No because as far as I am aware disclosing specific assets and holdings is not a legal requirement for a private organization. It’s not a requirement when it comes to for profit companies either, because those too are private organizations. You can see public info like yearly profits but not details about what specific assets they hold. It may be different with publicly traded companies, they are a different breed altogether but I haven’t had experience with those.
A swiss not-for-profit is obligated by law to provide detailed accounts and financial statements to a third-party swiss auditor and then to declare everything pertaining to tax to their canton’s fiscal authority. Any irregularities and they end up re-evaluated by the supervisory authority in Bern, fined and ultimately shut down.
That being said, a transparency report is a great common practice and even though we are not entitled to one, it would be a great move by Dfinity because it would address a lot of these concerns.
So I would also love to see a clear report on who has a big stake or role in the foundation. That said it’s only about a 6 and it won’t become a cause of mine anytime soon.
So I looked up the link to the swiss federation’s documents (which is only partially translatable) and opened all of the 15 pdf documents and found, besides Dominic, only 3 other names as signatories:
Waldburger, Cédric (board of trustees)
Niederer, Michael
Bochsler, Gian Alexander
my german is not good and i must admit to not having the time or inclination to go deeper, which would involve copying the text from each to a translator or figuring out batch pdf translation.
it doesn’t feel very transparent, but i couldn’t claim that it is deliberately opaque either. there do seem to be routes to follow for the willing journalist or researcher
Did a bit of digging. Cédric appears to be apart of Tomahawk. VC - a seed round investor in DSCVR on Jul 25, 2022 (another notable investor in this seed round is Polychain). Tomahawk appears to be based out of Zurich, CH.
Michael Niederer no longer appears to be a memeber of the Dfinity board. I found this link on google which appears to show network relations to dfinity. (Please note - I have no idea, nor can conclude the validity of this diagram. But very interesting nonetheless)
Per the above website, it appears our own Dominic Williams (ILU Dom) is the chair of the board
Gian also appears in the above infographic as a still standing board member. (as of the most recent publication on 20JUL22) Gian appears to be the Co-Founder of the ORIGYN Foundation.
It is not a requirement in North America, but in the EU privately held companies are required to publish annual revenue data and balance sheets provided they meet certain minimum criteria (over 50 employees, I think).
Yes, there was a bit of a musical chairs, it looks like, with Dominic Williams being the only constant presence. The latest change makes him, as far as I can tell, a sole signatory, but I am not sure what that means and if something is lost in translation.
I don’t think it is the most pressing issue either, but I find Dfinity’s reluctance to release relevant data instructive (and this involves not just the present thread but its history since mainnet launch). I have started to think of the IC as being controlled by a secretive organisation headed by an erratic leader invested with extraordinary power. However, great the tech, this is not the recipe for a successful decentralised public blockchain. I suspect that as the months and years roll on, the importance of transparency will rise from a 6 to an 8 or 9.
I am glad some eminent community members are pressing Dfinity to be more transparent. In a new thread on the Internet Computer Association, @justmythoughts asks the following questions:
What does the ICA actually do?
How are they managed?
Who is a part of the ICA and do they have a board and projects they are funding?
What overlap is there between the ICA and DFINITY?
What is the history of the ICA (how and why was it started, who started it)?
The first picture of a person on the ICA website is Chris Dixon from a16z. Is the ICA an investor shell organization?
What surprised me most about the post was that community members like @skilesare and @lastmjs have no clue what the ICA does. I have been wondering, given Dfinity’s silence, if there is a group of people who know these things which are not being revealed to the larger community for some reason.
It looks like everyone but an inner circle of Dfinity leaders is clueless about the structure and finances of organisations that received a massive share of ICP supply.
To reiterate my questions which have not been addressed by Dfinity despite assurances they would be:
Where is the list of all grants provided by the Dfinity Foundation?
What does Dfinity’s 5 year and 10 year decentralization roadmap look like?
What precisely are the Dfinity foundation’s fiat holdings?
Do any Dfinity leaders have stakes in dApps being built on the chain. If yes, which ones?
As a sidelight, I am watching the Treasury vote with interest, I have a feeling it will repeat a previously observed pattern. An independent Treasury would, of course, take a little power away from Dfinity and thus support decentralisation.
Community Award Program grants were never disclosed. Now it looks like the program has ended and “Special Projects” would seem to be the replacement. These are the programs I would be focusing on for transparency sake.
Thanks, @hshadab . I should have found that link, seems I can’t even search websites. If that is a comprehensive list, I am surprised. The total seems under 5 million USD. I would have expected a greater proportion of the 200 million to have been handed out in the 1.5 years since genesis to bootstrap adoption. Maybe the answer lies in the community reward program that @LightningLad91 mentioned.
About your second point, my question pertains more to the decentralization of Dfinity itself and control of the network rather than the nodes programme. The end goal of Dfinity, as with the builders of any public blockchain, should be to get to a point where Dfinity is no longer needed. Its main task now, in a sense, is to gradually render itself obsolete.
Ethereum’s philosophy of subtraction says it like this: “We attempt to subtract our power and resist the natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate power.”
Obviously, Dfinity is the lynchpin of the system right now and will continue to be so for the near future. But I hope it is planning for a time when it begins to subtract from itself. It is extremely difficult to hand over such a complex system to a community and yet if Dfinity in its present very centralised form stays in charge indefinitely, it will spell doom for the network. Of course founders will always think – We built this, we know what is best for it. There will always be rational sounding reasons for retaining control.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Dominic seems to be a technical genius but one that severely lacks humility.
Dom, if you’re listening, you built something great. There are obviously very smart minds working at DFinity, but it’s obvious that something is being hidden for whatever reason. Is it control? To be able to control the network with your massive voting power? Is there a reason why you refrain from answering any calls for transparency?
We, as a community can take the reigns and start driving adoption. After all, what good is a technical breakthrough if it just sits on some sketchy node providers’ computers doing nothing? Why waste this gift to mankind? Like seriously dude, just tell us what’s going on. People will believe you if you say you made mistakes. It’s ok to err- it’s human.
The only way I can see for DFinity to save themselves is to come clean, admit their mistakes with a touch of humility, and hold transparency to be one of their highest virtues. Until then, the masses will not trust the IC and I see it being little more than an experimental platform. It’s only a matter of time before others catch up. They have to move quickly if they want to stay relevant.
It shouldn’t have taken 2.5 months for someone to reply to you with those links. Someone from Dfinity should’ve done that within a reasonable time span
More transparency is sorely needed. The more you refrain from releasing basic information request the more conspiratorial people will get. At least if you can’t release the information, State the reasons.
Ironic innit? only goes to prove how much they care about transparency. IMO I don’t expect Dom himself to come and answer this. I’d respect his time - considering how much R&D goes into building IC.
I really appreciate his talks on Token 2049, that’s how I want to see IC presented to the crypto community.
A post on the IC reddit group asked about Dfinity’s financial status:
The very reasonable point made by the OP was they wanted to invest but needed to know if Dfinity could fund itself in the medium term. Strangely, the Dfinity team member’s response was a link to this thread, where of course there are no answers to be had.
Usually, something about these matters leaks if enough people know about it. Since even the most prominent community members outside Dfinity seem clueless about the foundation’s finances, it may be a closely guarded secret known to only three or four people. The question is, why would they choose to be so secretive? Maybe they do not want to reveal how much Dfinity profited from the high prices in the weeks after genesis for fear of angering investors who bought what they were selling.
I’m still curious about the kind of role and history of the foundation but, given its legal status, I would assume that a kind of freedom-of-information request would answer at least a couple of the questions floating around.
In nearby pages, I also found the guidance “Please indicate that your request is based on the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA). The request must contain sufficient information to enable the OAG to identify the official document requested.” and this contact.
Requests for access to files based on the Freedom of Information Act should be sent to:
Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland
Legal Services
Guisanplatz 1
CH-3003 Bern
rechtsdienst@ba.admin.ch
I suppose the next step would be to determine which legal documents pertain to the formation of a foundation of the type of ‘the Foundation’, which ones may contain information that is interesting and then to request a copy.
My prediction is that the findings would probably be rather bland, but it might be one route to bring more facts into the open.
First of all, the wait for a reply has no excuse. It is poor communication on our part. We see that. I explained what happened below:
The answer to most of these things is quite boring with perhaps only one juicy part.
I am not an expert by any means on this, but I will do my best and likely iterate/update as I learn more.
The Boring Stuff
No one has answered this thread for boring bureaucratic reasons. I myself report to R&D so I do not feel it is my place to reply. Same with Finance. Same with Legal. The task to reply was actually on the C-level’s desk, but it just has not crossed the “super important” threshold they use for their time. They actually brought it up a few times in their exec meetings and at each they agreed to pen a long, thoughtful reply, but it never made the cut off with more urgent priorities.
Yes there is a board. It really is no different than other Swiss foundation boards. Dom and Gian Bochsler are on the board. Why is it not on the website? They are both in the “leadership” tab of https://dfinity.org/. Is it obvious at first glance? No, I do not think so. I take blame here as the new manager of the website team.
Yes, the foundation has all the paperwork, meeting minutes, etc… of a Swiss non profit. Tbh, pretty boring stuff.
I think it’s very reasonable for my team to improve the website for these.
The “juicy” stuff
Here we get to the “juicy” or interesting stuff.
No, we at DFINITY have NOT published our runway and financing as of yet because it can be used maliciously. That being said:
I know it can sound silly, but we have been advised that since we are living in a world of highly-financed bad actors launching surreptitious attacks and FUD, we have been advised to hold off on financing info. Yes, I can see that makes the financing info even more mysterious… but I will leave you with this:
There are documented examples of people playing very very dirty against DFINITY. You can understand our reluctance to reveal too much given how some have attacked DFINITY in a bad actor manner. One could argue that it made us too defensive, and that is fair criticism.
Will this change? We 100% expect so… after all Ethereum foundation took years (after launch) to get where it is. Same with many crypto projects.
Quite honestly, I just rather keep working towards a world where DFINITY is not as important to the IC ecosystem, but my team can work on the “boring” stuff mentioned above.