This Week in DAOs - September 30, 2021
Fireblocks' Aave Arc Bid, Mirror Opens Up Crowfund Tool, and Compound's Big-Time Bug
The institutions are coming (if DAOs let them in) and multi-million dollar bugs, it’’s never dull a week in the world of DAOs. Keep reading to get caught up.
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Ecosystem Overview - September 30, 2021:
💰 $7.51 billion in DAO treasuries 💰
🗳️ 242,827 ballots ever 🗳️
👥 60,485 unique voters ever 👥
✍️ 6,063 proposals ever ✍️
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days
🗳️ 8,826 ballots cast on 70 different proposals 🗳️
👥 2,693 unique voters 👥
🌐 24 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 34 new proposals created this week ✍️
📰 This Week’s News
Aave Considers Enlisting Fireblocks as a Whitelister
Released earlier this year, Aave Arc allows institutions - i.e. centralized financial firms, traditional investors, etc. - to participate in Aave’s decentralized liquidity protocol via separate and permissioned liquidity pools where the other users have been verified, thus ensuring regulated entities can meet compliance standards related to BSA/KYC/AML laws.
This week, Fireblocks - the institutional digital asset custody, transfer and settlement platform - submitted a bid in the Aave Governance Forum to be the first such institution to be approved as a “whitelister for one or more deployments of Aave Arc.”
Still in the discussion phase of the Aave governance process, Fireblocks’ bid has not reached the community vote stage. However, when it does reach that point, the vote will have major ramifications for Aave. For example, according to the proposal adding the first whitelister to Aave Arc could speed up the creation of new products, such as “protocol deployments connected to debit cards, high yield savings accounts and other innovative fintech products.”
This is a big milestone for the Aave community, and DeFi in general, as it represents the acceleration of a bigger trend: the mainstreaming of decentralized finance protocols. And, of course, its all underpinned by $AAVE holders, who have the governance power to give it the green light.
Mirror Crowdfund Tool
Mirror is well-known as a crypto-native publication tool; like Medium but instead of the data being hosted on AWS servers, it’s stored on Arweave.
However, Mirror is much more than that. Those that have won the weekly $WRITE races and been given access to the publication tool have also had access to a variety other tools built by Mirror such as NFT minting, auctions, and more.
Mirror announced this week that they are opening up their Crowdfunds tool to the public. Crowdfunds allows users to raise funds for a project, in ETH, and send back tokens to their supporters. Check out the announcement blog:
Mirror’s Crowdfund tool just so happens to be a great way to launch a DAO, as exhibited by some of the crowdfunds we’ve covered in this newsletter, such as: Columbia University’s Lion DAO, DAO Masters, Seed Clubs mClub DAO, and PartyDAO.
At Boardroom, we’re excited to see all the new DAOs that are launched on Mirror. If you’re reading this and have plans to start your own, reply here or hit us up in Discord.
Compound Bug
On September 29th, a bug was discovered in Compound’s Comptroller contract in the wake of the implementation of Proposal 62, which was meant to update said contract.
The bug resulted in Compound users being sent very large sums of $COMP tokens - possibly up to $80 million dollars worth in total.
This ongoing incident puts on full display the perils of decentralized systems and their governance: the Compound community voted this bug into the system and is now bound to a 7 day governance process to rectify it. Efforts to that end are, of course, already underway. Proposal 63 is set to begin voting on October 2nd and would temporarily disable COMP rewards.
It also cuts to the core of the a notion underpinning decentralized systems like Compound: the idea that “code is law.” As Boardroom team member Brandon Valosek articulated in the Boardroom Discord:
Blockchain tech is often hyped because of its fully objective/code-based rules and execution... but is "the law" the intersubjective/social layer understanding of a system... or the underlying coordination engine?
If social layer -> people taking the extra COMP because of this bug are "stealing" If coordination engine -> lol finders keepers
Time will tell how this all plays out. Keep an eye on the Compound governance forum over the next few days.