Although we had originally cast a vote of NAY, after extensive internal deliberation and discussion with the team, we have decided to move to a position of ABSTAIN.

As enterprise grade infrastructure providers who have a good deal of experience in the decentralized storage domain (including Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus and other major protocols), we would like to both share the following feedback with the Eiger team and broader Polkadot community and offer some rationale for the change of our vote:

Firstly, we believe that it is important to handle in-process milestone-based treasury proposals (especially those proposing a common good) with some deference to prior governance approvals, regardless of our position as a current DV. While this does not mean that all proposals should become automatic “AYES”, we do believe it is appropriate for us to shift our starting bias toward “ABSTAIN” in this context.

As to the proposal itself:

On the “AYE” side, we very much believe that there is significant value in an integrated storage primitive for Polkadot, and we value the time, attention, and effort that has been put into this endeavor by the Eiger team. The team clearly consists of professionals who have worked with a number of notable blockchain ecosystems, and they have done their due diligence both with respect to Polkadot and providing some granular visibility as to their progress. Additionally, we commend their efforts for working alongside the Web3 Foundation through an original grant that studied the feasibility of this initiative. We recognize that this will be a needed public good in the future, especially once JAM fully emerges and starts to gain traction. There will be a clear need for storing data that can be accessed by users, builders, and the dApps themselves in order to allow the system to flourish with high performance.

On the NAY side, there were a few aspects of this proposal that we could not overlook and why we could not unconditionally endorse the referendum in its current state. Our team questions the choice of modeling much of the architecture after Filecoin, a decentralized storage protocol that has a number of well-researched challenges when it comes to data retrieval in particular. Several of our team members noted that given these infirmities (for example, Filecoin still struggles to find a true business case) the proposal is closer to a research initiative, with limited direct visibility to a meaningful ROI. We also note that the individual cost for FTEs supporting this proposal is built upon $25K per developer/month. While this is an appropriate cost in our view for senior blockchain developers, it is excessive for such functions as protocol research, general development or administrative support. We would ideally like to see proposals such as this one offer greater audit visibility into the actual hours spent on the project by functional discipline and category of developer experience.

Overall, we believe that chain-integrated storage is a very worthwhile pursuit for the Polkadot ecosystem and in the event that this proposal does not pass, we would welcome an alternative proposal from the Eiger team that directly targets an initial use case for their proposed storage system. Ideally, we would like to see a more Polkadot-bespoke storage primitive that will address the particular needs of JAM, while also providing similar cutting edge tech rather than relying on old archetypes for decentralized storage that still struggle to find product market fit.

ChaosDAO would like to provide the following feedback from our community. We offer this feedback voluntarily in the spirit of OpenGov, in order to help teams improve their proposals so we can all build the network together.

1. Some members expressed concerns about the project's high cost
2. Some members pointed out that the proposal lacked clarity on the overall cost and long-term utility of the project
3. Some members question whether the project adds any extra functionality to Polkadot, since working alternatives like Crust and Filecoin already exist. Some members however noted differences between the proposed project and existing solutions like Crust
4. Some members will like some technical validation regarding whether the proposed storage system is practical or beneficial.
5. Some members expressed skepticism about the project's staffing and cost structure.

ChaosDAO votes as a collective based on the results of our anonymous internal voting procedures. Our members are not required to provide any feedback about why they have voted in a particular direction. Similarly, to respect our members' right to anonymity, we will not be sharing the names of individuals who have chosen to voluntarily provide feedback. You can find out more about how we vote and how to get in contact with us here: https://x.com/ChaosDAO/status/1762986093316587995.