This Week in DAOs - August 12, 2021
Boardroom's Governance Scribe Program, DAOs React to Regulation, Curve's Institutionalized Bribery, and VectorDAO
DAOs don’t understand the concept of the “dog days of summer,” there’s plenty to catch up on. Keep scrolling to find out what you need to know about This Week in DAOs.
Reminder:
Sign up for the Decentralized Governance Hackathon co-sponsored by Boardroom, UMA, Snapshot, Compound, DAOhaus, Gnosis, and OpenLaw! If you’re not able to join yourselves, please share with anyone who you think may be interested.
Running from August 17th to September 7th, the Decentralized Governance Hackathon will focus on creating DAOs and scaling decentralized governance, DAO treasury and operations, and crypto-native orgs.
📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - August 12, 2021:
💰 $9.38 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 212,547 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 57,796 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,715 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 4981 ballots cast on 79 different proposals 🗳️
👥 2328 unique voters 👥
🌐 24 projects with active voters 🌐
✍️ 43 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
The Boardroom Governance Scribe Program
Yesterday, we started to roll out a program that we’re very excited about here at Boardroom: the Governance Scribe program.
Governance Scribes are individuals who will work for DAOs - and with each other - to help solve key problems that many DAOs are currently experiencing when it comes to their governance; specifically, the DAO information problem (i.e. the gargantuan task of staying current on the goings on of a DAO) and the onboarding problem (i.e. how to make it easier to onboard new users/token holders to a DAO’s governance).
The Governance Scribe program is a fantastic way to get involved in a DAO (and paid for contributions) for anyone who is looking to do so, especially if one is a governance enthusiast to begin with. Being a Governance Scribe would be a great thing for an aspiring delegate to do to ingratiate themselves in the governance of their DAO. Sound like you or someone you know?
DAOs React to Crypto’s Regulatory Situation
As readers of this newsletter surely are aware, the past couple of weeks in crypto have been dominated by news coming out of Washington, DC. The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which passed in the Senate earlier this week, included a shoddily-written “pay-for” targeted at crypto industry “brokers.” Though the supposed intention was to target centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Square, and others, the way the language was written could potentially lead to impossible-to-meet reporting requirements for software developers, protocols, miners, and DAOs.
Despite the best efforts of a handful of Senators - namely, Senators Wyden, Lummis, and Toomey - who proposed an amendment to change the language, as well as the entire crypto community which placed nearly 40,000 calls and emails (!) to their Senators to support the amendment, the ~2,700 page infrastructure bill was passed with the original language.
In light of this, we wanted to highlight some of the efforts by those in the DAO/crypto community to harden our collective defense against regulatory risk:
DeFi Education Fund
We’ve covered the DEF ad nauseum in this newsletter, but it’s time for a status update on the organization funded by the largest-ever, non-liquidity mining DAO treasury expenditure.
Last week, the DEF had two big announcements:
First, they hired Miller Whitehouse-Levine, formerly of the Blockchain Association, as their Policy Director.
Second, they launched DEF Rapid Grants, a program that will fund proposals ≤$50,000 that focus on: (1) policy-maker education, (2) thought leadership and academic research, (3) legal firepower, (4) messaging, (5) grassroots advocacy, and (6) DeFi best practices.
LeXpunK_DAO - Legal Activism DAO
The Yearn, Curve, and Lido Finance communities have spun up their own legal activism organization, in response to both the increased regulatory attention towards DeFi and the creation of the DeFi Education Fund. This week, YIP-63 passed unanimously to create LeXpunK_DAO, “dedicated to legal advocacy for yearn and other builder-centric DeFi communities.”
A key difference between LeXpunK_DAO and the DeFi Education Fund is that LeXpunK_DAO will be “governed by builders from contributing communities (including yearn) and practicing lawyers from the LeXpunK Army.”
For more on LeXpunK DAO and its origins, check out this great article in Decrypt.
HODLpac
*Disclosure (and rare use of the first person): I am the founder of HODLpac along with Kristin Smith from the Blockchain Association*
HODLpac was founded in 2020 with two motivations: (1) add a proper political fundraising operation to crypto’s policy advocacy toolbox and (2) experiment with creating a community-governed political action committee.
After attracting some donations from high-profile leaders in crypto, HODLpac donated $7,500 to ten different candidates in the 2020 election cycle. Those who donated and/or subscribed to HODLpac’s newsletter received HODLvote tokens (then on the Rinkeby test network to avoid gas fees), which were used in a Community Ballot to decide which candidates got donations. In a nod to experimentation with emerging crypto governance concepts, HODLpac’s community governance used quadratic voting to limit the power of larger donors in Community Ballots.
For the 2022 election cycle, HODLpac is building “Gitcoin for politics,” i.e. a donation application that will allow individuals to donate directly to any candidate they wish to support while having their donations matched via quadratic funding. HODLpac’s PAC funds will be the matching pool for HODLpac members.
GitcoinDAO, which was covered in this newsletter, also provides a great roadmap for HODLpac’s own progressive decentralization. Those who participate in Donation Rounds through HODLpac and/or donate to HODLpac’s matching pool, will be rewarded a new ERC-20 version of HODLvote tokens to use for the governance of HODLpac (such as the use of Super PAC funds and the parameters of donation matching).
For more on how it’ll work and the plans for HODLpac (including HODLscore, a repository of where candidates and legislators stand on crypto-related policy), check out HODLpac’s website, Docs, and Twitter page.
PartyPAC
Another cool, crypto-native political advocacy effort sprung up this past week with PartyPAC, which hosted an NFT auction to benefit Coin Center.
The NFT, named “HR 3684” after the infrastructure bill, raised 5.5 ETH (~$17,000) from 44 people via PartyBid.
Institutionalized Bribery on Curve
Curve, a decentralized automated market maker focused on stablecoins, holds a weekly governance vote to determine how of $CRV - its native token - rewards are allocated to its various liquidity pools.
This week, Andre Cronje of Yearn - which is closely-related to Curve - released bribe.crv.finance, a tool that “allows DeFi projects to bribe veCRV holders with token rewards in exchange for their votes.”
Institutionalized bribery is certainly a fascinating concept. It will be awesome to watch how this tool is used and how it affects Curve governance. We’ll be keeping an eye on it and we’ll definitely be writing about it again soon.
VectorDAO
The newly-launched VectorDAO describes themselves as “a collective of designers in crypto on a mission to accelerate the mainstream adoption of crypto protocols through design and investment.”
VectorDAO will “make it seamless for contributors to earn equity and tokens for their work. Being compensated in illiquid tokens can be risky so we protect our members by distributing the risks and upside of any one project by pooling these tokens into a portfolio shared by all our members.”
They’re currently accepting applications to join their collective, so if you’re a designer looking to earn crypto, check them out!
Stateless by Boardroom is a community-driven resource covering digital and distributed organizations and their governance. If you’re interested in contributing to Stateless, reply here or reach out to us on the Boardroom Discord.