🗳 This Week in Governance - Apr 21

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

Boardroom

Apr 21, 2023

Uniswap Adopts Accountability Committee for Deployments
OP Collective Launches S4 to Align and Achieve Collective Intents
Maker Governance to Vote on Coinbase’s New Real-World Asset Vault

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 182,329 ballots
👥 51,265 voters
📜 367 proposals
🌐 83 active DAOs

Let’s get into it 🔥

🗞 News Brief

Uniswap Gov Adopts Accountability Committee for Deployments

Uniswap governance has approved the creation of an Accountability Committee for Deployments, which will oversee the operational development of deployments of Uniswap V3 on other chains. The need for this committee was identified during the first Uniswap Delegate Forum held in October 2022, which led to the creation of an Accountability Working Group. The committee will be responsible for evaluating proposals and ensuring that they comply with the Uniswap DAO Proposal Template 1, as well as implementing an on-chain commitment mechanism for Uniswap DAO. To be part of the Uniswap ecosystem, some projects will seek the "official" blessing and management of Uniswap Governance. The initial Committee will have five members and a duration of six months. The members will be compensated with a retainer of $3,500 per 6-month term and a fee of $6,500 for each evaluated project. The committee will be subjected to review by the community at the end of the term to discuss areas of improvement and potential expansion of its scope to other kinds of partnerships beyond deployments.

OP Collective Launches S4 to Align and Achieve Collective Intents

The Collective has announced the launch of Season 4, which aims to align the community around Collective Intents and other foundational concepts. Collective Intents are directional goals that enable the community to align and focus its efforts, and each Intent is equipped with its own budget for Season 4. Token House Missions are proposals for specific initiatives that achieve an Intent, and they are executed by Alliances, or groups of contributors that temporarily work together to accomplish a Mission start-to-finish. Missions are divided into two types: Proposed Missions and Foundation Missions, and they must work towards the Collective's Intents. Collective Trust Tiers are introduced as the first step towards a more robust reputation system based on positive impact within the ecosystem. In Season 4, the Foundation will take several steps towards increased transparency and further decentralization by voting on two additional proposal types for the first time: Treasury Appropriations and Inflation Adjustment. The Collective draws inspiration from governance experiments run at several other DAOs, primarily Gitcoin, ENS, and CabinDAO.

Maker Governance to Vote on Coinbase’s New Real-World Asset Vault

Maker Governance votes to approve or reject a new real-world asset vault that seeks to connect the Maker Protocol's USDC reserves with the Coinbase USDC Institutional Rewards program. This new real-world asset vault is called RWA014 and, if approved, will be deployed to the Maker Protocol with a debt ceiling of 500 million DAI. In September 2022, Coinbase Inst. submitted MIP81: Coinbase USDC Institutional Rewards, a proposal to onboard a portion of the PSM's USDC to Coinbase Prime in order to participate in Coinbase’s USDC Institutional Rewards program. As noted by the Strategic Finance Coure Unit's Legal Assessment on MIP81, the Coinbase USDC Institutional Rewards rate stands at 2.60% annually and the USDC rewards will be calculated on a monthly basis.

💬 Forums:

Radicle: [Formal Review][RGP - 14] - Start the Radicle Org

Proposal [RGP-14] suggests establishing the Radicle Org to develop a fully-sovereign code collaboration stack called “Radicle”. Radicle aims to be a secure, decentralized, and powerful alternative to GitHub and GitLab while preserving user sovereignty and freedom. The proposal suggests that Radicle can solve several problems like platform risk, open access, privacy, data ownership, security, and availability by providing solutions such as users' ability to run their nodes without reliance on any third party, social artifacts (e.g., comments, issues, etc.) are stored in git, and users own their data, and Radicle is always available since it is local-first, uses public-key cryptography throughout the product and protocol, and is open source and permissibly licensed. The proposal suggests quarterly objectives to get closer to GitHub core feature parity, stabilize the technology stack, relaunch media presence, and work on identities, CI/CD, and secure artifacts. The proposal suggests a legal structure, contributors, and communication channels for the Radicle Org.

ENS: Public Goods Growth Grants

The Public Goods working group is offering a new retroactive grant opportunity. They are awarding 10k USDC to five established projects that have positively impacted the Ethereum or Web3 ecosystems. The goal is to support these projects while helping them grow into additional Public Goods funding opportunities from the ENS. The submission phase will run from April 14th to May 4th, with winners announced on May 18th. Projects must be retroactive, have a clear roadmap, and fall under the categories of infrastructure, tools, or education.

Aave: Aave Forest

BGD Labs proposes to integrate a monitoring and prevention framework called Aave Forest on behalf of Aave to protect the protocol against potential exploits. Aave has been continuously improving its security procedures, including testing and independent security reviews. However, it is still technically impossible to have 100% security assurance. Aave Forest is a framework that combines existing native features of Aave with external platforms to provide additional security assurance. It includes external platforms which are smart contracts or entities trusted by the community to execute protective actions over the protocol. Owls monitor Aave for potential incidents, and Rangers can take protective action over the protocol if an Owl detects an upcoming exploit.

Rari: RRC-8: Retroactive Governance Airdrop

This proposal suggests a retroactive $RARI airdrop to community members who actively participated in RARI Foundation governance from Q4 2022-Q1 2023. The motivation for the airdrop is to express acknowledgment and gratitude to those who have been consistently active and to act as the first small step in a larger governance incentivization program. Eligibility for the airdrop is based on meeting certain conditions, such as locking or delegating $RARI between 1 October 2022-1 March 2023, and locked and voted, or delegated and that delegate voted, among others. The eligibility formula used to determine the total amount of $RARI received is based on on-chain actions of the Foundation members. The proposal outlines the steps to implement the airdrop, including taking a snapshot to determine eligibility, running the eligibility formula, and transferring appropriate funds from the treasury to corresponding wallets.

Arbitrum: Grants Funding Framework Discussion

The proposed solution aims to avoid the cascading pattern of reactivity seen in DAOs, where initial overspending leads to accountability requests and centralization, followed by voter apathy, leading to no innovation. The proposal outlines four goals and corresponding signals, including creating a pluralistic funding framework, establishing the most innovative grant program, and considering mechanisms to ensure the longevity of the Arbitrum DAO. It discusses the importance of pluralistic funding and the use of different mechanisms including Quadratic Voting, retroactive funding, and partnerships with organizations like Otterspace and Token Engineering Academy. Finally, it suggests diversifying the treasury to 10% stablecoins and guarantees to create 10 years of budget availability to ensure the longevity of the DAO.

Gitcoin: [GCP-00X] - Upgrading Gitcoin’s Governance Contracts

Gitcoin and ScopeLift have been working on developing and implementing new on-chain governance contracts for the Gitcoin DAO, using Governor Bravo functionality and the Flexible Voting extension. The goal is for the DAO to approve the upgrade to these new contracts and migrate governor contracts, offering ongoing customization of key voting criteria, introducing Flexible Voting for new use cases, and exploring additional customizations in delegation. While the Alpha contracts are reliable, they are restrictive in terms of governance capabilities, and the new contracts would offer more options for voter participation. The contracts have been audited and extensively tested to minimize execution risk, but the largest drawback would be the treasury becoming inaccessible if there were a serious bug.

Aave: [ARFC] Private Voting for Aave Governance

This proposal suggests implementing private voting through shielded voting on the Snapshot platform for a two-month trial period in order to enhance Aave's governance and voters, leading to fairer and more accurate results. The current voting process may not reflect the true wishes of the community, and shielding individual votes will encourage voters of different sizes and opinions to participate and feel empowered, ultimately leading to a more fair outcome. Shielded voting has four key benefits, including preventing voter intimidation or coercion and protecting participants' privacy. The proposal includes steps for upgrading a Snapshot space to shielded voting, with the option for the community to disable the feature at any time.