This is a good point. It didn’t occur to me before, but yeah, if it were that the user has to sign two transactions, not ideal ux. Also, sounds like this would be a much bigger lift than a simple experiment.
Gm @0xean and @BeDiggy, I totally agree that executing multiple txs would be bad UX, and am not suggesting this.
The UX and implementation for optional, opt-out fees would be the same as added fees, ie. including a memo with the transaction or requesting a new API key from partners that has the donation percentage.
The only difference is that the “fee” would be optional, and users could opt out, in which case our existing memos/API keys would be utilized.
Hope that makes sense!
I do not agree that the risk of a fork is FUD, but a very real risk that we should expect once we achieve product market fit with a fully open-source codebase. Cultivating network effects are a great way to mitigate this risk, and adding fees are a great way to add friction to our network flywheel and hinder the DAO’s ability to build max network effects.
I also stand by the statement that a single engineer would have success in their ability to fork the front end and launch a competing DAO. As far as maintenance goes, anything that broke in their fork would also break in ShapeShift’s fork; they wouldn’t even have to fix the bugs, and could just wait for ShapeShift’s engineers to fix. Their app would function just as well as ShapeShift’s, but rather than being charged fees, there would be no fees and users could earn ownership in the new DAO in the form of governance tokens. They could also copy all of ShapeShift’s marketing and support documentation, and would have a fresh supply of governance tokens they could use to help bootstrap and incentivize a community.
I certainly don’t think this is the main reason the DAO should not add fees, but I do think it’s one of many important reasons for the community to consider before going down the path of adding fees. We are so close to being able to experiment with no fees + FOX rewards, and I have yet to see a compelling case made for how fees will help meaningfully impact any of the challenges the DAO is facing.
The idea that fees are a new thing is a falsehood. We know what the results of fees will be. I am very much interested in trying new things, which is why I advocate so passionately against fees and for no fees + FOX rewards instead. To your point, I do have fears about the DAO’s ability to survive and achieve its vision if it implements fees, so much that I’m even willing to compromise with optional, opt-out donations if it prevents ShapeShift from implementing fees.
I am still not clear on this.
Some examples may help -
Thorchain, no problem, I understand the mechanic. They allow us to set a variable fee and fee address.
Cowswap - do we have the ability to specify a variable fee? I wasn’t aware this was an option, so its unclear to me how we would give someone executing a trade on cowswap the option to donate without a second transaction.
CowSwap’s ability to add fees is not yet live, but when speaking to their team at DevCon they said they were working on it (note: they’re also planning to launch an affiliate program)
0x’s API supports adding fee/donation %'s, as do fiat on/off ramp providers.
My point is just that aside from the opt-out ability in the UI, the technical implementation for optional donations would be the same implementation as mandatory fees. Wherever fees are possible, optional donations should be possible too.
It would be up to product & engineering to decide when and where optional donations make sense.
Following up on this, I compiled a quick list of large grant programs that are explicitly for public goods
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Optimism’s retroactive public goods funding (https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c)
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Moloch DAO (https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-moloch-dao-funding-public-goods-ethereum-ecosystem)
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Public nouns (https://publicnouns.wtf/)
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Gitcoin grants (https://gitcoin.co/) ; polygon donating $1M to public goods matching donations (https://go.gitcoin.co/blog/polygon-commits-1-million-for-public-goods-gitcoin-launches-polygon-checkout)
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Cosmos’ program isn’t limited to public goods, but they mention it in this latest proposal (https://www.mintscan.io/cosmos/proposals/93)
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Blog from vitalik on funding public goods (https://protocol.ai/blog/transcription-vitalik-buterin-funding-the-commons/)
This is just a quick list, and there are certainly many more similar programs.
Beyond grant programs that limited to public good projects, I think @Fireb0mb1 nailed it with this comment in Discord: "my guess would be that choosing between two candidates for a grant, you’d favor the one that won’t try primarily to develop the service as a way to rent seek on final users… at least that’s how I understood that argument when it was made… maybe I was reading too much into it 
"