🗳 This Week in Governance - Apr 13

A weekly resource covering crypto governance, politics, and power.

Duncan Dobbelmann

Apr 13, 2023

Optimism’s Token House completes first on-chain voting cycle
Metropolis’s Podarchy Explorer addresses permissions “epidemic”
Arbitrum DAO debates symbolic return of 700m ARB to the treasury

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 141,083 ballots
👥 52,710 voters
📜 270 proposals
🌐 74 active DAOs

Let’s get into it 🔥

🎙️ Delegate News Update

The Delegate Podcast discusses the hottest DAO governance updates curated from this newsletter. In 20 minutes, the episode covers major protocols and governance activity:

Delegate Podcast → Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon

🗞 News Brief

Optimism’s Token House completes first on-chain voting cycle

Optimism’s Token House, which together with the Citizens’ House forms Optimism’s bi-cameral governance, recently completed its first on-chain voting cycle. Although active in governance since June of 2022, Token House voting had taken place offchain prior to the recent move to the portal created by Agora. The two proposals before the Token House were of a very different nature, and both were the first of their kind: The first proposal, which passed with almost 100% of over 43k wallets voting in favor, was to upgrade Optimism mainnet to the Bedrock release — a proposal of vital importance to the protocol. The second proposal, however, asked the Token House to consider the suspension of a delegate due to an infraction of the Delegate Code of Conduct. Although this latter proposal also passed, with over 80% of over 17k wallets voting “for,” a number of people have noted the complexity of such proposals.

Metropolis’s Podarchy Explorer addresses permissions “epidemic”

In a post on April 11 introducing Podarchy Explorer, Metropolis says that it has identified a quiet epidemic: “faulty smart contract permissions” — which pose a “massive threat” to the ecosystem by inadvertently allowing unauthorized access. This can lead not only to the loss of assets — which is what we hear about most often — but to the facilitation of “centralization and censorship avenues.” The Podarchy Explorer pierces the obscurity generated by layers of code and creates a “spatial explorer” that allows the user to examine any on-chain entity and “easily view its connections to and permissions over smart contracts.” Using the tool requires no technical knowledge. Metropolis has so far indexed two “vectors”: Safe membership, and smart contract access control patterns — revealing up to three layers of “relationality.” “We have a responsibility to make known the unknowns of our protocols and core systems,” the team writes.

Arbitrum DAO debates symbolic return of 700m ARB to the treasury

Only a day after Arbitrum posted two proposals in the forums meant to address the failure of AIP-1, user thiccyhot posted their own proposal, AIP-1.05, arguing that “what happened with AIP-1 was a clear overreach of the DAO’s power of treasury resources.” The proposal calls for the Arbitrum Foundation to return 700m of their 750m ARB to the DAO Treasury. “This is a symbolic gesture,” thiccyhot writes, “to demonstrate that the governance holders ultimately control the DAO, not the Arbitrum service provider nor the Foundation.” Among other things, the proposal also asks for disclosure of the terms of service with market maker Wintermute, who had been given $40m in ARB. While many in the Arbitrum forum agree with the proposal’s intention, many also feel that it is, at this point, impractical, unnecessary, and could hinder the L2’s progress. One commenter wrote that “the proposal is both invalid and bad governance,” while another pointed out that it is unenforceable. All three proposals are currently live.

📚 Good Reads

Let 1,000 DAOs Bloom, by Jess Sloss
2023 State of Crypto Report (and Crypto Index), from a16z crypto
Introducing Fortune’s Crypto 40: Blockchain businesses built to last (paywall)
Introducing Web3 Work, from Other Internet
The Three Kinds of DAO-to-DAO Partnerships, by Raphael Spannocchi
Decentralization and Protocol Interaction: Navigating the Layers, by Marc Zeller
Seeing like a protocol, by Barnabé Monnot
Architecting network success, by Diana Biggs of 1kx
DAOs and the Future of Education, by Bruvton

Forums:

1inch: Shielded Voting Implementation
Aave: Private Voting for Aave Governance
Bankless: Governator Season 8 Project Proposal
Gnosis: GnosisDAO & Gnosis Chain Monthly Comms Update
Lido: Constitutional Building Blocks (Purpose, Mission, Vision)
Optimism: Governance Call OP Rewards Update
Optimism: Season 4 Preview
radicle: Governance Updates
Rocket Pool: Make oDAO Health Clearer
Safe: Safe Grants Program (SGP)
SoftDAO: Optimal Tally Threshold: Balancing Access, Inclusivity & Spam
Sushi: Head Chef Jared Grey’s Official SEC Statement & FAQ
Uniswap: Reconfigure Snapshot Proposal Threshold

🧵 Threads

Decent Orgs, from Daniel Ospina
Aave delegate campaign winner, from Butter
Just because a protocol is on-chain doesn’t mean…., by Chase Chapman
I couldn’t sleep so I posted this, by DisruptionJoe.eth

🎧 Listens

Are DAOs Strong Enough to Survive the Regulators? on Unchained
chase @ blockchain at USC, on DAO Talk
Decentralized voting proof of concept, from Denison Bertram
Upcoming: What the Golden Age Pirates Can Teach Us About the Future of DAOs with Jon Alexander, from RnDAO
Upcoming: Decentralized Governance and Digital Asset Prices with Jill Grennan, from RnDAO

📜 Highlighted Proposals

Voting System Choice for Hop DAO Elections

This proposal suggests that the Hop DAO needs a specific voting system for the election of nominees to various positions. It establishes a weighted voting strategy for upcoming and future Hop DAO elections including community multi-sig elections and the Hop DAO ambassador program, with the reasoning that weighted voting allows voters to choose multiple candidates and quantifies their support in percentages. The proposal includes a disclosure stating that it cannot create a legally binding contract or enforceable obligation.

✅ Voting started: April 3
⏰ Voting ended: April 8
⚡ Type: Snapshot vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Authors: Kene and Bobbay from StableLab

Reactivate Inactive Voting Power

0x has seen a drop in governance participation over the last 18 months and puts forward this proposal as an effort to engage new community members. There is “inactive voting power” left from the Bootstrap Delegate initiative that can now be reallocated evenly to a group of seven self-nominated community members (nomination pitches are linked in the proposal).

✅ Voting started: April 12
⏰ Voting ended: April 17
⚡ Type: Snapshot vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: ericwong

Post-BSL cross-chain deployment process and creation of new uniswap.eth subdomain

This temp-check proposal, posted by the new Uniswap governance lead, hopes to gauge community sentiment around the idea of creating a new subdomain, v3-deployments.uniswap.eth, that would identify all official Uniswap v3 deployments on other chains. This action is suggested as necessary given the expiration of Uniswap’s Business Source License this past April 1. Such a subdomain would “provide safety & security for users, focused support to ecosystem participants, and clarity to Uniswap governance.” The proposal also describes in detail a proposed process for future deployments of v3.

✅ Voting started: April 6
⏰ Voting ended: April 13
⚡ Type: Snapshot vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: eek637

A Purple Grant

This proposal on behalf of Purple DAO, which aims to “proliferate and expand the Farcaster protocol and ecosystem,” asks BuilderDAO for a grant of 50 ETH in order to “continue to proliferate Nouns Builder through media and by example.” Purple was created using Nouns Builder, and the proposal provides many examples of how Purple (and those associated) have promoted Nouns Builder. The proposal also describes what Purple plans to do with the grant.

⏰ Voting ends: April 14
⛓️ Type: onchain
✍ Author: Chris Carella