PIP-XX: Formalisation of Laita Labs as a Service Provider

Governance Proposals
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PIP-XX: Formalisation of Laita Labs as a Service Provider

Abstract:

Laita Labs has been one of the core drivers of growth and success for the Velora protocol since before the DAO itself existed. Since then, the DAO has developed to the point where multiple service providers are now executing different needs, such as Mimic Labs with fee conversion and @WakeUpLabs with distribution. The following proposal aims to establish the roles of Laita Labs as one of the service providers.

The main scope of this proposal is specifically to enable Laita Labs to continue our mission for development in marketing and protocol growth that has been evidenced in our recent Launch with Velora. By passing this proposal, Laita Labs will be able to better execute its mission to the DAO while maintaining full transparency on our contributions to the Protocol.

Goals & Review:

As an entity existing prior to the creation of ParaSwap DAO (now Velora DAO), Laita Labs has been working on the Velora protocol since its inception. Due to the longstanding relationship Laita Labs has with the protocol, there has often been confusion between the two entities, and the responsibilities the former has to deliver to the DAO. As we continue to onboard new service providers and governance participants, we believe that this confusion requires clarification going forward, and want to define our role more specifically.

Up until this point, Laita Labs has been providing the services free of charge despite being essential for the upkeep of the protocol. Our reasoning behind this decision came from our assessment that the DAO had not yet been developed enough to handle these matters, leading to a limited scope of discussion regarding this situation.

In this proposal, we aim to define how Laita Labs operates on Velora DAO in a manner similar to how WakeUp defined its broad roles in PIP 55 and Mimic in PIP-34. Just like these proposals helped establish the scope of each service provider and their roles, this PIP aims to put forward a scope of roles that Laita Labs can perform for the DAO.

As one of the most important contributors of the protocol, we want to delineate a strategy that allows us to continue providing our services to the DAO in a way that provides the much needed growth for the upcoming demands of Velora, which include additional marketing (as seen in the recent launch of Velora) as well as development of the protocol.

To summarise, our main goal is to define the role of Laita Labs within Velora DAO, and set forward a strategy to strengthen the marketing and development of the protocol

Means

To best define the roles we wish to offer as a Service Provider, we have divided each of them in separate categories:

Marketing Facilitation

As part of Projecto Miro’s implementation roadmap in PIP-56, a Marketing token allocation was outlined. Now that the initial marketing initiatives are underway, we are confident that a pure-token collaboration for marketing could compromise the long-term health of the DAO.Due to current market sentiment, deals purely in vested tokens are unfavorable, meaning that by using the new token allocation the efficient output is significantly reduced.

Our Marketing Facilitation allocation includes the services Laita Labs provides to coordinate and execute the marketing strategies that have been introduced since the rebrand of Velora. This can include collaboration with agencies, assistance with content creation, and brand support and outreach. Recent examples of our introduced Marketing Strategies include:

As seen by the success of the recent rebranding effort, we would like to continue these efforts going forward with the new brand, as they will help establish Velora as the leading intents-based trading platform.

Infrastructure and Developer Support

To ensure that Velora remains a competitive protocol with maximal efficiency and reliability, Laita Labs will perform core maintenance of different dependencies in the protocol, such as:

  • Maintenance of DexLib: DexLib is our integration library which permits DEXes to be integrated into our backend. With over 900 Pull Requests executed on the library, Laita Labs has an essential role in maintaining the integration process, core logic, open source tools and more. This integration maintenance system allows for fast integration of key liquidity sources, as well as troubleshooting and optimisation in case of faulty integrations.

  • Smart Contract Maintenance for Market and Delta Swaps, which includes the releases of new versions in the future.

  • Velora API Maintenance for both Market and Delta to assist with transaction building and query. The API requires a low latency, high accuracy code to be able to query the best sources and auctions as efficiently as possible for different partners. This particular work requires a high amount of engineering work, which will increase as the intents-centric part of the protocol continues to scale.

  • Provide transparency data and dashboards such as the Analytics and YTD dashboards, as well as Dune analytics integrations in dex_aggregator.trades. These help provide an open data point to analyse the performance of the protocol.

Outside of the maintenance of core protocol dependencies, Laita Labs supports end-users and key DAO infrastructure as well, defined with the following roles:

  • Partnerships and DevRel for the Velora protocol. This part of our operations assists with the existing partnerships. Additionally, it helps in securing volume growth through the onboard of, amongst others, new API integrators, new Agents and new liquidity sources for Velora Protocol and Delta
  • Customer support and troubleshooting: This includes our Help Center articles and Customer Support channels maintenance
  • Copyrighting of product features and use case articles, which helps with the communication of our product suite.
  • B2B assisted integrations of the Velora protocol, which assist multiple partners both prior, during and after the integration process with assistance and issue resolution.
  • New products and features research, development, innovation and implementation, including our most recent release, improvements in routing technology, Super Hooks development, and more intent-based use cases.
  • Maintaining the general operations and infrastructure of the Velora Protocol including, amongst others, payments, service providers coordination, and collaboration with the DAO.

DAO Facilitation and Dashboards

Laita Labs has been providing assistance on DAO onboarding, process and analytics. This includes coordination with some of the other key service providers in their services (eg SeedGov,.WakeUp and Mimic) as well as with Delegates to ensure alignment, transparency, and coordination. As such, we wish to continue serving this role of coordination and explanation.

In addition to this communication role, Laita has been responsible for the production of dashboards such as protocol, staking and revenue Metabase , as well as the ParaBoost calculator.

Additionally, this role also includes the responsibilities of maintenance of some of the key toolings needed for the DAO to function, such as Snapshot and the Forums, as well as using our Discord as a governance discussion tool (through eg. community calls).

——

Implementation Overview

As Laita Labs is already deeply integrated with the DAO, no additional mechanisms will be needed to implement these missions.

While the DAO can see from the previous five and a half years of work for the Protocol, there are various metrics that the DAO can track to ensure that Laita is providing the efforts outlined above. Some examples include:

  • DexLib maintenance and integrations: Pull requests · VeloraDEX/paraswap-dex-lib · GitHub
  • Service uptime (currently at over 99% uptime)
  • Release of Delta on new chains beyond Base and Ethereum.
  • Coordination and strategy efforts with the DAO and its respective councils and missions.
  • Continuation of Marketing Efforts, such as the ones previously mentioned above.

All major milestones - including the ones above and more- will be shared with the DAO routinely through a new periodic transparency report.

Time of Implementation:

As Laita Labs is already operating in Velora DAO, the only implementation change is the formalization. These changes will begin from the closest end-of-epoch after the proposal.

Budget:

This budget will only apply from the formalisation going forward, and covers partially some of the costs being defined in the ‘Means’ section.

Our proposed budget for the provision of these services is the following for the next twelve months:

  • 300,000 USD in ETH, invoiced after the proposal execution.
  • A per-epoch payment of $60k in USD to be invoiced from the per-epoch revenue generated to cover essential infrastructure costs for a period of one year, starting from proposal execution.

While this scope would still not fully cover the total expenses incurred by Laita Labs for these services, we believe this ask to be a fair initial request relative to the results that Laita Labs has been bringing to the protocol lately, as evidenced by the latest protocol revenue (Metabase)

The costs invoiced will be invoiced using Request Network.

Risk Assessment:

Laita Labs has demonstrated the long-term commitment to Velora with over 6 years of support to the product and $100B+ in generated volume up until this point, and we remain committed to the long-term success of the protocol. Using the conditions outlined in the budget section, we ensure that Laita Labs is able to grow the protocol even more effectively.

As part of our efforts to increase transparency to DAO participants, transparency reports will be provided to the DAO to increase communication of the latest milestones accomplished as a Service Provider. This will help communicate the progress Laita Lab has been making to grow the protocol over time.

As a final disclaimer, we would like to remind the DAO that Laita can ensure the best effort in achieving the best possible growth, but it cannot guarantee the success of the protocol, as this can depend on external factors outside of Laita’s control.

10 Likes
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We have seen the great work from Laita Labs and see no reason for some formalization of the agreement to not happen.

Some thoughts:

  • Laita Labs has already demonstrated strong alignment and commitment by providing significant contributions free of charge. Formalizing their role recognizes their longstanding support and dedication.
  • As a founding contributor, Laita Labs possesses extensive technical and operational expertise within the Velora ecosystem, making them uniquely qualified to efficiently manage and scale critical services.
  • A long-term partnership helps maintain stable operational quality, ensuring that essential tasks are performed consistently and effectively, minimizing disruptions or service outages.

A question we had regarding budget here is

Curious how this is different from “Additionally $60k USD/month to cover …”? Is this delineation just to show which budget, funds are being pulled from? Overall, the budget as a whole seems pretty reasonable for a core service provider.

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I would like to express my full support for the formal engagement of Laita Labs as a DAO service provider. Over the years Laita has delivered core value to the protocol, its maintenance, infrastructure, and least but not last a successful re-brand and upgrade to Velora. Bringing this relationship under a clearly defined mandate and budget can only strengthen transparency which I highly value and it feels like the right next step for a maturing DAO.

The proposed budget 300k USD in ETH plus a 60k USD monthly appears commensurate with the work described and its in my view less then that of other DAOs operations costs. A little mention and curiosity as the proposal itself notes that :

In this spirit, a high-level operating-cost breakdown (even if provided after ratification) would give DAO and community a clearer view of how these figures map to real expenditure.

With the minor clarification in mind, I am ready for the Snapshot vote, it feels easy and no other mentions required as the proposal is much in line with PIP-57, although to give community the mic to scrutinise I look forward to seeing some others feedback / approval and of course Laita’s continuous drive of Velora’s growth and technical excellence in the months ahead! :leopard: :paw_prints: :new_moon: :dizzy:

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Thank you @Laita for this proposal. We’re grateful for your continued commitment to the protocol and are very positive about the overall direction of Velora and the DAO. We’ve already been significantly involved in providing feedback to this proposal and have clearly expressed our thoughts on all the recent developments, so will keep it brief.

For transparency’s sake, our opinion was that if the DAO is now going to foot the bill for Laita, it should’ve had more to say on the recent changes. Either way, as we look ahead we expect stronger feedback loops between Laita and the DAO going forward.

That said, we believe with the new DAO structure and Growth Committee alignment and comms should flow much more seamlessly.

Clearly the Laita team must be paid for their work, and we’re hopeful that we all together can keep driving revenue higher. Still, with mounting costs for the DAO (delegate rewards, gov task force, growth committee, Laita etc), it’s something we need to be mindful about.

Our only question to Laita is: How come the monthly expense went up by 20% since our draft conversations took place?

2 Likes
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I see no reason to put back the proposal. Will support it. Velora will have a service provider with clear responsibility across important areas. Laita has already shown their value and of course, they should be paid.

Plus, clear roles and budget from the beginning matter, especially for future B2B relationships. A DAO needs to show transparent governance and a team in charge when working with serious partners.

I know Laita’s scope is quite broad, from marketing to infra and DAO support, so the budget sounds fair, no issue here :slight_smile:

Agree with @citizen42

Could we get a detailed breakdown of the costs involved? It would help delegates better understand how the budget will be allocated.

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At SEEDGov, we support this proposal.

In the interest of transparency, we inform the community that Laita shared an early draft of this proposal with us, and we provided feedback along the same lines as @citizen42 and @ignas, particularly regarding the importance of including some detail about the associated costs, among other points—some of which are now reflected in the final version.

That said, we believe Laita has done an excellent job leading the development of Velora, and it is entirely logical to formalize their role as a service provider to the DAO. This dynamic is also common in other DAOs, where labs and/or foundations are formally recognized as service providers and/or request funding from the DAO to continue driving protocol development — as seen, for example, in Uniswap or Everclear.

3 Likes
9

I support this proposal.

I also want to inform the community that I shared feedback on this proposal draft. It is good to see that some of them were taken into account, which only highlights the collaborative approach @Laita has with the DAO.

I want to take the opportunity to provide additional feedback and suggestions.

  • Is Laita available to change this to 150k upfront and the remaining as a stream over the engagement period? This is a common practice in DAO service providers’ relationships and would reduce the impact on the DAO’s treasury. We could also add a clause to review the stream after 6 months to kill it (paying the remainder) or let it continue as planned.
  • I assume this is a request for a marketing budget in stables or ETH. As others pointed out, a cost/budget breakdown would be beneficial for the DAO to understand how much is planned to be spent on marketing. I also believe that a native token allocation would give more firepower on market deals (as it is normal to have the payment as stables/ETH + native token to highlight alignment), and should be part of this request.

Thanks for the proposal!

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I would like to start by thanking all the contributors at @Laita who helped kickstart the protocol and continue with its development till today.

As I understand the core team did receive 17% of the PSP supply. Were these tokens used to subsidise any of the services in question?

Finally, would it be possible to understand if all the requested amount be purely allocated towards services mentioned in this proposal or will some of it be allocated elsewhere?

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Thank you to all delegates for the feedback that has been provided so far. We are glad to see that the sentiment is overall positive, and are happy to answer the additional questions you have shared to provide more context.

First, we would like to inform everyone of a small change that we have implemented for easier execution. To ensure clarity of proposal execution, we have changed the payment terms from monthly to a per-epoch basis. This is due to the two of them, while close, not aligning completely, with the end of some epoch being significantly earlier or later than the end of month.

In a similar vein to past service providers, such as PIP-62 PIP-23 and PIP-55, we specified our monthly budget in this way to explain this is an operational cost which will be drawn from the monthly revenue generated as opposed to the DAO treasury.

As many delegates are expressing the similar concerns , we wanted to further contextualise the current running costs. Due to the open nature of DAO forums, we cannot share confidential information or other expenses which could affect our competitive advantage. However, we can clarify that the current budget of the proposal would cover 20 to 40% of our current usage.

Due to the costs being significantly higher than the invoiced amount, it is difficult to match one-to-one where every dollar of this proposal would be going. However, just to provide a reference of the current costs, we can provide as an example that on the last year Laita Labs has spent:

  • 600k - 700k for audits: These include security audits for essential contract sets such as Augustus Contracts, as well as Delta contracts.
  • 600k - 700k for marketing: This category includes to creation of content, branding strategy, ads for the product, PR, creative services, and more services which assist with the marketing of the product

With this context in mind, the amount we have placed on the budget of this proposal would barely cover the needs stated above without counting for future growth, and still does not cover other expenses Laita Labs continues to provide and has outlined above, such as salaries, software development, legal , infrastructure and software subscriptions.

Finally, regarding the streaming suggestion, we are not familiar of any streaming solutions and none have been implemented by us so far in our DAO directly. Considering our 6 years of track record of the product development, we believe this would introduce significant operational risk and delays for little upside. We are happy to explore this solution in future proposals once these have been more thoroughly tested.

The amount you are referring to was not a payment made by the DAO, as this comes from the token distribution which predates the DAO itself. Additionally, this allocation was made in 2021, which since then we have continued providing additional services and have helped grow the protocol significantly since this date.

The following proposal aims to reduce the reliance of Laita Labs on PSP. With current market conditions, we think it’d be more strategic to cover part of the expenses using the revenue we are helping generate as opposed to using the token, which is why we are bringing forward this proposal.

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How the required money is combined with the income from Velora official swap UI, if any?
If the source for this money is the DAO Treasury, how it will reflect on stakers revenue? (it looks like significant decrease)
Is it necessary to vote before finalizing transition to a new token?

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Thanks for this post @Laita. You can add Proxy to the list of delegates who are supportive of moving forward. The ~17% of the PSP supply that was brought up earlier in the thread isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and it was allocated back in 2021 so we don’t see any reason to take it into account when considering formalizing the team as a service provider in 2025. Laita Labs has done a lot for the ecosystem and we’re happy to vote in favor of approving their requested budget.

2 Likes
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In line with most other delegates, we are in support of allocating DAO capital towards funding Laita.

But we’d like to add a further caveat to this statement. We see no reason not to support Laita since from an external perspective, we see the team executing on Velora’s development. However, it would be nice to gather a more detailed look into how this capital is meant to be used beyond the broad strokes auditing and marketing buckets mentioned above. This isn’t a matter of not trusting Laita—but simply a matter of principle, where the entity funding Laita should have increased purview as to how funds are meant to be utilized. The format of this can be debated, and there’s no need to conduct a line-by-line disclosure, just a general overview that goes a bit beyond two broad buckets. To obfuscate these financial details to a degree, it may be worth hosting office hours once in a while with the Laita team to gain insight as to how the funds are being used. Perhaps before this proposal goes to vote, we can have a quick roundtable between Laita and delegates that are a part of the compensation program? We’re open to ideas.

The other aspect that’s slightly unclear is how Laita intends to interface with the DAO going forward, given their existing financial situation.

Since the requested funding amount only covers a portion of total operating costs, how are the remaining costs currently being covered—solely via the original PSP allotment? Is the intention to increase Laita’s funding using protocol revenue in the future, making it the sole source of funding for Laita? This brings us to the final and perhaps more pressing question: why is the timing for this proposal now? The hunch is that it’s based on internal runway projections. It would be helpful to understand what the financial situation of Laita is generally at the moment so we can best understand how much the team needs and what the increase is funding requests could look like over time. The purpose of this question is not because we think the ask is too high—it’s because we want to understand if the Laita team is properly being given the resources they need to cover short to medium term liabilities so that Velora growth and development is optimally addressed.

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Hi @AranaDigital ,

We understand the greater degree of transparency needed for this proposal to pass, which is why we are committing to a periodic transparency platform where we share critical developments, including key integrations, important developments to the product, and partnerships Laita Labs has attained. A transparency update thread has just been published, and can be found here.

With these periodic releases, we believe that Delegates will be able to see the developments that Laita Labs does to keep the protocol growing, and as these are public will allow for a level of transparency and accountability that would be viable as opposed to sharing more potentially competitive information.

Regarding this point, we believe that there has been a misunderstanding of the point we were trying to share by showing these examples.

Our original proposal outlines in the ‘Means’ section a much more comprehensive overview of the services we wish to offer as a service provider. These include marketing facilitation (PR efforts, content, branding, etc.), Infrastructure and Developer Support (which includes Maintenance of DexLib, Smart Contract Maintenance, API, etc.) and DAO Facilitation + Dashboards.

Our examples of Audits and Marketing costs were shared in reply of the points raised to other delegates, wondering how much of the total costs this proposal could cover. The point being made in the proposal was not that this PIP will cover Audits and Marketing, but instead that the current budget would not cover the complete operating cost of even two of the major categories at the current stage.

Regarding this, we hope that the recent releases can help bring further context on the importance of expanding the product. Compared to just a few months ago, Laita Labs is committed to the growth of Velora in both a product and brand awareness level. This commitment is higher than ever before, partially thanks to our expanded feature set. Not only do we wish for people to recognise the new brand, but we are entering a new world of Intents and Cross-Chain trading that requires more development, research and partnerships than ever before.

Additionally, the DAO has attained a level of maturity and professionalisation previously not seen at any of its history. Now that different delegates and service providers help run the protocol, it is important to outline the resources needed to keep the protocol afloat, and this kind of healthy discussion is part of the reason we believe that now the timing is right. The following proposal is not a funding request, but instead, we aim to begin invoicing as a Core Service provider similar to other entities performing similar work for the DAO. As we are closely involved with Velora DAO, we are happy to answer further questions, but in a similar way that other service providers cannot answer where their invoiced fees go in different departments due to confidentiality and competitive reasons, we also have to perform similarly on this ask.

These two reasons combined have led to the decision to release this proposal now. Over time, in the spirit of effective decentralization, we hope that the role of Laita Labs becomes that of one Service Provider among many, all of which work in a collaborative manner with Velora DAO.

We hope this helps bring sufficient clarity to the proposal.

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We appreciate @Laita putting forward this detailed proposal to formalize your role within Velora DAO. As @citizen42 highlighted, your foundational contributions, from ongoing infrastructure maintenance to the recent Velora rebrand, have been critical, and we also agree with @SEEDGov’s observation that bringing core contributors under a clear mandate aligns Velora with best practices in mature DAOs.

We fully agree that transparency through routine reports is essential. At the same time, given Velora’s current phase and scale, we believe there’s no need to create an overly bureaucratic process that could hamper agility, or to requie very detailed plan. Preserving decentralization while applying balanced oversight will best serve the protocol’s growth today.

The 17 % PSP distribution was an early-stage equity-like upside for founding members and core contributors. Treating that allocation as a budget line would undermine their economic incentive to keep growing Velora; once that upside is diluted, they lose direct exposure to the protocol’s success. In our view, the allocation should remain off-limits when evaluating Laita’s operating budget.

We recognize that detailed line-item disclosures could jeopardize competitive advantages and thus it should not be shared. Still, this might be reframing @AranaDigital 's question, some clarity is needed on how Laita Labs has historically financed operations and how it expects to do so in the future. If non-DAO revenue streams continue to shoulder a large share of costs, the DAO must understand when and why that balance might shift; otherwise, it is hard to evaluate the scale and duration of future funding requests.

In short, we are supportive. Laita Labs’ long-standing commitment and proven execution make trusting them the obvious choice, and the requested amount strikes us as entirely reasonable. We are not seeking intrusive, line-item transparency; the high-level visibility described above is sufficient. If those points are clarified further, all the better, but even in the current form we are comfortable voting For this proposal.

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Hi @Tane , thank you for your answer.

Historically, most of our funding has come from raises and treasury reserves from prior to the DAO formation. In the future , we wish to maintain the growth of Velora as the main driver to support the operations of Laita Labs. We hope that this proposal formalising our position on the DAO will assist to signal a wider degree of maturity in our ecosystem and assist with the long-term outlook of the protocol.

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Following the discussions that have taken place with delegates, we want to formally enter the frozen period, and we will aim to post the proposal on snapshot shortly after that. Thanks everyone for the debate and we look forward to continue working with the DAO.

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Nothing new to add to the proposal, as other delegates have already raised great points.
I just wanted to share my appreciation for the transparency and the consistent updates in the relevant thread — they are very much appreciated. Previously, there was little perspective on what Laita Labs had been doing behind the scenes, especially in marketing and growth. Now, with more visibility, the Growth Committee can better align its efforts with Laita Labs, and delegates can gain a clearer perspective as well.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge the dedication of the Laita Labs team over the past six years. Looking forward!

2 Likes