Revoke the Grant: A Multi-Platform Entertainment Series Designed to Boost DCL Brand Awareness

by 0x0214b80ad993edb57dac15e156681d4ad16b175b (SkinnyOrca)

Revoke the Grant: A Multi-Platform Entertainment Series Designed to Boost DCL Brand Awareness

Introduction

Based on comprehensive due diligence and meticulous analysis, it's evident that there are numerous inconsistencies and concerning practices associated with the grant awarded to Metatrekkers. This proposal seeks to highlight these issues and recommend the revocation of the grant for the sake of transparency, accountability, and the credibility of our organization.

Grounds for Skepticism

1. Conflict of Interest

• Issue: The grant recipient voted in favor of his own proposal, which he directly benefits from. This can be due to his snapshot voting system where members of his DAO vote on whether they should vote on it or Not. However, most of the members who voted in Metatrekker’s DAO was also getting paid from the Decentraland DAO.
• Issue: Many voters who are direct beneficiaries of this grant voted on the proposal that rewarded the grant.

https://etherscan.io/token/0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac495271d0f?a=0x50a83425d537e39a0b7f884dcc07e6f4f37a09f3

2. Mismatched Budgetary Allocations

• Travel Expenses: The budget includes travel expenses, yet there's no evidence of any traveling being done. When confronted about the travel arrangements, the community was told “We are not travelling at all.”

• SEO vs. Google Advertising: A substantial SEO budget ($550/month for 10 months) is in place. However, it's perplexing that this significant SEO budget is proposed alongside another significant budget for Google Advertising ($450/month for 10 months). Especially when considering they're also paying for backlinks and advertising in other categories.

• Content Creation Discrepancies: The Social Media Manager, responsible for Content Creation, is allocated $475/month, yet a separate content creator category demands an additional $450/month.

• Email Marketing for Get Response: According to Notion the budget has an allocation for Email Marketing at $250/month to “Send weekly emails to email list using getresponse platform” and “Man power to create content and send emails.” Getresponse.com charges only $93/month for sending up to for 10,000 contacts which includes an AI email generator. Is there a reason the DAO has to pay an extra $150 a month for emails that can be AI generated? Why can't the content creator or the social media manager send out a weekly email using this service? What are the metrics of these emails and how many contacts do they actually have?

3. Deceptive Practices

• Misrepresentation: The grantee claimed to be an OpenSea and Ripple investor on his metatrekkers.io website and linkedin. However in the community Discord, he said he wasn’t.

• Hidden Transactions: Evidence suggests that the grantee might be compensating some of his Delegators, specifically VP legendneverdie, gsbroz, landlord, etc.

4. Lack of Transparency & Engagement

• Avoidance in DAO Discord: The grantee actively avoids answering questions in the DCL DAO Discord channel dedicated to him. Notable members left unanswered include Mimsy and Tudamoon.

• Selective Communication: He consistently ignores queries from certain community members.

5. Financial Discrepancies

• Server Costs: The stated server costs are $2500 for 10 months. However, only $250 for 10 months is paid to HPrivakos. This disparity raises concerns about the potential misuse of funds and whether other servers are being utilized. Where is the rest of the $2250 going? What other server costs are needed besides video streaming for their events when they are paying to use other venues?

• Payment for Venues: Despite having a $24,000 total allocation for the Venue and Event Support Team, the grantee has only compensated venues from Beattrekkers Series 2 with $93.75 each. Metatrekkers stated there is 72 venues total, but if we are only compensating $93.75 each x 72 venues that equals $6750 which means that $17,250 would be for the event support team. If he were to only pay the venues and split it evenly, it would be $333.33 each for the 72 venues.

• Not all marketing costs accounted for: On their notion they fail to mention anything about the $4000 for their marketing plan on Forbes and Bloomberg.

https://dcl-dao.notion.site/Marketing-Plan-ee63a795396a4bfd831d475da5b774bf

6. Redundant Teams

• Issue: The grantee has set up an Execution Team for managing the event and a separate Venue and Event Support Team which also claims to handle event execution. This overlap appears to be a case of double-dipping.

7. Metrics

• Compare their Metrics to the Dollhouse:

https://dcl-metrics.com/scenes/dollhouse/c8383fca-bbb9-449e-af06-adeaef5090d5

• Compare their Metrics of their events to TRU Band Room:

https://www.dcl-metrics.com/scenes/tru-x-energy/c734fa84-8acc-4c8e-b9ca-185e81a1138e

• Here is Metatrekkers’ Metrics:

https://www.dcl-metrics.com/scenes/metatrekkers/93cc491d-cabf-46a1-b2ba-c2f9eb420a8a Remember people had to go to their parcel to vote on the DJ who won each battle. So this data is important to show true conversion. On August 2nd for example, Metatrekkers claim that 523 people showed up to the event. Only 24 voted at their parcel. This means their conversion rate was 4.5% for this event. How many of those votes are part of the Metatrekkers team or friends with them already. How many of those votes are actually unique wallets?

Conclusion

For the sake of accountability, trustworthiness, and the overall reputation of our DAO, it's important to make sure we only give grants to people with good faith, good ideas with roadmap and to a team that is able to complete what they promise. Given the array of concerns and discrepancies highlighted above, we confidently propose the revocation of the grant awarded to Metatrekkers titled “A Multi-Platform Entertainment Series Designed to Boost DCL Brand Awareness.”

We urge DAO members to deeply consider these findings and vote in favor of the revocation to uphold the integrity of Decentraland.

• Revoke
• Do Not Revoke
• Invalid question/options

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp