🗳 This Week in Governance - August 4

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

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Aug 4

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Governance Activity - Last 7 Days

🗳️ 35,591 ballots | 📜 165 proposals | 👥 9,542 voters | 🌐 48 Active DAOs

📣 What You Need to Know

This week we saw: DAOs fundraising and coordinating during budgeting season, more stablecoins on the way, new DeFi protocols launching, governance superteams forming, Nouns experimenting with novel governance systems, and much more.

Let’s get into it 👀

🗞️ DAO News in Brief

GHO is greenlit

Aave continues pushing through its GHO stablecoin plans with no signs of stopping. The community passed the first of three proposals needed to launch GHO. The proposal had no trouble passing with an overwhelming 99.9% ‘Yae’ votes. The DAO will next look to vote on a genesis parameters proposal for GHO sometime next week with an AIP on-chain vote to follow if successful.

Dragonfly leads Debt DAO raise

Debt DAO announces a $3.6M seed raise from Dragonfly Capital, GSR, and other investors. The DAO self describes itself as the “Pipe for Crypto” and the one-stop shop for crypto native credit. Debt DAO previously facilitated the first DeFi debt financing round for Redacted, the Metagovernance protocol.

Budgeting Season at Gitcoin DAO

It’s budget season for DAOs, including Gitcoin. The 6 workstreams at Gitcoin DAO have begun drafting their budget proposals for Season 15. These workstreams include DAO Ops, Moonshot Collective, Gitcoin Product Collective, Public Goods Funding, Fraud Detection & Defense, and Memes, Merch & Marketing. The proposals look to fund the different teams over the course of the next 90 days. Look for amendments, approval, and ratification to follow.

Governance House and Llama team up

The two governance teams make it official. Governance House and Llama are merging core teams to form a governance superteam. The teams have stewarded and worked closely with numerous protocols and DAOs such as Aave, Uniswap, dYdX, TribeDAO, just to name a few. The team specializes in protocol engineering, treasury allocations, and analytics and will look to help further shape their partner protocols.

Interest Protocol prepares for launch

The DeFi protocol inches closer to full launch with an update from GFX Labs, the team behind the new protocol. The update outlines the protocols upcoming IPT token sale, capped collateral token functions, and its usage of optimistic governance for its governance process. The protocol looks to be “the first fractional reserve banking protocol on Ethereum that pays interests to all depositors.”

📚 Good Reads & Listens

“Go Fork Yourself” by Packy McCormick, David Phelps & Luca Prosperi
“DAO governance attacks, and how to avoid them” from a16z
“Business-Governance Fit” from Haun Ventures
An Optimism Governance Delegate Data Dashboard from Flipside
“The Great NounsDAO Experiment” on I Pledge Allegiance Podcast
“Nouns DAO: Organically Dilutive Governance in Motion” by Luca Prosperi
The Nounders | Nouns DAO Series Ep 1 & Ep 2
How DAOs Can Avoid the Tyranny of Informal Structure from PeopleDAO
“How to fix DeFi tokens" w/ Hasu on Bankless Podcast
7 types of on-chain governance a thread by David Phelps
“Sufficient Decentralization: A Playbook for web3 Builders and Lawyers” from Variant Fund
“Democracy as a Design Space w/ Nathan Schneider” on The Blockchain Socialist Podcast
ApeCoin DAO explores delegation

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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🏴 BanklessDAO: Season 5 Specification

View the proposal

As with previous season specs (described here), this one provides details on changes for the upcoming season, which runs from August 8 through October 30, 2022. Importantly, however, if this proposal passes the Governance Solutions Engineers will have the ability to implement the BanklessDAO Constitution & Community Handbook, which includes a new improvement proposal process/template (bDIP).

96.09% voted to approve
See the discussion

⌐◨-◨ Nouns: Mandated Rounds: Nouns Governance

View the proposal

This Nouns proposal, which follows a highly successful first “mandated round,” is a call for proposals from the wider community to improve the Nouns governance client – based in part on the results of the Nouns Governance Survey. Any team can submit proposals to be one of five teams funded at 20 ETH each to create promising alternatives to what currently exists.

“While our classic nouns.wtf/vote gets the job done, there is a lot more to explore regarding Nouns governance.”

98.04 voted for
See the discussion

💎 SuperRare: Formalize the relationship between SuperRare Labs Inc. and the RareDAO Foundation

View the proposal

With this proposal, SuperRare Labs (the company that founded SuperRare) and the RareDAO (an independent nonprofit created to support the SuperRare DAO) seek approval to formalize their relationship through a year-long, renewable contract so that a sustainable funding mechanism can be created for the latter. Details on the relationship and the funding are spelled out with thoroughness and clarity in the proposal posted in the forum.

“The SuperRare DAO is in need of competitive development from sophisticated parties ready and willing to add value to its ecosystem and contribute further to its decentralization.”