LUNC governance: Recommended changes to the LUNC L1 Task Force Budget (Q2)

LuncBurnArmy posted a budget request to the Luna Classic community which seems poised to either be denied, or pass so narrowly that it seriously delegitimizes the current L1 Task Force.

As someone who has had overwhelmingly positive experiences dealing with LBA on issues where we agree, while at the same time disagreeing with him on some very basic issues, some detailed constructive feedback is called for here.

There are 2 sets of issues. The first is a loss of confidence in particular members of the L1TF, and the second is a set of quibbles with individual line items in the L1TF Q2 proposal.

At the same time, the LUNC community needs to stay within its lane. It should think of itself as a board of directors, delegating authority to a managerial C-suite. It has every right to veto/fire individual C-suite members who engage in grossly improper conduct. But it cannot and should not micromanage the C-suite’s management of the chain, or force new members onto the L1TF whom existing members don’t have a rapport with.

Issue 1: Loss of confidence in the L1TF

Although most of the L1TF’s membership (InonMan, Fragwuerdig, Ed, Vinh, LBA, junior devs) are excellent team members, productive coders, and are generally a public credit to the protocol, the L1TF has still lost the confidence of a growing segment of the community. What are the “legitimate reasons” for this?

1. Ed Kim is leaving the L1TF. Ed had by far the most trust of the community of anyone in the LUNC community. The L1TF without him is completely at the whim of the L1TF’s loudest, most toxic, and increasingly least trusted member: Zaradar.

2. Zaradar is obviously unfit to succeed Ed Kim as the ‘CEO’ of the LUNC community. Being a “CEO” of a public blockchain has many job requirements besides being a good coder. Ed Kim met these requirements. Zaradar does not.
   Those requirements include:

   1. Generally telling the truth, or being as truthful as possible within the political / public-perception constraints of that moment

   2. Being trusted by fellow team members

   3. Not resorting to backstabbing politics when he doesn’t get his way

   4. Engaging, as opposed to alienating, potential L1 partners and outside participants

   5. Maintaining focus around issues where community consensus is high, while avoiding issues where consensus is lacking

   6. Delivering on past promises before waving shiny new promises in front of the community

   7. Most importantly, being positive, not negative, to the price of the LUNC token.

3. Zaradar is the most expensive member of the team, the most negative value added, has repeatedly lied about material facts — and also controls the influencers around the chain to a degree that steers the community further down a direction that’s self-serving, aimless, and ultimately harmful to the chain.

   1. He’s been doing this for 9 months, and was a major player in a long series of grifts including the Neblio scam, the TR $150k (which Zaradar loudly and publicly supported, before he was unexpectedly rugged by his even-scummier colleagues — Vegas, Raider, ClanMudhorn, etc).

Zaradar needs to go.

At the same time, the team should present its own preferred candidate(s) to replace Zaradar. The community should not force the L1TF, who aside from Zaradar have served the community honorably, to work with people it doesn’t know or isn’t comfortable with.

The community should also consider splitting Zaradar’s compensation among other L1TF developers, if Zaradar doesn’t obviously need replacing. Aside from Zaradar, the developers of LUNC are not particularly well compensated, and their responsibility is enormous.

Issue 2: Individual line-items within the Q2 budget request

The Q2 scope of work comes across as engineering-jargon overload without painting a clear picture of how LUNC end-users benefit. LBA needs to explain how each bullet point is intended to add value, in 1-2 sentences.

Things that don’t deliver tangible end-user benefits, like “overhaul continuous-integration workflows,” are ‘filler’ that don’t belong on the list. Things like “finalize pre-release testing of XYZ” are not deliverables, they’re implementation details on the way to executing on a deliverable. They also should not be included on the Q2 scope of work - the scope of work is about delivering tangible benefits, not process-detail around how those tangible benefits are delivered. Things like “integrate FeeShare module from Juno,” otoh, are tangible deliverables (even if it wasn’t made clear how the community benefits from it).

Items in the later part of the roadmap are highly questionable. The ones that jump out to me most are:

• “Project Ziggy” - was widely derided by the broader DeFi community and is not workable. While L1TF individuals can assist it in their spare time if they please, the L1TF should not include it in their own scope of paid work until it has passed more serious scrutiny from DeFi professionals who know how stablecoins work.

• “L1 Dojo” stuff is either an irrelevant Zaradar pet project, or basic protocol documentation.

• The “two-year high-level roadmap” for Terra Classic is premature, and represents another opportunity to distract the community with bright shiny objects while the chain has very few dapps and remains broken in basic ways.

• The “community oversight committee” was a mistake. PFC_Validator, one of the most talented contributors of the LUNC community, quickly resigned due to conflict with Zaradar and was replaced by a grifter who rigged a vote and proceeded to dump his “LUNATICS token” on the most gullible corner of the community. StrathCole, another talented member, recently stepped back from it.

  • Oversight is not delegated to a cherry-picked subset of the community, it’s the whole community’s job.

One urgent item that wasn’t included in the Q2 scope of work was fixing LUNC’s cross-chain liquidity situation. Getting funds out of LUNC is virtually impossible outside of CEXs. Bridging via Osmosis is complicated and insanely expensive. The L1TF should re-integrate with a simple bridge like Axelar or PortalBridge/Wormhole, to ease user onboarding. In this respect, among others, the chain feels more broken today than it felt 9 months ago.

In summary, I think the Q2 budget proposal should be heavily amended. However, most of the L1TF has added significant value, especially InonMan who has been confronted with extremely unfortunate personal circumstances but who has nonetheless been a rock-star contributor. The best way to build on recent progress, while leaving behind drama, would be to drop Zaradar from the L1TF and reallocate his budget elsewhere.