I just posted a response on Discord to a request for feedback. Fits here too:
Like many old-timers, I often insist price is not the most important, but since DCG is the largest known regular seller of Dash, they put pressure on the price and should at the very least provide enough value to the network to offset price dips from budget sales because that money comes out of everyones' pockets. I understand how overall market trends can sweep up Dash. But having DCG should give us a competitive edge vs. other cryptos who have to rely on donations and corporate sponsors. Let's use the DASH/BTC, the DASH/BCH or the Dash/LTC rate (or any other direct competitor) as an approximation of over/underperformance. Across the board, the long-term trend is down.
Normally, at a truly decentralized project, it would be near impossible to blame anyone for it. But we have created a Dash Core Group, who, for all practical intents and purposes, acts as if it *is* Dash. Dash.org lists DCG as "the team". AFAIK, only DCG members represent themselves with a @dash.org email address. Ryan has been labeled "Dash CEO" in more articles than I care to remember.
So, for better or for worse, DCG will have to take a good chunk of responsibility. And its performance, at any corporate organization, would long have been grounds for replacing the management team. If you don't deliver, if you don't create value, you need to make room for someone or something who can.
We're not in a corporate world. You can't just launch a CEO search and bring in an "experienced executive" for something like Dash. In fact, we shouldn't even have a CEO. I'm so tired of explaining in various groups and forums that, yes, Dash is decentralized ... only to have stuff like this thrown at me:
But I also don't want to call for dissolving DCG and throw out the baby with the bath water. I think there are some very good reasons to have a degree of centralization. A well coordinated large-budget cross-channel marketing campaign, for example, is more effective than a few dozen scattered amateur attempts. And I really really do not want to end up in endless tug-of-wars and
chain splits like in BCH.
But we should not let DCG continue business as usual. For me, the string of failures is long, but the last quarterly call was the last straw.
These calls to me always have an air of a corporate puff piece. Everything is awesome and burning issues get swept under the rug. Except, those issues have become the elephant in the room and elephants don't fit under a rug any longer.
Economic transactions are up. Isn't it great? Not a word about the recent discovery that most of those transactions appear to be inorganic. Never mind Lightning Network, BCH, LTC - every competitor except BTC, which is at its limit - all grew much MUCH more YoY. If you're growing slower than the market, you're really falling behind. Ryan is calling it "That was quite a strong result there."
Platform is delayed. Again. Since 2018. If it had come out in 2018 as promised, even as an MVP, we could've wiped the floor with the whole market. Could've, would've, should've. Now it's going to be 2022, we have dropped off the radar of all but the most diehard fans,
investors lost interest, Dash, the payment coin, is being removed from payment processors with thousands of connected stores (e.g. CoinGate, Coinify), crypto user names already exist elsewhere (even if not as technically elegant) and there are countless new competitors - PoS and smart-contract coins, improved fiat payment systems and even CBDCs on the horizon. 2022. But if you didn't carefully study the slides, you wouldn't have known. The CTO, when talking through them, conveniently overlooked this for the community most pressing question.
Ah yes, the CTO. If it wasn't for the quarterly calls, you'd be excused for thinking we don't have one. AFAICT he distinguished himself mostly by his absence from the community. OK fine, not everyone is all social. If he had quietly delivered, nobody would say anything. But he had not. Under his tenure, we stumbled from one delay to another. And now he's throwing in the towel after sneaking in yet another one. What a farewell gift! Leaving Dash with his biggest project unfinished to run a startup. Did we learn that from the call? Nope. Not a word from Bob. No reasons or circumstances from Ryan. "
To pursue an excellent opportunity" was all we heard. What opportunity could be more excellent than revolutionizing the world of payments? It was Quantum Explorer, who shed some more light on it later on Discord. Now we're left wondering why a Dash C-level sees more potential in a dating app for a church(!), rather than finishing what we all think could be the biggest accomplishment of his career.
Time to find a permanent replacement and an orderly transition? None. Gone within 9 days after the call. Just like that. "We've known about it for a little while" says Ryan. Why haven't we, the community?
Arden is explaining the foundation she built for future marketing efforts. Great work, right? Back pats all around! For me, the key part was: "
When I came into DCG, I went to look for all of the data ... and unfortunately I had come into a situation where that foundation had not yet been built." For years we had a Chief Marketing Officer, an even higher title than Arden's, hinting at an even higher experience / performance level. What was he doing?? At the conference in Uster, I was with Fernando at a break-out group about affiliate marketing. He seemed helpless and in way over his head, asking the most basic questions. I remember wondering "THIS is our CMO??" How could this misappointment be allowed to persist for so long?
Now Ryan is talking about
institutional investors and is amazed how none of them know about Dash. Exciting opportunity identified! Yes, great, but why are we now learning that
DCG declined getting involved with this target group when approached earlier? And how could it get so far that we're so unknown?
"Oh, we had no marketing and biz dev budget! The bear market, y'know?" Hmm, but why didn't we? How could the core team miss out on the epic opportunity to fill a Scrooge McDuck-size war chest in 2017/18? "Uhmm, well, we didn't have the corporate setup for that" is usually the answer. You know what? I don't buy it. They did have budget proposals back then and if you have the setup to take funds from the treasury, you have the setup to keep funds from the treasury. Possibly I'm wrong here, but I haven't seen this explained conclusively and until I do, I'm going with "biggest management blunder in Dash's history".
We're still feeling the consequences today. An extra incentive fund had to be set up to help retain a key developer (and others in the future). The developer still left. "
after he left we had 2 devs in core team, we now have 5" says QE. With the core dev team down to a mere two at times, OF COURSE platform will be delayed. Why wasn't more focus put earlier on hiring and retention? Why did we never learn any of this? And the newly added three still have to prove their mettle; whether they can really replace Codablock and Dustinface remains to be seen. And again, it leaves the nagging question what drove those two guys to leave yards from the finish line? Was it really financial reasons only? Wouldn't a dev take pride in releasing a project he'd been working on for years? Could this hint at a lack of confidence that there ever will be a decent release? Or at low morale and dissatisfaction with DCG leadership?
I don't even want get into Andy's post. Suffice to say it would have deserved more attention than
a curt Q&A remark.
Bottom line: The concept of one monolithic DCG has shown to be ineffective. It follows
Niskanen's budget-maximizing model a bit too closely. And it leads to dying out of grassroots efforts.
I help mod the Telegram chat and if I had a duff for every time I heard "Dash must, the team should, ..." it'd be enough for a masternode. "Me? Why should *I* do anything? Dash has a paid team!" Night and day compared to, say, some BCH groups where there's a real can-do spirit and people just make things happen.
So what would I like to see?
First and foremost, more transparency. Brutal honesty, even if things aren't so rosy. No more puff pieces. Live call-in Q&A at the quarterly calls, not just prepared questions. I want to be able to probe into what was just presented.
Second, make the accounting more verifiable. I want to see how the numbers shown in the Q reports match up with the treasury payouts. How many Dash were received during the period? When, at which rate were how many Dash converted to USD? Fiat vs. Dash holdings today? Show me how supplementary funding requests (marketing, biz dev etc.) feed into the respective budgets and what those budgets are actually used for so that I can match it against promises in the proposals.
Then, the leadership. We have a COO too. Besides MC'ing the Q calls, what is he doing day to day? I have no idea. So I'll talk more about the CEO. I don't want to demonize Ryan. Many decisions were made in great uncertainty and it's easy for someone like me to come in with the benefit of hindsight and talk smack about everything. I can tell Ryan cares deeply about Dash. He is a good manager with impressive connections, who brought many good things to Dash - the trust, the DIF, I believe even CrayPay came through his initiative. He brought a professionalism to Dash that is lacking in most other crypto projects. I see his strengths mostly on the legal side, investor relations, business development.
Only DCG staff can tell how good he is as a people manager. To get an unfiltered view, I'd like the Trust Protectors to do a postmortem with the people who left DCG. There seem to be a lot, going back to Chuck Williams, who presented Evolution with great enthusiasm in 2017. High staff turnover is not a good sign.
What I can tell is that Ryan isn't the charismatic visionary with the ability to electrify people, the public face that I'd like Dash to have. He also doesn't have a track record building tech startups. I see those as contributing factors to Dash's inferior performance. Rapid iteration, delivering on a shoestring, test, measure, adapt - I don't think it's in Ryan's blood. "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries could be some inspiration. I also know that you can't hire such a person externally. The passion this requires has to be genuine, it has to come from within. I can't think of anyone else with the right skillset in the Dash universe currently. Perhaps the solution is not to put anyone on the pedestal as *the* CEO.
That leads to my final point. I've long struggled with the dilemma of centralized efficiency and direction vs. decentralized resilience and creativity. Now I just saw this forum post. I think that's a good idea. Have Ryan head up the business arm and have a techie (QE?) head up the development arm. Separate their funding (ideally still with only one accountant to minimize cost). Set measurable performance targets or
OKRs for any C-level or equivalent and make them public. Elevate the visibility of other teams, e.g. Incubator, Dash Next etc. to make it clear Dash is not = DCG.
In such scenario, would Dash be less attractive to institutional investors without one clear leader figure? Would developers, without direction by the business side, just develop things because they're cool, not because the market wants them? I'll leave that up for discussion.
