ETH Staking Node for the DG DAO

The DG DAO currently runs a profitable validator node on Polygon that contributes to a weekly ICE purchase and burn. This is a proposal to expand to an Ethereum staking node also, now that the Ethereum merge has been successfully completed.

Proposal: Give the team the discretion to choose between the following options with the amounts proposed being flexible, to get exposure to ETH staking for the DG DAO:

Setup one or more ETH staking nodes using the current DG DAO treasury, by converting up to 1m out of the 4.7m DAI to ETH. Most of this DAI was acquired by converting ETH when it was trading around $3k-4k range. Buy an “x” amount of ETH per week, using a combination of the following: DG DAO treasury DAI, up to 50% of the Polygon validator node rewards and up to 50% of the secondary sale royalties. This ETH can be staked in a pool using either Lido or Rocket Pool. Once the staked ETH in one of these providers reaches 32 ETH, the DG DAO can withdraw those funds and run their own staking node with it.

Once the DG DAO is running an ETH staking node, it will accumulate ETH for the DAO over time. After the Shanghai upgrade is complete, which is estimated for some time in 2023, then the staked ETH and ETH rewards earned during this time will be able to be withdrawn. This will give the DAO another source of funds that can be used to purchase and burn ICE every week, the same way that the Polygon validator is being used now. Going forward from there, a % of the ETH rewards from the staking node should be converted to ICE and burned and a % should be accumulated to add more ETH staking nodes.

Credit for the proposal idea to 0xCatsLover, with additions to it by 0xGabe and SzJanko.