This Week in DAOs - June 24, 2021
Boardroom User Dashboard, the DeFi Education Fund, a Rari "Franchisee DAO", and more
The DAO space doesn’t take time off and this week proves it. Keep scrolling to get caught up.
If you want to get involved in Stateless - a community-driven resource covering digital and distributed organizations and their governance - or are interested in learning more about Boardroom, reply here or join our Discord. We’d love to hear from you.
Check out what we’ve published this week:
📰 This Week’s News
Boardroom Launches User Dashboards
Over the last few weeks, the Boardroom Portal has been upgraded to include a:
Multisafe integration to bring transparency, access, and readability to DAO treasuries on Boardroom’s Governance Portal, and
DAO Screener showcasing high-level ecosystem and project-specific governance data, including treasury balances, proposals, ballots, and voter stats.
We’re excited to announce our latest product feature: the Boardroom User Dashboard.
The Dashboard is designed to give individual users a home base to interact with DAO governance. Features include:
A Proposals feed that displays governance proposals, sortable by Active, Closed, and Pending.
A Vote History modal that displays a user’s past votes given their connected wallet
A Calendar feature that showcases upcoming votes and community events.
A Learn section with links to Stateless content and more.
Like the DAO Screener last week, today’s release is the first iteration of the Boardroom Dashboard. We will continue to roll out new features as we build tools to empower DAOs and their members to be more transparent, efficient, and effective.
To that end, we want to hear from you! Have feedback? Ideas for what we should do next? Join our Discord, or reply here, and tell us!
UNI’s DeFi Education Fund Vote
We’ve been paying close attention to Uniswap’s historic governance proposal to grant 1 million UNI tokens to a political and regulatory-focused 501(c)4. Not only would it represent the largest DAO treasury distribution (excluding liquidity incentive programs) ever made but it would also be an extraordinary example of DAOs adapting to interface with legacy institutions.
Well, after a false start last week due to Uniswap upgrading their governor alpha contract, the official governance proposal is now live. Proposed by Harvard Law Blockchain and Fintech Club, the proposal would establish the DeFi Education Fund - “a 501(c)(4) nonprofit entity based in the United States to provide grants for political, educational, and legal engagement.”
There have been a few changes made to the proposal as it’s progressed through Uniswap governance’s Temperature Check and Consensus Check phases.
First, the name of the proposed organization was changed from the DeFi Political Defense fund to the DeFi Education Fund in response to criticism that the first iteration was too adversarial.
Second, also in response to a common critique of the original proposal - namely, that there was insufficient DAO oversight of funds after the initial treasury grant - the official proposal includes plans to use Tally’s Failsafe tool. As described in the proposal:
“Failsafe is an additional safety mechanism built on top of the multisig wallet that allows Uniswap tokenholders to (i) stop any multisig transaction from taking place, and (ii) request funds sitting in the multisig to be sent back to Uniswap’s treasury.”
That the proposers have incorporated community feedback is undoubtedly positive and a great example of how the distributed governance procedures being developed by DAOs can be effective.
However, there are still some vocal opponents to the proposal. Chris Blec of DeFiWatch sent a letter (which was posted in the governance forum here) objecting to several aspects of the proposal, including the concentrated voting power that has pushed the proposal forward to date.
As of now, there are just over 25 million Yes votes, which is 15 million shy of the 40 million required for the proposal’s passage.
Rari Capital’s Franchise Deal
Last month, we wrote about Rari Capital’s admirable handling of their Ethereum Pool hack as an example of both the messy reality of distributed organizations as well as how to maintain legitimacy (a la Vitalik Buterin) during challenging situations.
This week, Rari is the source of another story from the world of DAOs worth highlighting and this time it is a much more positive circumstance.
There is currently a proposal in the Rari governance forum to create, effectively, a franchisee DAO - a “clone-chain” - on Polygon called Rake Capital. Jai Bhavnani of Rari characterized it in a forum comment as a “blessed fork.”
How it would work is the following: the Rake Capital team would replicate Rari on Polygon and distribute 50% of its $RAKE token to the Rari Capital DAO.
The proposal has not yet gone to vote but there is seemingly support for the idea from the core Rari team and others.
Yet another cool example of DAO-to-DAO business development that we will almost certainly continue to see more of.
Yearn’s yTeams Announced
Stateless Podcast Episode #6 featured Tracheopteryx of Yearn discussing “governance 2.0” and yTeams. Enabled by YIP-61, yTeams are “small, autonomous groups of yearn contributors empowered by YFI holders to act independently in the best interest of yearn within a constrained domain of action and with enumerated, discrete decision-making powers.”
There are currently 9 yTeams within Yearn: yBrain which “manages strategies”; yBudget which “sets budgets”; yChad which controls the main Yearn multi-sig wallet; yDev which defines and manages the Yearn protocol; yFarm which controls Yearn’s Farm Treasury; yGuard which has “emergency powers”; yOps which ratifies yTeam signers; yPeople which handles operations and compensation; and yTx which delegates transactions.
Earlier this week, it was announced that an initial set of yTeam signers have been selected by “rough social consensus” by each yTeam.
Yearn continues to be a must-watch proving ground for DAO operations and management ideas. Time will tell if this unique structure will be copied by other organizations.
Instadapp’s DAO Holds Inaugural Governance Vote
Instadapp, a decentralized finance portal that aggregates access to major protocols for its users, is embarking on its own progressive decentralization journey.
Last week, Instadapp announced $INST, a governance token that will enable holders to vote on future InstaDapp protocol upgrades. $INST was distributed to Instadapp users and investors, the Instadapp team, and users of Maker, AAVE, and Compound.
On Tuesday, the inaugural governance vote kicked off to “complete the transferal of administration rights of the protocol to the community.”
COALA’s Model DAO Law
COALA, aka the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications, is an organization with a mission to “explore the implications and deployment of blockchain technologies at the nexus of our evolving social and economic order in the 21st century.”
Recently, they released a “model law” for policymakers to consider when addressing DAOs that “provides legal certainty for DAOs and their participants, and unlike other regulatory frameworks, accommodates flexibility for their unique features and further innovation.”
This adds to recent efforts from jurisdictions like Wyoming, as written about here in the Defiant by members of the Boardroom team, to accommodate DAOs in existing legal structures.
It is worth noting, however, that some members of the crypto legal community are not fans:
Check out the above thread for more detail on possible issues with these efforts.
There is still much to be done to figure out both how DAOs fit into legal frameworks as they exist today as well as how best to address any frictions with new legislation.
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.