🗳 This Week in Governance - Feb 16

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

Duncan Dobbelmann

Feb 16

📣 Key Points

Optimism governance moves on-chain
Spark Protocol forks Aave v3, proposes profit sharing
Uniswap considers an accountability committee
… and much more

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 83,185 ballots
👥 24,315 voters
📜 276 proposals
🌐 71 active DAOs

Let’s get into it 🔥

🗞 News Brief

Optimism governance goes on-chain

On February 10th Optimism announced that their voting portal, which will facilitate on-chain voting for the Optimism Collective, is accessible for testing. Governance decisions have up until now been conducted off-chain through Snapshot, with very high (and increasing) participation from Token House voters. The Optimism Foundation, however, has for some time expressed the hope to move voting on-chain in order to increase decentralization — and to deal with persistent infrastructure issues. Various community members pressed for the transition as well. After a competitive selection process, Agora was chosen to build the portal, which will in action for the vote on Optimism’s protocol upgrade to Bedrock (starting on February 16th).

Spark Protocol forks Aave v3, proposes profit sharing

Last week Phoenix Labs announced its product Spark Protocol in the Maker forums. Intended as a “front-end for interacting with DAI,” Spark’s first offering is Spark Lend, a “market focused on the most liquid, decentralized, and highest market cap assets.” At the same time, Phoenix Labs posted in the Aave forums to acknowledge’s Spark’s roots in Aave v3 (i.e. Lend is a fork) and to propose a profit-sharing program “for the FOSS work done.”

The proposal is to send 10% of gross profits from the DAI market in Spark Lend to the Aave Treasury for a period of two years. Alternatively, Phoenix proposes that Spark could use 2% of that profit to purchase AAVE tokens and “align both organizations further”. Meanwhile, Aave recently announced that GHO, a new stablecoin and in some sense a competitor with DAI, is live on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet. Phoenix Labs says:

“We are ardent proponents of permissionless innovation that has enabled our space to create new and exciting solutions rapidly.”

Uniswap considers an accountability committee

Laura Lotti of Other Internet recently posted in the Uniswap forums to propose an Accountability Committee for Licensure and Deployments “tasked with overseeing the operational development of partnerships and agreements involving Additional Use Grant requests and deployments of Uniswap V3 on other chains.” Pointing to Uniswap’s Business Source License (which expires in April), the number of Additional Use Grants requested over the last year, and upcoming deployments of Uniswap V3 on other chains, the author makes a case for stringent oversight of the many processes involved, which include: evaluating proposals; implementing on-chain commitment mechanisms for the Uniswap DAO; providing quality assurance and technical guidance; and regular reporting to the DAO.

The initial proposed committee includes representatives from Consensys, she256, StableLab, Stanford Blockchain Club, and Tally — but further discussion has revealed interest from FranklinDAO (and potentially others). Should the proposal move forward, committee composition will likely be determined through the Uniswap governance process.

📚 Good Reads

“We read 59,000 DAO forum posts, so you don’t have to…*,” by Raphael Spannocchi of Flipside Crypto.
“Welcome Home: A New Kind of Social Network” from FWB
“Purple Innovation’s PRPLS Innovation” (corporate governance), by Matt Levine
“Finding the Right Leadership for your DAO,” by Kairon of Tally

Forums:

Bankless DAO: [RFC] bDAO Vacation Policy
Developer DAO: [DRAFT] D_D Cod of Conduct and Moderation Process
ENS: [Temp Check] ENS Token 2nd Airdrop
Euler: Formalizing Multichain Deployment Process
Lido: MEV policy for the Staking Router
Maker: Endgame Communications Strategy & Plan: Community Feedback
Paladin: Introducing a legal wrapper for Paladin

🧵 Threads

Token airdrops as incentive programs in the future, by Li Jin
Financial statements for DAOs, from Token Terminal
The three methods used to generate DAI, from Maker DAO

🎧 Listens

Collective Accountability and Lucid Dreaming with Gabriel Tumlos of Mochi, on DAO or Never
Uniswap BNB Deployment vote, Flipside’s Govy Show #21
BlochainGov community call: research on Proof of Humanity governance Crisis
Kraken to End Staking-As-A-Service Program, by Gary Gensler

📜 Highlighted Proposals

SafeDAO Constitution

View the proposal

With this proposal, Lukas Schor makes the case for a SafeDAO constitution. Arguing that improving human coordination through governance smart contracts isn’t sufficient, Schor lays out a draft text for the young DAO. The draft defines the “mission, goals, and principles” of the DAO that would together serve as the “north star” to guide the community. If approved, changes to the constitution would require double the quorum and a 2/3 majority vote.

✅ Voting starts Feb 16th
⏰ Voting ends: Feb 23rd
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Lukas Schor

Swap Portion of Treasury USDC to DAI

View the proposal

ENS recently sold 25% of its treasury (which was entirely in ETH) for USDC, resulting in +$16m of the stablecoin, with the goal of providing an “operational runway” for the DAO that could last as long as two years. Monetsupply recently posted in the ENS forums to propose that $5m of the recently acquired USDC be swapped for DAI, and the DAI deposited into Maker’s DAI Savings Rate contract, which currently yields 1% interest. The author argues that this would present “meaningful diversification” and address such things as USDC solvency risk and centralization risk.

👥 Type: Temp-check
✍ Author: monet-supply

RFP: Cayman Islands Administrator for the APE Foundation

View the proposal

This request for proposals was posted to the ApeCoin DAO forum on February 7th, pointing out the need for a new administrator of the APE Foundation “to support the governance and administration of activities of the DAO.” The described scope of work is significant and includes finances, legal and regulatory compliance, meeting facilitation, and social media account and Apecoin website maintenance. Submission guidelines and submission evaluation criteria are detailed. Four companies have responded to the request; one of them proposes to fulfill all functions, while the remaining three propose to work together in doing the same. Projected costs are ~$75k/month.

👥 Type: Forum discussion
✍ Author: Waabam