I listened to the recording of the CBD Space from last Saturday. Part of what I’m writing here is as Executive Director of Regenesis Labs, part of it is as someone whose name came up in a public conversation. I didn’t even corrected my english using AI to not flatten my feelings and thoughts, so sorry for any mistakes.
First of all, I celebrate any conversation that moves discussions forward and challenges decisions and plans, as long as they are informed and respectful. I think some critical missing pieces of information were not there on Saturday.
The transaction dashboard (Metabeast Proposal)
When the Governance Core Unit stopped existing (long after the pause of the Grants program because we provided support for more than 3 months without any compensation), nobody took over maintenance of the governance platform. The codebase that handled the transparency dashboard just… sat there. Then some Alchemy and Covalent API changes happened, Snapshot started charging DAOs to use some of the voting strategies we were using, the script that summarized and calculated data to be displayed on the Transparency page broke. All in all, typical things that happen when a codebase is not maintained.
Fixing all this even before people started to realize was literally our first priority when Regenesis Labs started operating. It’s in the early monthly updates I published.
What Metabeast reported was in fact not working. When we fixed the scripts that generated the spreadsheet, the Transactions tab behaved differently because given the amount of rows that sheet was having, the script compiled all the transactions made in one year and stored that on the repo while showing only the YTD transactions on the spreadsheet. As soon as I saw the post, I tasked an engineer on the team to fix it. It took a couple of hours. The dashboard, the scripts, and the spreadsheet works now.
If you see something missing or off, the best move is to reach out directly. Discord, community spaces, this forum. I believe creating governance polls based on assumptions about someone’s intentionally hidden transactions creates noise without creating an efficient path to solve things.
The funds being held by former committee members
I want this to be unambiguous. The money sitting in those multisigs has nothing to do with Regenesis Labs. We don’t receive it. We don’t control it. What’s there is DAO treasury money being held without authorization.
But more importantly, not only money. This includes:
- Marketplace and curator fees (they continue profiting from every transaction)
- Land the DAO purchased (around 80 parcels)
- Access to official DAO accounts on Twitter and Discord
And yes, the over 500 ETH that are valued in over 1M USD at the moment
The committee was paid $28k per year to sign transactions occasionally for years. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that’s bad per se, if you have a big responsibility, you have to get some compensation. But because of that, I can now say that they failed their duty. They had one job, and failed. Rizk disappeared from the community since the DAO and the Foundation stopped paying him. He ragequit but with the keys with him.
If they care so much about the project that they are holding the assets from the looters, why don’t they state their stances publicly? Why didn’t they join a meeting or space or post on the Forum? Why don’t they return the LAND, the social media accounts, the Discord servers? Why does HP keep talking shit about the project he’s trying to protect in other project’s Discords?
What’s interesting is that in the past HP didn’t hesitate to sign the transaction moving 1M USD to Decentraland Games because the committee was just a proxy that had to execute what the community voted. And even though he was super angry at that time, he kept nurturing their personal relationship with DG founders. Not to say he’s currently listed as a collaborator on a project alongside one of the founders of Metaverse Architects. Yes, the project that also ripped off the DAO a few times. If you were wondering, he voted in favor of every governance proposal to restructure the DAO. His position only changed when the new structure left him outside the decision-making process and the payments ended. I would love to see Kyllian contributing to the project because I know he has knowledge and context but he alone decided to take the other path.
What Regenesis Labs is doing (and what we decided to inherit)
The mobile client and the Bevy client existed before us as Grant projects. True. But here’s what the situation actually looked like when I made the initial assessment: no product leadership, no production roadmap, a pretty weak engineering process (Don’t get me wrong, I’m talking about the processes, not the people, they are great) and a team of engineers with zero job security because their grants were ending and they weren’t sure what they were gonna do.
It’s not like we inherited the team. I worked with them first to understand if they were ready to switch gears from engineers getting paid to do a technical prototype to a team shipping something thinking of the end user.
Regenesis Labs gave that work a home. Structure, direction, and a clear strategy. The DAO Council as the Regenesis Labs board also gave me advice and direction on how to move forward that had an impact on the planned roadmap.
We hired an experienced Product Manager and Product Designer who are leading the team alongside the existing Engineering Manager. We pushed and supported the team to transition to AI-assisted coding more and more (last month’s release had 218 PRs made by a team of 4 engineers and a manager).
Regenesis Labs also improved the relationship between the team and Decentraland Foundation, allowed the team to have better and more fluid conversations, access to tooling and shared services, things that with the previous structure would not have been possible. That is the reason why we’re about to launch a product we can start promoting.
Regarding the Bevy client, it was a standalone desktop client when it was a grant. I’ve made the decision of asking the team to rework it for web and now we are reshaping the strategy because we’re seeing a lot of value as a tool for content creators and developers. It’s clear that none of the current Decentraland clients offers the flexibility and performance that other projects are getting out of using Three.js for example, and we believe that with Bevy, we can get closer to that. Our internal teams are using it when developing scenes and when working with agentic development and the results are being pretty solid.
About the status of the In-world Builder and the projects that haven’t started yet: that’s what priorities look like. You don’t do everything at once, especially with the size of our team.
I truly believe that having a no-code experience for building in DCL is critical if we want to onboard new users and I respect the work Lastraum does. That’s why I reached out to him and that’s why we invited him to participate in the first hackathon we did. We just have to make choices about what to work on first. It’s not that we don’t care about it. It’s that accessibility comes before no-code creation tools in our roadmap. Get people into DCL, then give them tools to build. That’s the order.
Even if we are working on tooling for developers and creators (we kickstarted the Authoritative Multiplayer Server that Foundation will be publishing soon, a fundamental building block for building multiplayer scenes; we are working on OpenDCL, an agent specialized in Decentraland scene development already used by some creators in the ecosystem; we built guidelines for creators to develop mobile friendly scenes; we added a mobile preview mode in the Creator Hub) we haven’t got to do everything yet.
About my role
I don’t owe anyone except the DAO Council an explanation of my compensation. But since I’ve been the one pushing for being as transparent as possible, and these conversations happen because of that, I’d like to say some things.
My hourly rate is lower than when I was the lead of the Governance Core Unit. At that time I led a team of 4 people, now I lead 15. Now I have the legal responsibility of the creation of Regenesis Labs as a legal entity, I personally sign contracts for contributors, I have a board that makes me accountable, I manage more funds than before.
My initial ask was higher than my current payment, below the market rate for a role like this for someone with my professional experience, but higher than I ended up getting. But that’s how you know the system works. I had to negotiate with the Council, I had to set up some objectives, and had to inform when plans change. We will get to discuss it again in case the operational budget gets renewed.
Autonomy and how DAOs actually work
More automation, less dependency on individuals. That’s what I’ve heard on the space on Saturday. Especially after seeing how the committee situation played out, I think it’s a great goal.
But let’s be realistic: fully autonomous execution without any human coordination is a hard problem. As far as I know, no other DAOs that are actually building something got to that point.
The previous grant program let the community vote autonomously. $14 million went out. What survived? Almost nothing. All the things that survived the last wave of grants survived because someone cared and stayed enough to improve it or at least keep the lights on.
Regenesis Labs is set up to execute or incubate community ideas. The door is open, I’m more than happy to jump in a call and bring someone on the team to have even more context. So far we haven’t gotten much in terms of concrete proposals, but I’m sure that will change in the short to mid-term.