This Week in DAOs - August 26, 2021
Aave Cross-Chain Governance, VCs Engage with DAO Governance, SwingDAO Launches, and the Gitcoin + Bankless DAO Worker Survey
Keep scrolling to get caught up on what you need to know from the past week in DAOs and their governance.
Reminders:
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - August 26, 2021:
💰 $8.89 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 219,778 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 58,779 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 5,837 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 2,858 ballots cast on 76 different proposals 🗳️
👥 1,781 unique voters 👥
🌐 27 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 49 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Aave Cross-Chain Governance
Just hours ago, Aave released a set of open source tools “to enable true cross-chain governance on Ethereum.” They also announced that they are open sourcing the main front-end interface to the Aave Protocol, allowing anyone to “build an alternative front-end with a different or enhanced user experience.”
Aave’s governance cross-chain bridges are a significant innovation for the Ethereum ecosystem, which is increasingly going multi-chain via networks like Polygon.
A vote to “test a cross-chain transaction workflow that would enable the Ethereum based smart contract for governance for the Aave Protocol (the ‘Aave Ethereum Governance’) to control the deployment of the Aave Protocol on Polygon (the ‘Aave Polygon market’),” is live now.
Polychain Chimes in on Compound Governance
Jacob Phillips, researcher at major crypto VC firm Polychain Capital, shared a report in the Compound governance forum entitled “COMP Summer Cleaning: Time to get organized.” In it, Phillips consolidates a list of issues with Compound governance and proposes some potential solutions.
In the ensuing discussion, several comments and suggestions have been made that are worth reading whether you’re specifically interested in Compound or simply decentralized governance in general. After all, Compound was one of the first DeFi projects to hand governance over to its community of token holders. There is much to learn from its experience.
a16z Delegate Disclosure
Another story related to crypto VC firms engaging with DAO governance popped up today when a16z released details around their governance rights delegation program.
As outlined in the second tweet of the above thread, these details include a16z’s:
Best practices for token delegation
Criteria for assessing delegates
Legal mechanics and template docs
Current delegate network
Ideas for future improvement
They even open-sourced their delegate engagement letter and their rubric for evaluating potential delegates.
SwingDAO
SwingDAO launched this week with an announcement that they are building a protocol that allows users to buy and sell votes. Following the recent release of bribe.crv.finance and Vitalik’s essay criticizing coin voting, Swing is striking at the heart of a hot topic in DAO governance these days: “coin voting reform [and] the need for transparency in currently existing — and unavoidable — bribing practices.”
Swing protocol is still in development but the blog post linked below outlines its preliminary model for “developing fluid voting markets on top of existing coin voting systems where users can sell their votes for DAI in order to extract value from their governance tokens.”
Bankless + Gitcoin Survey
If you read this newsletter, you know that DAOs underpin everything in crypto.
As such, as crypto continues to grow, more and more people find themselves working for DAOs.
GitcoinDAO and Bankless DAO teamed up to start mapping this new frontier of “work”. They released a survey, linked below, calling all DAO workers to “contribute to the discussion and help inform the ecosystem + hopefully help the ecosystem coordinate to create better infrastructure for ‘the internet of jobs’.”
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