach out on Discord and/or Commonwealth. There's going to be dashboards on governance, dashboards on Hedgies, dashboards on the $DYDX token, and they're working on sort of trivia cards for Commonwealth and Twitter backgrounds, etc., to match voting and tokens. The Governance Burrow has been working on DRCs for the Hedgies-Lens Protocol Collab, and there will hopefully be more information coming soon on that. I know AndyGG, who is part of the Governance Burrow, has been in conversations with myself and the Lens Protocol team, so they will hopefully get Lens handles for the Hedgies as well as dYdX token holders, which will be exciting. They're launching the “Meet the Delegate” series, which is something I believe will be extremely impactful within the ecosystem.

We’re really excited about that. They've worked on a number of onboarding and proposal synthesis and provided frameworks for forum growth strategy. All impactful measures there and excited to see what they come up with over the next few weeks and into Season 2. The Media Burrow, so this Burrow has been working very closely with the Foundation very much helping with streamlining Epoch Reviews like we're doing now, production of video content, helping us with affiliate docs. They've been creating a broad media template strategy and repurposing existing content, and then definitely thinking about translating bounties into several languages, and it's something that, shout out to NTInc, who's been spearheading the transition over to Wonder, our new Bounty Board. The Risk Burrow, they're doing risk reports, which is great and these are posted on Commonwealth also. They're looking at different collateral options. So there are a lot of threads and discussions that are going on behind that.

They're looking at maker volume rewards for each market, and they've launched a community program that they've received over 10 submissions for, which is an asset explorer program and market commentary. So if you believe that you've got the skills and you can provide those types of commentaries then by all means check out the Bounty section on Discord and reach out to 0xCChan about that. The Student Burrow currently is compiling a database of University crypto and blockchain clubs to help us establish contacts for delegation. They've been having calls with multiple stakeholders at the university level to introduce dYdX and make introductions to potential delegates. So I'm really excited about that. They're also going to create an educational video to outline and explain how to get set up on Commonwealth and complete the delegate application form.

Finally, the User-onboarding and Education Burrow. So they're the ones who have been spearheading the dYdX academy site. They've brought in existing multilingual resources from country heads and community managers to bolster the experience for international traders. They've hosted the dYdXacademy.info and dYdXDAO.info page, which is a great resource for everyone to check out all things about the dYdX ecosystem. They're launching a Thinkific course to create comprehensive education content to define dYdX specifically. They’re also working on bounties, translations and accessibility for international community members.

So overall, really excited about the impact that they're having. They're a great group. They’re working well together, and I'm sure if you haven't checked out on Commonwealth, there's some discussions now regarding changing a little bit of the structure. So if you're interested in everything that's going on with the program, definitely check that out, reach out to the Ambassadors and see how you guys can collaborate.

Okay, moving on to the next question, for anyone up on this stage. "When are certain DAO working groups going to be started and has there been any discussion around what that initial group may be?"

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. James, I'm happy to take this one. Taking a step back, different communities have different concepts or ideas around DAOs. This is my personal opinion, but in a lot of ways, when I look at the DAO landscape out there, generally speaking, I don't think I can point to a single DAO that has completely nailed what it means to be a successful DAO. In a lot of ways, DAOs are not super efficient. They don't result in a ton of productive output, they underspend from their community treasuries, and they haven’t nailed the exact best in class DAO playbook. So we certainly take inspiration from other DAOs, some things work, some things don't, but I still think we're in the early innings of what it means to be a DAO and what's the right number of working groups, what works, and what doesn't. With that being said we've certainly run a number of experiments, or the community has run a number of experiments over the last year. The establishment of the Guernsey Trust to support the dYdX Grants program is a step in the right direction and really provides a legal rapper for a DAO or SubDAO within the dYdX ecosystem to fund community participants. That's been experiment number one. Experiment number two is really around the Ambassador Program. As James provided an update on the six different Burrows. I think in a lot of ways, those are the early innings of functional areas that the community can gravitate around and the objective there, hopefully at some point, is for each of those Burrows to really be self-sustaining and potentially their own SubDAO. So that's point number two. I would say with V4 coming at the end of this year, this is where the community will have much more functional control over the product and can build much more on top and around, should it choose the underlying protocol.

The responsibility and the amount of impact that a decentralized community can have around the overall ecosystem will be significantly higher. Tactically, this means that in the next six months the community should continue to discuss best practices and learn and iterate, and be responsible for the thinking around what it means to be best-in-class DAO that has full control over the leading crypto trading platform out there and continue to learn and iterate and build tooling around this. There are a lot of lessons learned with the existing infrastructure that the community currently has. And certainly looking forward to working with the community to narrow down the scope here and really focus on execution. The last thing that I'll say is, again, I started off answering this question with the broad statement that I don't think any DAO has been a wild success up until now.

My personal perspective is that in some capacity DAOs need to still figure out how to move a lot faster from a decision making standpoint, and really focus on output. In some ways they need to be able to compete with companies and corporations while still leveraging the inherent benefits of transparency and a decentralized community base to make decisions. My ask for the community is really to think about some of the limitations with the infrastructure that exists today, how do we make sure that a DAO can run as efficiently as possible, and we really challenge everyone to think about that and to discuss and execute that over the next few months.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, David. So last couple of questions then, this might be one for you Josh or Cliff, "How does the Foundation plan to increase the number of established community members becoming endorsed delegates?"

Josh (dYdX Foundation): I'll preface this by stating, in my opinion, the way that we view the Endorsed Delegates program is that we would rather have fewer high quality delegates than more mediocre delegates, based on the contributions that we've seen thus far. The delegates that have excelled are the ones that are established community members who are engaged in governance and very much have a stake in dYdX and the dYdX community. Taking a step back, anything that we can do to increase the number of high quality contributors that get involved with the dYdX protocol, whether that is through the Grants program, the Ambassador Program, or any other means, should increase the number of quality endorsed delegates. I think you've seen great stickiness from those programs in terms of people converting from the Ambassador Program, the Grants program, or just being general members of the community, and then wanting to get more involved in governance.

This is definitely something that we think about constantly and shout out to mx. I remember when he first onboarded, we had a conversation just about the need to have more active representation from the community that is traders on dYdX. This is something still to this day that we could benefit from, having more active community members who use the product and are involved with the product. Have a direct stake in how the product is going to transform and really bring that unique perspective. I would encourage anybody listening to consider onboarding. Onboarding, just to remind everybody the Foundation is not gatekeeping who onboards, it's really meant just to provide other dYdX community members with the information to make an educated, informed decision about who they're going to delegate, proposing and/or voting power to. To answer in short, we plan to increase the number of delegates by reaching out to active voters, active contributors and active traders.

David (dYdX Foundation): I would also add, if you look at the actual data, Endorsed Delegates have played an increasingly important role in voting for DIPs. They've been very proactive on Commonwealth, showing their thoughts around various proposals, and so I echo Josh's comment that getting voting and/or proposal power into Community Delegates that really are spending the time to engage is a really important initiative and something that we should continue to foster. From a product experience, quite frankly, delegation is still pretty clunky or there's certainly room for improvement to be able to create transparency around that.

I know there are several third-party tools out there to try to make delegation and data around delegation more transparent. dYdX is currently supported on a platform called Boardroom that does show delegate information, past voting history, etc. If anyone in the community has ideas around how to build a better product experience or is interested in applying to the Grants program to really build a better front-end to support delegation more broadly, I would certainly encourage anyone in the community to think about that and drive that forward.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, David. Thanks, Josh. That's all the pre-populated questions. I will just say that there is an AMA on Wednesday. It's 12:00 PM, PT. Antonio is hosting an AMA on Twitter Spaces specifically for V4. I have put the tweet up in the Discord event section so people can click on that and ensure you RSVP to that. It'll be a great event where you can actually put your hand up and ask questions about V4. What we can do now, we'll open up the floor to anyone who wants to ask any questions from the Foundation standpoint or anything that we've just touched on or anything Epoch related data wise. So if anyone wants to come up on the stage, by all means raise your hand at the bottom of the screen and we'll bring you up.

Speaker (Community Member): So do you plan to integrate not only with the Cosmos network but also with others? I mean the first one is the Cosmos network and maybe in the future, you plan to maybe interact with other networks?

James (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. In all honesty, I'm unsure. I think that's a great question to ask the V4 team on the Twitter Spaces on Wednesday and address that to them. But from a Foundation side of things, we're unaware of that and probably not well equipped to answer that in all honesty.

Mo,L (Community Member): Hi, I have a question regarding isolated margin. Is that ever going to come on V3 or is that being pushed towards V4? Thanks.

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. I'm happy to take this one. Right now, V3 is really just focused on cross-margining. There is the ability to take isolated positions, but you have to set up a unique wallet to trade on dYdX and kind of ring fence each position to each account to make that work. At this time the dYdX Trading team is hands on deck focused on launching later this year, while maintaining V3 with just a few incremental improvements, like reduce only. I don't see dYdX Trading focusing on isolated margin. Though it has been a popular feature request for a long time. Having said that V4 is a protocol that is being designed to be able to support different types of products, and so being able to support isolated margin, multi-collateral, perpetuals, spot, futures, etc. I think there's just a lot more design space that will be available once it launches.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks Mo. Just a quick reminder before I bring anyone else on the stage, there is a POAP for this Epoch Review. If you head into Hedgies-General channel, in the Hedgies-General channel, and the secret word is ‘Foundation’. Alucard has created the form. If anyone wants to get their POAP head into the Hedgies-General channel now and claim your POAP. It will be open probably until the end of this AMA, so be quick, and claim your POAP.

Speaking (Community Member): I want to ask about the Ambassador Program. When will you guys be adding new Ambassadors?

James (dYdX Foundation): In terms of adding new Ambassadors, for the time being with the Grants Program proposal that is still being voted on, obviously there's been a reduced amount of funding there. So right now, I think bringing on new Ambassadors is on hold. That may change over a period of time. Hopefully, this will change if we get some more funding in time. Keep an eye out. We’ll be posting updates once we start to reopen and bring more people on, but right now it's just on hold.

Ax07 (Community Member): Hey How are you? I was going to ask about when you pass to V4, what's going to happen with the Hedgies? Currently we have trading rewards, well, not rewards, but trading fee discounts.

James (dYdX Foundation): Is this a question about Hedgies?

Ax07 (Community Member): Yeah. It's about the Hedgies and V4. I've seen on Discord that once you launch in V4, we're not going to need a Cosmos wallet or anything like that. So it's going to be like StarkWare, where we just bridge on site on dYdX and just trade as usual. So are the Hedgies still going to be functioning the same way as it is right now, or is it going to change and we have to build some sort of a bridge to Cosmos?

James (dYdX Foundation): I would probably assume that there will need to be some form of bridge. I definitely think the Hedgie functionality will remain, but I wouldn’t take this as complete gospel per se. I don't know if you've got anything else to say, David?

David (dYdX Foundation): Honestly, I think this is a good question for the Twitter Spaces with Antonio on the technical implementation. The reality, from my standpoint is, should the community of dYdX token holders vote for V4 to recognize Hedgies functionality within the Cosmos ecosystem and provide trading fee discounts or any other benefit, it'll be up to the community of dYdX token holders to make that decision. For the implementation, at that point, really any team will be able to build that tooling to be able to implement that decision. I think it's a question you should raise on the Twitter Spaces for Antonio, but from my perspective, it's certainly possible and up to token holders in the community at large.

Ax07 (Community Member): Yeah. Perfect. Another question is that I've seen on the Commonwealth forum, there's a lot of discussion about VE tokenomics for the new $DYDX token, and also there was a lot of discussion on Discord about revenues, can you say anything about that?

David (dYdX Foundation): I'm happy to take this one. I think my comments from earlier still stand where from a token economic standpoint or restructuring of any kind of governance contracts, that's really up to token holders to make a proposal and recommend changes. Clearly, I think it'll maybe a little more impactful to wait until more details around the V4 implementation are released to really fully understand kind of the scope of the product, but what has been shared publicly by the dYdX Trading team is that no centralized entity, including dYdX Trading will have the ability to collect fees from the protocol. Ultimately all of those decisions will be in the hands of token holders and really token holders and the community at large will have full control over all aspects of the protocol.

Ax07 (Community Member): Yeah, I see. So the token holders will decide if the revenues like the trading fees goes to the token holders, stakers or to the treasury and all the rest. We can vote for all that?

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. It'll be up to the community to come up with a proposal around whether or not to change fees and ultimately how those fees are then distributed within various stakeholders and participants within the ecosystem.

Mo (Community Manager): Morning. So quick question in regards to the Foundation, David it's directed to you really. Do you have any metrics in your mind which would make you think the Burrows is a successful experiment over say 6-12 month period, or do you not have any set in stone at the moment? If you do, I'd just be curious to know what metrics are you looking at to see if the Burrows is a value-add to the dYdX protocol? Thanks.

David (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, Mo. I think this is a great question. James, feel free to jump in as well with your thoughts, but from my standpoint, again, I made the comment earlier, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we measure success and OKRs for the community and kind of decentralized decision making at scale, and ultimately right now, the only real metric that I think certainly dYdX Trading cares about, and I think the community really should be focused on is growth related metrics, right. It's how many users, how much volume is generated and how many active traders that are organic traders are part of the dYdX ecosystem.

For me it's really about looking at the actual output of these working groups and how they contribute to products or projects that actually have usage and drive user or volume growth to the dYdX protocol at large. For some Burrows like the User-onboarding & Education Burrow, it's maybe a little more easier to look at those quantitative outputs, and you can look at page views for the dYdX Academy website, or you can look at referrals, et cetera, to really measure success. I think for other Burrows, like the Risk Analysis Burrow, it's maybe a different set of OKRs or kind of success metrics to really demonstrate value.

Ultimately, I think the guiding principle is, are people focused and building tools that active users, active traders of the protocol find valuable, are people building tools that facilitate decision making that get buy-in that provides transparency around what's going on in the ecosystem and are people then using kind of those tools to make actionable decisions that result in their protocol moving forward. So I would say there's certainly quantitative OKRs and then more subjective and qualitative OKRs. The last piece that I'll mention again is, at least with V3 a big focus for me has been to really identify and work with high potential, long term, contributors and really find a place for those contributors within the dYdX ecosystem at large, and really empower community members to take ownership of things and run with it.

With the Ambassador Program, there were over 2000 applicants and we ended up selecting 17 to really kick start their program and test different things out. For me, it's also about the ability to attract and retain outstanding talent and keep them within the dYdX ecosystem and family. When there's a lot of competing DAOs or opportunities out there, it's how do we really channel a lot of the enthusiasm that exists and make sure that people are working on the most impactful things that help drive their protocol forward. James, I don't know if you have any other OKRs or metrics that you would look at?

James (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. I think those are obviously the high level overall goals of growth and exposure to the industry and ecosystem at large. From Season 0 and Season 1 there are deliverables and expectations from a more granular standpoint where, let's say the Governance Burrow are trying to sort of like, vote on chain on 75% of proposals, or create two DRCs and be involved with different collaborations, et cetera. As the Seasons progress, really the Burrows are encouraged to, I create their own goals of what they're really trying to achieve by trying to be as decentralized as possible, allowing them to have the decision making capabilities to create different tasks and projects to contribute to that overall growth, but really echoing what David said, and then trying to be more granular at what the Burrows are trying to achieve both individually and collectively as a program.

Mo (Community Manager): Okay. That's great, that makes sense. So essentially they have targets and it's maintaining them. My main observation is that for anything to be established, it takes time to form those foundations. So it gets that visibility. So the Ambassador Program's quite new. So dYdX Trading, for example, has launched a marketing campaign. So how do you determine whether it's because of the campaigns done by the Burrows that's onboarding users in a particular Epoch or it's due to dYdX Trading Inc. launching a particular marketing campaign? So how do you differentiate the confounding factors influencing basically the metrics that we're measuring for these Burrows essentially?

James (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. It's a great point. In all honesty, it's very difficult. I think that's naturally a struggle where everyone's contributing to growth and to determine whether it's market factors, whether it's campaign factors, whether it's other exchanges locking funds, whether it's someone closing down perpetuals trading and how that impacts new users coming into the ecosystem, I think it's very difficult to differentiate that. It's something we are aware of and try to be as, I guess, timely with launching.

Mo (Community Manager): Okay. That makes sense. The main reason I was asking was because if the data is being collected, I'd be quite interested to make a research paper out of it at the end of it. I think, like David said, there's very hard evidence out there what DAO model works, so whatever yourself and David and the rest of the Foundation team have implemented, and it shows good outcomes, I think we should try and share that with the wider Web 3 community to show that this is a model that works and this should be implemented across, or the protocols that are trying to emulate. So that's why I was asking these questions, but thank you for the answers.

David (dYdX Foundation): Last comment I'll make on that is I think generally speaking one of the values that we've publicly shared, right, is decentralizing through transparency, and hopefully the community here can recognize the fact that the Foundation team and the dYdX Trading team generally does try to share a lot of data and lessons learned, really builds in public and shares as much information as we can and be transparent about that. Certainly, whether it's open sourcing the trust in Guernsey for DAOs or other initiatives that we've focused on, I think sharing lessons learned and best practices with the broader Web 3 ecosystem is something that we should continue to do. So for any Grantee, for any Ambassador, for any community contributor, I want to continue to encourage everyone to be transparent, to share reports, to share lessons learned and really view this as a collective learning experience where we're all learning together and trying to come up with kind of the optimal outcome in a transparent manner.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, David. Thanks for all the questions, everyone. I know we've just hit time, so we'll have to close it off there, but post any remaining questions in the Epoch Review channel, and we'll try and answer them there. I'll send this off to be deciphered, and then hopefully we can post this onto YouTube, and then we can share that within the Discord channel. We’ll close it off there, have a great rest of the week, and we'll see you in the next Epoch Review.

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