🗳 This Week in Governance - Dec 15
A weekly resource covering Web3 governance, politics, and power.
📣 Key Points
StarkNet Announces the Initial Phase of its Governance Process
MakerDAO Forms Strategic Alliance with GnosisDAO
NounsDAO Votes to Continue funding Prop House
Uniswap Proposes Changes to its Governance Process
Optimism Begins Voting on Key Changes for its Upcoming Season
… and much more
Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 100,893 ballots (+189%)
👥 34,616 voters (+89%)
📜 245 proposals (+21%)
🌐 66 active DAOs (+16%)
Let’s get into it 🔥
📡 Coverage
📖 READ our latest brief on Uniswap, their proposal to make changes to their governance process, and the bigger picture.
🗞 DAO News in Brief
StarkNet Launches the First Phase of its Governance Process
The StarkNet Foundation has announced the first phase of its decentralization process for the StarkNet protocol. In this initial phase, a governance process is introduced that allows STRK tokenholders, delegates, and a Builders’ Council committee to participate in proposed changes to the layer 2 protocol. Voting on changes will take place over a six-day period, followed by a 24-hour timelock if the proposal is approved. A simple majority will be required to pass a proposal, and there will be no minimum quorum. The Builders' Council will be a 17-person committee appointed by the Foundation to facilitate the governance process during this phase. Additional information regarding the Council will be provided in a separate blog post. In November, the StarkNet Foundation was introduced as an independent community structure helping steward the StarkNet project alongside StarkWare, the core team building the protocol. Those who wish to become a StarkNet delegate are now able to submit a delegate profile on the forums. The StarkNet Foundation plans to begin voting shortly after the testnet release of the protocol which will concern a version upgrade to the protocol.
MakerDAO Partners with Gnosis DAO
This week, MakerDAO passed an on-chain proposal to form a strategic alliance with GnosisDAO. The Executive proposal, which consists of a bundle of previously passed polling proposals, was executed on Tuesday. Among the proposals in the bundle was one to formally add GnosisDAO's native token, GNO, to the stablecoin protocol. GnosisDAO first applied to be added as collateral in August. Its proposal follows MakerDAO’s collateral onboarding application process, which provides a standardized way for third parties to be added as collateral to the Maker protocol. This process requires projects to fully outline the risks and benefits of being added to the Maker protocol. The proposal to onboard GNO had previously passed several polling votes within Maker’s governance process before clearing this final hurdle. Parameters for the newly approved GNO vault include a maximum debt ceiling of 5M DAI and a debt floor of 100K DAI.
According to Stefan George, the Founder of Gnosis, the DAI generated by the newly formed vault will “help boost the development of the Gnosis Chain ecosystem by expanding its protocol, improving its infrastructure, and keeping gas fees low.” The project’s application states that it hopes to generate at least 30M DAI within the first year. Maker often looks to onboard new assets as accepted collateral types in order to increase market usage and demand for DAI, mitigate risk, and enable further scaling. Other changes in the proposal bundle include monthly payments to each of Maker’s 20 recognized delegates, the onboarding of additional RWA vaults, an increase to the DAI savings rate, the offboarding of renBTC as collateral, and more.
Nouns DAO Votes to Continue Funding Prop House
On Wednesday, Nouns DAO passed an on-chain vote to continue funding the development of Prop House, a core infrastructure that funds builders within the Nouns ecosystems. Prop House first launched in January 2022 with the aspiration to be “the seed to a crypto native Y Combinator model.” Hundreds of Prop House proposals and funding rounds later, the team behind the experiment is now requesting additional funding to continue developing the project into a full-fledged protocol. In the proposal, the Prop House core team requests 570 ETH to fund six months of development. Since development began on Prop House, a total of three proposals have funded the project with 695 ETH for operational expenses and an additional 555 ETH to fund projects who applied for grants. Proposal 183 specifies the team will focus on improving the product’s UX alongside additional steps needed in the development of the protocol. The Prop House protocol will use a “dual-chain architecture” powered by Ethereum and StarkNet. Currently, the protocol is deployed on testnets and remains in the testing phase. The team plans to deploy it on Ethereum mainnet by the end of Q1 2023.
📚 Good Reads
“A Stroll Through the History of the Nouns DAO Treasury” by Adam Eisenman
“Governor Note: The veBAL Wars” by Traver Normandi
“State of Synthetix Governance” by Joel Miyazawa
“Undesigning a DAO” by Samantha Marin
“Governance as Conflict” by Eric Alston
“The Onchain Era” by Yancey Strickler
“What is the AttestationStation” from Optimism
Alchemix: Optimism Grant Allocation for Liquidity Incentives
Nouns DAO: “Nouns DAO x Sismo ⌐◨-◨ : The Nouns Governor ZK Badge”
Element DAO: “Karma Proposal - Analytics Suite for DAO Governance Contributions”
🧵 Threads
“Introducing the all new PartyBid: On-chain multiplayer for NFTs” from PartyDAO
“Improvements we can make to existing on-chain governance frameworks” by Shreyas Hariharan
“My Top DAOs Trends of 2022 and Predicted Top Trends of 2023” by @EndearingEvan
“I am making the DAO operating costs public” by Jared Grey
“Delegation is the path to capture hell for web3” by Daniel Ospina
🎧 Listens
“Uniswap Foundation: Behind the Scenes w/ Devin Walsh” on Cross-Chain Examination
“DAOs Are Public Goods w/ Kevin Owoki” on Building at the Edges
“Building an On-Chain Reputation” at Virtual On-Chain Summit
📜 Proposals
Protocol Delegation Program
This proposal outlines the creation of a delegation program within Optimism’s Token House for the upcoming Season. Here, 5M idle OP within the Governance Fund will be delegated across as many as 23 protocols. A total of 18 protocols will receive delegation based on the following criteria: total gas fees generated on Optimism during the proceeding Season. In addition to these protocols, 8 protocols will be voted in through a nomination process during Special Voting Cycle #9b. Participating protocols must abide by the Delegate Code of Conduct and must maintain a high participation rate to be eligible for renewal the following season. The maximum amount of OP a protocol can be delegated is 2 million. The proposal describes itself as a more incentive-aligned way for protocols to participate in Optimism’s governance as the self-delegation of grant rewards was previously discouraged.
✅ 98% voting ‘For’
⏰ Voting Ends: Dec 21
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
dYdX Operations subDAO
This proposal aims to launch an operations subDAO for the dYdX DAO, called the Operations Trust. This subDAO would be set up as a Guernsey Purpose Trust and be responsible for publishing a DAO Playbook, managing communications, and opening a fiat bank account on behalf of the DAO. Here, Reverie requests $360K in DYDX tokens be transferred to a newly formed multisig to fund 6-months of operations at the subDAO. This is an on-chain vote to ratify the proposed changes as it previously passed a Snapshot vote.
✅ 100% voting ‘Yes’
⏰ Voting Ends: Dec 19th
⛓ Type: On-chain Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Reverie
Receipt of Gauntlet Insolvency Fund
This proposal looks to confirm the transfer of Gauntlet’s Insolvency Fund over to the Aave Ecosystem Reserve. The Gauntlet Insolvency Fund is a special-purpose pool of funds created to act as a risk management backstop in the event Aave incurs losses during its engagement with the risk management platform. Following the accrual of CRV bad debt in November, this proposal formally requests this pool of funds be unstaked and transferred back to the DAO. In addition, a separate proposal at Aave has been created to confirm alignment on how to best pay down the existing CRV bad debt.
✅ 91% voting ‘YAE’
⏰ Voting Ends: Dec 16
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Llama
Treasury Management #2
This proposal looks to transfer a select number of assets from the Paladin DAO treasury over to a separate community multisig. The following strategic assets are included in this transfer: CRV, CVX, BAL, and AURA. The proposal is considered a step in preparation for ‘Warlord’ an upcoming subDAO at Paladin.
✅ 100% voting ‘For’
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Figue
EIP 35: Claiming SAFE Airdrop
This proposal aims to claim SAFE tokens from the recent SafeDAO airdrop before the December 27th deadline. Euler Finance’s multi-sig treasury qualifies the protocol for an allocation of 7,972 SAFE tokens. If the proposal passes, the protocol will claim the entire amount and self-delegate the allocated tokens to the multi-sig wallet. A previous proposal at Euler to claim and delegate the SAFE tokens to the DAOplomats failed to pass. The Euler community plans to run a separate proposal to decide on a viable delegate for the SAFE tokens.
✅ 100% voting ‘Claims and self-delegate $SAFE’
⏰ Voting Ends: Dec 20
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Matt, Bobby
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