Iāve formulated a theory regarding the above, but itās unsubstantiated at the moment. Can this be confirmed or refuted by anyone?
I suspect there wasnāt sufficient uptake in terms of buyers for nodes that needed shedding, leaving NPs that needed to shed those nodes with the option of either dropping the price, or establishing a hire-purchase agreement. A hire-purchase agreement complicates the ownership of nodes, which would call into question the āindependenceā of the NPs. A non-disclosure agreement avoids these details being shared, so that it canāt become a point of contention which might have caused the related proposals to be rejected by the community.
I personally wouldnāt see a big problem with this, as itās a practical step in the right direction for decentralisation. I think the problem comes with attempting to hide it. In my opinion this is a best-case scenario, but there are worse scenarios (some that fall under the category of āasset protection/shieldingā). Given this, the presence of a non-disclosure agreement itself (or no comment) should have been reason enough to reject these proposals (in my opinion).
While thereās still uncertainty about what these non-disclosure (and/or no comment) cases are about, I would suggest that the donor NPs and recipient NPs should be considered to belong to āclustersā (and should not reside within the same subnet). If I donāt hear objections, Iāll update my tooling to take this into account, which will inform the way that I vote. This of course largely undoes the point of transferring the nodes away from the donor NP - so I think transparency and clarity are by far preferable (Iām not sure how many times this needs to be requested though).
As a side note, Iāve gone through the Declaration of Independence statement for each of the recent transfers, and the wording thatās used is not standardised. Some are short ā
Both Existing Node Provider and New Node Provider declare that they do not have any
majority control in each otherās operations.
Some are longer ā
Both Existing Node Provider and New Node Providers declare that they do not have any majority control in each otherās operations, financial interests, or governance decisions. Each party operates independently, with no undue influence or control over the otherās activities.
Questions
- If the donor doesnāt have majority control what sort of control do they have?
- Why was there a deliberate choice not to word this as ādo not have any controlā?
- What would constitute due influence (as opposed to the undue influence)?
Someone was responsible for this template wording. Given that this is being used in formal review documents, I think the reasoning for this wording should be elaborated and understood by the community a little better (such as the reviewers who are voting on these proposals and asking the community to follow their votes). Related discussion from a little way back.