Provide transparency on finances

Sushi DAO should provide transparency on all expenses and promises (deals such as salaries to be paid, bonuses to be paid, etc). All team members should use publicly known wallet addresses and receive any salary/bonus/rewards from Sushi on these addresses.

This will help restore public trust in Sushi DAO and helps others in the ecosystem to help out with things like budget forecasting, etc. It’s currently nearly impossible for external stakeholders to vote on proposals as it’s impossible to know the financial health of the treasury.

Should Sushi DAO provide financial transparency?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

In the legal context , when Sushi DAO is a legal entity it should provide some accounting as to its operational activities.

Those reports can be (and should be) shared where appropriate. Any reporting before a legal entity should be done “unofficially” and disseminated only for educational purposes.

1 Like

I dont think anyone is against financial transparency. RSK posted this yesterday but i think something needs to be built to properly report. Maybe start with simple cash flow for treasury and ops wallets using flipside? Or using powerBI. Ive used PowerBI a lot and i think its pretty good. You can create graphical reports and then click into the various parts to drill into further data. Just requires knowing how to pull transactional data

I suggested this yesterday but I’ll put here - can one of the mods on discord create a ‘Reporting’ channel? That way if people want to take a stab at dune or flip side analytics we can all ask questions in there. I started playing around with flipside.xyz but I dont know all the tables to pull data from so i would need to ask a lot of dumb questions

2 Likes

Don’t think anyone would be against this.

I would however like this to turn into specific information fields & level of granularity that the community would like disclosed.

By the time this reaches snapshot I would like to see this go from “ deals such as salaries to be paid, bonuses to be paid, etc)”

To a specific list of things:
Ex:

  • Annual salaries broken down by contributor
  • Vesting schedules broken down by contributor
  • Requirement to only use publicly identifiable wallets
  • Any operational expense outflows
  • Contributor performance evaluations that correspond to performance bonus distribution.

Will be good for the community to establish these guidelines & then once voted in should be easily followed. Right now it’s still vague, which is the problem in the first place.

I voted yes on the question of “Should Sushi DAO provide financial transparency?” For that, I believe we should.

With that said, I do not think that all recipients of Sushi payments need to have public addresses. There can be some form of anonymization of payments, I assume.

We can create an accounting protocol that knows what is paid and when. But not necessarily to whom.

For example, if we have 12 devs for the month of May 2022. I think the DAO should be able to see 12 individual dev payments, without having to see who received it. The same for Samurais. If we have 6 Samurais, we should be able to see 6 payments made to Samurais for the month.

That allows for some privacy on behalf of “contractors/employees.”

Now, if those individuals receiving payments choose to doxx themselves, that is up to them. Further, they may need to doxx themselves if a payment dispute arises. Because there would have to be a way to reconcile payments made and payments received.

Yes, you are absolutely right to propose it! However, I concur with @sambacha, this will result from basic accounting and will be solved once a legal entity is set up.

1 Like

I don’t think there’s a need to make this a complex proposal. The idea is to set the default for financial information to public within Sushi. I’m worried that Sushi’s financial planning is mostly non existent. When the default is transparency, at least the community can help out. I’m worried that with the latest proposal Sushi has over extended it’s finances, at least in the bear scenario.

Sushi could run out of funds within a year under it’s current plan, or not… without more transparency this is hard to know.

There’s nothing vague about this proposal: if Sushi has financial information, make it public. Feel free to come up with any exceptions, the only one I can think of is paying bug bounties. Disclosure of the exact nature of some of these should be delayed until any risks are mitigated.

2 Likes

Sushi running out of funds, definitely needs to be transparent.

As a decentralized fintech operations, our default should always be transparency.

There’s nothing complex about being specific around what types of disclosure the governance process decided Sushi should follow. It’s just work.

The “more financial transparency” sounds good but in practice is more of the same, discretion & ambiguity. You have the opportunity to use a proposal to specifically define financial reporting and what it entails, so maximize the opportunity.

The expense sheet is public it’s one of the last items linked in the sushi discord proposal discussions channel. I don’t think we disagree at all my point is public co’s have an obligation to report certain financials, and many of which are standardized, to which investors can model the biz & health. Use this proposal to do the same for Sushi & maybe it sets the precedent for DAO’s at large.

I will do my part to ensure “more financial transparency” with taking what has been historically unstructured & disorganized & neglected and turning it into structured, organized, and regularly published but you can do your part to define what that reporting should entail. Sushi 2.0 had salaries and budgets and was without question an improvement from the status quo but we can go further and remove the “Neil’s judgement, or Matthew’s judgement, or Head Chefs judgement”.
Ex. Do you want to see line item expense reports of which software vendors sushi uses? Some would say yes some would say no and there are arguments on both sides. If you do the work and start defining specifics as a governance mandate sushi is in a better place. The issue has always been one of discretion and ambiguity so let’s fix that.

With this proposal I’d rather set a base expectation that financial information is public.

What I want to see I’m sure Sushi currently doesn’t have, so that would require manpower and skills not available right now. But at least share what’s there, so we know the status quo of accounting, record keeping, etc.

But on top of making everything public, a few things that would be great are:

  • A real-time view into actions taken by the ops multisig with explanations/justifications for all items
  • A list of all liabilities (promises of salaries, bonuses, deals done, etc)
  • A real-time view of all assets, or at least a monthly update
  • Financial forecasting, cash flow projections
  • Monthly financial report with revenue, expenditures, etc

Sushi currently still has no leadership, so the community is the leadership, but the community can’t lead if the team isn’t transparent. The community just had to vote on a proposal that was missing lost of important details. I only just figured out that the 6m Sushi needed is ON TOP of the $5.7M in salaries.

But considering how little information there currently is within Sushi, let’s start by sharing that. Once real leadership is in place, hopefully a CFO/treasurer can setup the basics.

So again, there’s nothing vague about this proposal: set the default for financial information at Sushi to public.

3 Likes

So, when snapshot? I think with 100% yes votes and my 1M+ SUSHI this is a logical next step.

2 Likes

Completely reasonable analysis. Do think some form of CFO would be responsible for this effort, which as you point out, we don’t have until we have a leadership in place to select a CFO/treasurer.

Building an integrated financial system is important
It is possible to set clear financial regulations and laws regulating salaries and expenses
And on a monthly basis some financial reports are issued regularly that reveal the financial position of Sushi
and at the same time they do not conflict with the confidentiality of some information

Transparency and maintaining the confidentiality of some information do not conflict
These are easy things to organize

Building an integrated accounting system that helps achieve the goal of financial transparency

As we have publicly stated in previous posts, we believe financial transparency is a fundamental cornerstone of the Sushi restructure. We spent a lot of time going through the public spreadsheets while coming up with our proposal, and we found it outdated and really complex to follow.

Once proper accountancy is in place, treasury diversification is a no-brainer. Right now, USD salaries are being paid from the Treasury, which is composed almost entirely of SUSHI tokens. We consider that salaries and regular expenses should be covered by the new Kanpai revenue while leaving the treasury as a backup reserve. To avoid any unnecessary market risks, the best plan would be to turn all this revenue immediately into stablecoins.

What remains unclear to us is which immediate actions should be taken if this proposal goes through and who will be responsible for it. We are wary of this vote passing and not being executed, as we already saw it happen several times in the past.

Overall, we strongly support this proposal and are looking forward to it. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

I think it should be planned to build a financial system that achieves the goals of the sushi community