🗳 This Week in Governance - August 25
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
📣 What You Need to Know
Governance Activity This Week:
🗳️ 17,928 ballots (🔻 26%) | 📜 164 proposals (🔻 10%) | 👥 8,697 voters (🔻 34%) | 🌐 46 active DAOs (🔻 8%)
This week: Some DAOs call it quits while others look to revamp, Airdrop launches continue, More DAO tooling is announced, Liquidity is a real concern at some protocols, and much more.
Let’s dive in 👇
🎤🦙 Breakdown: Llama
We sat down with delegate superteam Llama to discuss their governance history, delegate values, and much more. Listen to the podcast below.
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Tribe DAO looks for the exit
Fei Labs, creators of Fei Protocol and FEI stablecoin, published a proposal on August 19th detailing plans to wind down Tribe DAO. Tribe DAO was created in December of 2021 when Fei Protocol and Rari Capital joined forces in the largest DeFi merger. In late April, the Rari Fuse pools were hacked and drained in excess of $80m. The hack victims included other DeFi protocols and retail investors. Frax Finance lost $13m and OlympusDAO lost $9m. Following the hack, a snapshot vote was posted and passed that outlined plans to repay and make whole all hack victims.
After over a month of waiting, an on-chain vote was finally held to confirm the previous snapshot vote. However, this time, ‘against’ votes prevailed supported in large part by the Fei team. Now, this recent proposal from Fei Labs only outlines preferential distribution to TRIBE holders and severely limits repayment to the hack victims. Controversy and heated discussions have ensued on the best path forward to properly make hack victims whole. Also as a result of this proposal, a number of affected DeFi protocols have introduced their own proposals to help victims or remove risk as Tribe DAO winds down. A snapshot vote is live that explores different paths to consolidate Tribe’s assets. The dissolving of a DAO is happening in real-time. Creditors or in this case tokenholders, may or may not be fully repaid. Look for an on-chain vote in the next month or two.
SAFE Airdrop Confirmed
SafeDAO, the spinoff DAO of Gnosis, has proposed a token airdrop for its early adopters. On August 18th, the proposal was introduced detailing plans to distribute 5% of the total supply of SAFE tokens to users. The airdrop looks to further decentralize the project, reward usage of the protocol, raise awareness, and provide ownership and governance rights to its community. Around 22,000 wallets currently qualify for the airdrop. Safe’s multisig product is widely adopted and used by various DAOs and organizations across the ecosystem.
Liquidity Crisis at BendDAO
BendDAO is a collateralized lending protocol that provides NFT lending and borrowing. The DAO proposed emergency parameter changes after suffering from a sudden liquidity crisis. The nature of illiquid NFT assets in a bear market and existing poor protocol parameters prompted the crisis to unravel. The community quickly drafted an emergency governance proposal to help stop the bleeding. Now, a new proposal is live that looks to improve on the previous proposal and hopefully keep the protocol afloat.
📚 Good Reads & Listens
“An Exploration of Internet-Native Organizations” by Scott Moore & Maxwell Kanter
“Efficient DAO Design” by 0xJustice
“Tokens are Products” by Jesse Walden
“The Plight of Governance Tokens” by Gwart
“Understanding Voter Fatigue” by atareh.eth
“3 Lessons You Can Learn From JokeDAO” from Coinvise
“Guild: Building the Infrastructure Layer for Online Communities” w/ Reka on DAOn the RabbitHole Podcast
“GovernorDAO w/ Jon Greenwood & Zane Huffman” on The Green Pill Podcast
“Endgame Plan V3” by Rune Christensen
“The Gitcoin Hyperstructure” by Kevin Owocki
📜 Highlighted Proposals
🏙 CityDAO: The Network City
This ambitious proposal is meant to initiate the realization of a real-life “Network City” that uses Web3 community governance. It is inspired by the development of Marfa, Texas and the ideas of Glen Weyl, and will make use of Partial Common Ownership, Quadratic Voting, and Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding approach. The focus will be on the creation of “positive-sum feedback loops that catalyze organic economic growth.” As stated in the full, nine-page proposal:
“These systems provide the incentives necessary to create an equilibrium between cooperation and competition that will maximize the productive, fair and efficient allocation of capital and resources. Ultimately, we are creating the foundation of CityDAO’s future: an economic engine, situated in the real world, for Teams and Citizens to experiment, collaborate, compete, develop their ideas, and build.”
✅ 95.93% voting to approve
💬 See the discussion
🥧 PieDAO: Implement front-end sanctions screening
Following the sanctioning of Tornado Cash by Treasury’s OFAC, PieDAO’s front-end provider Dexlab can no longer provide its hosting service unless specific sanctions-screening measures are put in place. This proposal asks the DAO to vote on whether the PieDAO front-end should implement sanction-screening measures (and thereby provide “the best UX to PieDAO applications”) or whether it should not implement those sanction-screening measures.
“By not implementing any sanctions screening measures, PieDAO will have to fully rely on Community self-organized measures aimed at providing self-hosted frontends for all PieDAO applications.”
❌ 50.36% voting against sanctions screening
💬 See the discussion
👻 Aave DAO: Stance on Ethereum POW Fork
This proposal asks the DAO to signal its full support for Ethereum’s upcoming mainnet shift from proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS) consensus — over against any alternative fork that might form. AAVE will be fully functional after the consensus change, as shown through extensive testing; and there is general agreement among the builders of the protocol that it is “effectively impossible to sustain a viable Aave Market on any Ethereum fork running an alternative consensus.”
“The Aave protocol is one of the largest DeFi applications in the world…and is an essential piece of infrastructure powering hundreds of other dApps and experiences in the DeFi ecosystem. The DAO should send a clear signal to the DeFi ecosystem about where it stands with respect to the Ethereum merge.”
✅ 99.9% voting for
💬 See the discussion
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For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, browse our Governance API - 🚀 This above link can be used to make requests against the API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!