This Week in DAOs - August 19, 2021
Decentralized Governance Hackathon Updates, Uniswap's Drama-Filled Proposal #7, $RARE Launches, and the FWB Dashboard
An exciting week in DAOs, yet again. Keep scrolling to get caught up on what you need to know.
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - August 19, 2021:
💰 $9.2 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 216,912 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 58,311 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,779 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 9,703 ballots cast on 80 different proposals 🗳️
👥 2,917 unique voters 👥
🌐 27 projects with active voters 🌐
✍️ 54 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Decentralized Governance Hackathon Kicks Off
The Decentralized Governance Hackathon has officially begun! Running through September 7th and co-sponsored by Boardroom, UMA, Snapshot, Compound, DAOhaus, Gnosis, and OpenLaw, the hackathon is focused on creating DAOs and scaling decentralized governance, DAO treasury and operations, and crypto-native orgs.
If you haven’t yet registered:
Here’s a Twitter thread with details on Boardroom’s prizes:
Rumor is that a grand prize for the project that best leverages multiple “governance legos” is going to be posted soon. Stay tuned!
Uniswap’s Drama-Filled Proposal #7
Uniswap’s seventh official governance vote started on August 13th and was supposed to conclude tomorrow, August 20th.
The proposal, if passed, would have granted $25m worth of $UNI to Flipside Crypto, a platform for “community enabled crypto analytics.” Flipside provides data visualization tools and create structured bounty programs on behalf of the crypto projects they work with to encourage individuals to provide “analytics needed to drive ecosystem engagement and growth.”
However, unlike Uniswap’s DeFi Education Fund proposal, which granted $20m worth of $UNI to a 501c4 that would liquidate the tokens in order to use the funds, Flipside’s proposal involved using “Uniswap’s own yield mechanisms to sustainably self-fund the program.” In other words, Flipside proposed “borrowing” $25m from the Uniswap treasury and funding their grant off of the yield generated on Uniswap.
Note: The very-detailed full proposal is definitely worth a read
Despite the proposal passing the Temperature and Consensus Check stages with nearly 100% support, there was much controversy when it came time for the official on-chain vote.
Those against the proposal included venture firm a16z, Flipside’s semi-competitor Dune Analytics, and Compound’s Robert Leshner:
Others were in support of the proposal, such as Cal Blockchain, Jesse Walden, Kenneth Ng, and Yearn’s Banteg:
Though, after he voted with his ~8m delegate $UNI, Walden seemed to have shifted his position:
After 121 votes, the proposal was neck-and neck:
So, Walden’s change of heart could have had lasting repercussions. However, it ended up not mattering, as the vote was canceled today, August 19th, at 18:36 UTC.
The reason for the vote’s cancellation was due to a bug discovered in a third party voting interface, which caused votes meant to be cast No to be sent to the Yes contract.
Getty Hill, a major DeFi contributor, was able to cancel the proposal due to the proposer falling below the 2.5m $UNI needed to make a governance proposal.
It is not yet known if/when this proposal will be re-proposed for a vote by $UNI token holders.
SuperRare Launches $RARE Curation Token
SuperRare, a NFT and digital art marketplace, has made strides towards decentralizing itself with the launch of the $RARE “curation token.”
Part of what the project is calling “SuperRare 2.0” is the creation of the SuperRare DAO, governed by $RARE token holders, which will be “tasked with overseeing SuperRare Spaces, the community treasury, and the platform’s future.” There will also be a “SuperRare Governance Council” comprised of “nominated community members that implement decisions based on the votes of $RARE token holders.”
SuperRare Spaces - “independently curated storefronts on SuperRare” - are the main aspect of SuperRare 2.0 from a product perspective.
“Each Space is overseen by a designated operator (or operators), chosen by a community vote of $RARE holders. Elected operators will choose and onboard their own artists, market as they see fit, and earn commissions on all sales through their Space.
The SuperRare DAO also earns an on-chain commission on sales from Spaces, giving token holders a direct incentive to pursue high quality curation of all Spaces added to the network. $RARE holders will be invited to vote on which spaces should go live next in a recurring vote. ” (Source)
For more on SuperRare 2.0, see their documentation here.
FWB’s Pulse Dashboard
A few weeks after they announced FWB Season 3, Friends with Benefits continues to pioneer the concept of a productive tokenized community with the release of their Pulse dashboard.
Offering a “real time view” of the FWB community, Pulse aggregates a bunch of relevant information for FWB members, such as the $FWB token price, the treasury holdings, upcoming events, and more. Plus it simply looks awesome.
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