This Week in DAOs - July 15, 2021
Boardroom's Platform Adds Gov Frameworks, Shapeshift Decentralizes, DeFi Education Fund Sells $UNI, VCs Pitch Sushiswap, & Delegate Disclosures.
The world of DAOs keeps getting busier and busier. Keep scrolling to get caught up.
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Also, check out what we’ve published this week:
📊 This Week’s Stats
Source: Boardroom Screener
Ecosystem Overview - July 15, 2021:
💰 $6.57 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 137,895 ballots 🗳️
👥 39,549 voters 👥
✍️ 5,346 proposals ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 3601 ballots cast on 47 different proposals 🗳️
👥 1626 unique voters 👥
🌐 15 projects with active voters 🌐
✍️ 35 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Boardroom Adds More Governance Frameworks
The Boardroom Governance portal, powered by Boardroom's API, is a governance framework-agnostic interface that provides DAOs and their members with the tools they need to make better decisions and accomplish their goals. No matter the governance framework DAOs elect to use, Boardroom's platform is designed to standardize common actions like voting and delegation and enable DAO members to easily participate in distributed governance.
That is why we are excited to announce that Boardroom now supports projects using Compound's Governor Alpha and Governor Bravo, among the most popular DAO governance frameworks in use today.
Instadapp, Gitcoin DAO, Fei Protocol, Inverse Finance, PoolTogether, Radicle, Indexed Finance, and Ampleforth are now live on Boardroom! And, any other project using Governor Alpha and Bravo (or a modified fork thereof) can now integrate with Boardroom - if that describes your project, join us on Discord to learn more.
Check out our announcement blog featuring a case study of Instadapp’s governance portal for more detail:
But wait, there’s more!
We’ve also added support for AAVE and other projects using a fork of AAVE’s V2 governance:
We’re excited to keep adding more projects as we continue on our mission to make governance more efficient and effective for cryptonetworks and DAOs. 🚀
Shapeshift Decentralizes
Shapeshift, a non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange and management platform, pulled off the biggest airdrop in history yesterday as it “begun dismantling its corporate structure, decentralizing governance to its customers via its FOX Token.”
$FOX token holders will now steer “the future of [Shapeshift’s"] product and brand by voting on and submitting proposals.”
And, guess what?! Boardroom is partnering with Shapeshift’s new DAO to help facilitate its governance.
$FOX holders can use Shapeshift’s governance portal integration to view proposals, vote, and delegate.
Shapeshift is also the first project to use Boardroom’s new Ideation feature built on Ceramic Network. Check it out live:
And stay tuned next week for more detail on Ideation…
VCs Pitching DAOs
If you haven’t yet listened, this week’s Stateless podcast episode with Kinjal Shah, investor at Blockchain Capital and co-founder of the Komorebi Collective, is packed with great content.
One of the topics covered, however, leads perfectly into another news story this week: how traditional venture capital can invest in and interact with DAOs. Kinjal made the case that there are a few ways VCs may be able to help DAOs: (1) they can be a long term partner with “diamond hands,” and (2) they can provide services such as token design, grants program administration, participating in governance, etc.
This week, we saw an example of this “in the wild” as Amy Wu from Lightspeed hopped in the SushiSwap governance forum to pitch the community on the firm’s participation in a planned strategic treasury diversification (similar to Index Coop’s, discussed last week in this newsletter).
The forum discussion in its entirety is a fascinating read (and features an interesting back-and-forth on using UMA range tokens). But, Amy’s post in particular shines light on the the way VCs envision working with cryptonetworks and DAOs.
DeFi Education Fund & Uniswap
Careful readers of this newsletter will remember when we said two weeks ago that “until further notice, this newsletter will no longer be discussing the DeFi Education Fund.”
Well, this is further notice because it’s back in the headlines and worth discussing!
On July 12th, the DeFi Education Fund sold half of its $UNI supply to fund its operations.
Many in the community did not respond well to this announcement.
A flurry of tweets criticized the move:
(Andre should subscribe to this newsletter…)
And other’s took to Uniswap’s governance forum in reaction:
“Demand for Transparency from DeFi Education Fund,” Chris Blec
“[Discussion] Should we request DeFi Education funds to be put in wallet controlled by governance with spend limit?,” UCLA Blockchain
And this satirical post “[proposal] Removal of established cranial follicles fund” from Cobie
As we’ve discussed, the DeFi Education Fund represents the largest DAO treasury expenditure (excluding liquidity mining programs) ever and, so far, the drama has not disappointed.
While regulatory engagement on behalf of DeFi is certainly a worthy cause, the organization’s operational structure and relationship to the UNI community will most likely continue to be a point of contention for many. Especially when contrasted with other programs funded by the Uniswap treasury:
Granted, DCInvestor voted no on the proposal throughout its Uniswap governance life cycle and those who oppose this were bound to continue to be vocal, while those who support it have fewer things to say.
Nonetheless, this whole situation is shaping up to be a valuable case study in DAO governance. We’ll almost certainly be discussing it more in the future, so stay tuned!
Delegate Disclosures
Delegation is becoming an increasingly important topic when it comes to scaling governance of cryptonetworks and DAOs. At Boardroom, we’ve built in this feature for projects that support it (and plan to provide more solutions in the future).
Indeed, one of the criticisms of the Uniswap’s DeFi Education Fund vote was that the votes required to pass it came from student clubs (Harvard, Penn, UCLA, and many more) that were delegated voting power from VCs.
The folks at LexDAO, a legal engineering guild, have proposed a model conflicts disclosure form for delegates to use to “disclose potential conflicts of interest and other relevant terms to prospective delegators.”
They’ve also drafted a form Token Delegation and Voting Policy:
As DAO governance scales, it is important to build out not only the “hard” technical infrastructure around DAO governance and concepts like delegating (a la Boardroom), but also the “soft” infrastructure like legal agreements and customs.
Kudos to LexDAO and others who are pushing this frontier forward.
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.