🗳 This Week in Governance - Feb 23

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

Duncan Dobbelmann

Feb 23, 2023

a16z announces its first cohort of Optimism delegates
Lido DAO considers several treasury proposals
Nouns airdrop designs go to Snapshot vote

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 104,362 ballots
👥 24,656 voters
📜 247 proposals
🌐 64 active DAOs

Let’s get into it 🔥

🗞 News Brief

a16z announces first cohort of Optimism delegates

Ross Shuel announced a16z’s first cohort of Optimism delegates, identifying six student university groups in addition to GFX Labs that would each receive 1 million OP. Potential delegates were assessed using a rubric to ensure that those chosen would “strengthen the governing body of the protocol in some meaningful way and become long-term leaders for the protocol.”

The student groups include University of Southern California, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, North Carolina A&T, Georgia Tech, and Northeastern University. To the question of whether a16z might influence its delegates — which came to the fore recently during a Uniswap vote — Shuel said: “Never.” Delegate independence is made explicit in a legal agreement. Adam Cochran questioned the focus on university groups, given purported “broad inexperience,” but Shuel said that they consider “impacts on decentralization” in their efforts to widen the pool of influential delegates.

Lido DAO considers several treasury proposals

Steakhouse, which serves as Lido DAO’s Finance Workstream, has posted several interrelated proposals in the forum that ask the community to weigh in on “basic principles” for treasury management. The first asks whether the DAO should stake treasury ETH (of which there is 20k+); the second whether it should sell treasury ETH; the third whether it should diversify its stablecoin holdings (which are all in DAI); and finally, the fourth proposal asks whether the protocol should sell surplus stETH to finance operating expenses.

Steakhouse estimates “run-rate” expenses for the DAO to be $1.3M-1.5M for the next few months. The treasury DAI ($17M) alone is estimated to cover about a year of operating costs. A number of interesting questions are being considered, including just how to structure all the discussed options in proposals, how they can then be executed, and why there is a reliance on US-dollar-based stablecoins.

Nouns Airdrop designs go to Snapshot vote

In December of 2022 jacob (Noun 174) introduced the idea of a Noun Airdrop, which allows Nouns DAO to “issue new Nouns outside of the daily auction via proposal.” This gives the DAO the ability to offer Nouns as compensation, for example, instead of spend treasury ETH. At the end of January this year, Elad posted the different ideas for the airdrop design for community feedback: 1) mint on demand (jacob’s idea); 2) reserved nouns (which operates by maintaining the daily mint); and 3) the Noun buyer (in which ”the Noun Buyer contract gets funded with ETH by the DAO, and allows anyone to supply a Noun that satisfies the desired trait(s) in return for ETH”). The discussion is important because it considers the extent to which the one-Noun-per-day-forever auction meme is central to Nouns. The proposal, which uses rank-choice, is up on Snapshot through March 6th.

📚 Good Reads

Analysis of a DAO to DAO Partnership: Aave x Balancer, from Flipside
The Problem of Measuring DAO Maturity, by Juan Esquivel
Tokens, Symbols, and Schelling Points, from Hive Mind
The Challenges of Offboarding in DAOs, by Doo Wan Nam
Games Over Governance: Recentering DAOs on Coordination, by 0xJustice.eth

Forums:

Aave: [ARFC] Deploy aCRV & CRV to veCRV
Cosmos: Define Ownership of the Cosmos Hub Twitter Account Using Governance
Developer DAO: D_D Women Budget Proposal: Diversity, Inclusion & Social Space
Euler: How to Combat Gamification of Voting
Index: DPI Metagovernance Organization and Delegation
Maker: On-chain RWA Monitoring
Optimism: Cycle 10 Grant Review Roundup
Paladin: Governance Process V0
Safe: Towards a Governance Framework for SafeDAO

🧵 Threads

Ghost delegates in DAOs, from Karma
On taxis (and centralization), by punk6529
Time delays in governance, by Dan Wu
What I find compelling about tokenisation, by Valerie Tetu
The DAO Model Law, from COALA (the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications)

🎧 Listens

DAOs and Privacy Regulation with Paolo Maria Gangi, RnDAO Talk 22.
The Current State of DAOs in the Bear Market, with Chase Chapman on Mint
Decentralization - DAOs & Online Communities, with MemeBrains
a16z’s Big Token Energy, on DAO or Never
Onboarding Governance, on Coordinative
The on-chain renaissance, on DAO Talk
What’s Happening in Decentralized Social, with Stani Kulechov and Li Jin
Buying an NBA Team, DAOs, and Sports in Web3.0, with Commodore on Deep Dive

📜 Highlighted Proposals

Launch the Gitcoin Staked ETH Index

View the proposal

This proposal structures a partnership between Index Coop and Gitcoin to create a staked ETH index product (gtcETH) that would “provide diversified exposure to the top liquid staking tokens and share a portion of staking rewards with Gitcoin in support of public goods funding.” The product would use the same methodology as dsETH, which “promotes decentralization and competition amongst liquid staking protocols.”

✅ Voting starts Feb 22nd
⏰ Voting ends: Feb 25th
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: allan.g (C-squared LLC)

Delegated Domain Allocation by Questbook

View the proposal

This grant proposal from Questbook aims to launch an ecosystem growth fund ($2.22M for one quarter) that would support “a wide variety of teams building apps on top of Euler in a transparent manner.” As with their work in rebooting the Compound grants program, Questbook here suggests using “domain allocators” drawn from the community, each of whom would manage a specific area of grant-making. Questbook would help to set up the program and provide the tooling to operate it “in an efficient and transparent way.” This would help address the “dearth of high-quality proposals,” token-holder blind spots, and “lack of impact measurement.”

✅ Voting starts Feb 20th
⏰ Voting ends: Feb 26th
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Questbook

Making GNO Native to Gnosis Chain

View the discussion

The GNO token was minted on Ethereum, making it native to the chain. GNO on the Gnosis Chain thus “represents a claim against GNO on Ethereum,” as Martin Köppelmann points out in the Gnosis forum. Köppelmann proposes that GNO be switched to Gnosis Chain to avoid bridge risk and, additionally, help manage the GNO token supply, which the DAO voted to reduce to 3M (a vote which cannot be enforced by code on Ethereum). Lastly, GNO currently generated through rewards on the Gnosis beacon chain can’t be moved the Ethereum — a problem that would go away if all GNO were canonical to Gnosis.

👥 Type: Forum discussion
✍ Author: Martin Köppelmann