🗳 This Week in Governance - Jan 6
A weekly resource covering Web3 governance, politics, and power.
📣 Key Points
BanklessDAO Shares Season 7 Specification
Nethermind Proposes Deploying Uniswap v3 on StarkNet
ApeCoin DAO Takes a Step Toward Decentralization
… and much more
Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 25,626 ballots (+96%)
👥 12,468 voters (+70%)
📜 167 proposals (-7%)
🌐 61 active DAOs (+22%)
Happy New Year! Let’s get into it 🔥
🗞 DAO News in Brief
BanklessDAO Shares Season 7 Specification
BanklessDAO posted a draft of its Season 7 Specification to the forums on January 3 -- well ahead of its proposed Snapshot approval date of January 30. This early heads-up results in part from the necessity of integrating or re-integrating processes that have changed since the passing of the DAO's Constitution and the improvement proposals (bDIPs) and other shifts in approach that have followed. For example, where previously there was one “Community Vote” on a seasonal specification, which "included all changes, in all areas, into one packaged vote – funding requests from all groups, governance changes, operational changes, and the detailed seasonal timeline," this process was "superseded" by the Constitution. Seasonal specifications have been a staple at bDAO since Season One and serve as an agreed-upon actionable guide for the DAO to follow.
To bring Season 6 into line with the Constitution, the Community Vote had to be split into separate "work streams," which created several bDIPs and other suggested process changes, some of which have yet to be implemented. The post author suggests that DAO members continue to put forward new ideas in the forum. The Community Vote has effectively been disaggregated, and the new approach "empowers all members to participate in governance without relying on the Operations Department to aggregate and curate topics to be discussed." The Season 7 operations timeline is specified in the post; it begins on February 6, ends on May 7, and includes dates for funding requests, Grant Committee review, and Snapshot votes for Season 8 budget requests.
Nethermind Proposes Deploying Uniswap v3 on StarkNet
This week, the Nethermind team submitted a proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on StarkNet, a zero-knowledge rollup platform. Nethermind is a team that has developed various blockchain tools, including the Nethermind Client for node operators, Warp, a transpiler for converting Solidity code to Cairo, and Voyager, a block explorer for StarkNet similar to Etherscan. In their proposal, the Nethermind team requests a BSL exemption from the DAO to grant them the ability to fully deploy the DEX. Uniswap v3 incorporates a Business Source License (BSL) which is a special general public license that provides the benefits of fully open-source software while also protecting the community that built it. Uniswap Governance is afforded the right to grant exemptions to this license.
StarkNet offers high scalability and unique features that are secured by the Ethereum network with a growing list of integrated protocols. Currently, Nethermind has a private testnet deployment of the decentralized exchange for testing with additional plans to deploy a public testnet in the coming weeks. Deploying Uniswap v3 on StarkNet would be the first non-EVM-native deployment of the protocol. This distinction means there is an added risk to deploying on StarkNet since this is not a native implementation. The proposal requests feedback on how to best approach this circumstance to identify and define risk tolerance and best practices. The proposal is currently gathering community feedback and may see amendments before coming to a vote. Should the proposal pass, StarkNet hopes to deploy Uniswap v3 by the second quarter of 2023.
ApeCoin DAO Takes a Step Toward Decentralization
The ApeCoin DAO community passed a proposal this week that hopes to kickstart further decentralization of the DAO. Currently, the DAO relies heavily on Cartan, a centralized Cayman entity that provides administrative support. The proposal, called AIP-196, aims to extend the contract with Cartan for two more months while also starting a process to find a new administrator and forming a temporary working group (WG0) to develop internal structures for decentralization.
ApeCoin DAO has been working with Cartan since March 2022 and pays them $150K per month for their services. In December, Cartan attempted to pass a proposal to increase their monthly payment to $250K and 20K ApeCoin, but the proposal failed. The new proposal requests 361K in ApeCoin from the DAO treasury to fund this initiative. It also acknowledges the importance of a legal entity like a foundation but emphasizes the role of community-run working groups in covering out-of-scope work. As part of this initiative, the DAO is holding an election to appoint 7 stewards to the inaugural Working Group Zero. The election period begins on January 7th.
📚 Good Reads
“Uniswap Grants Retrospective” from Uniswap Grants
“Gaining Insights into the Paladin Voting Market” from StableNode
“Towards a More Cooperative Web3” by Thompson, Winn, Oates, et al
“The DAO Governance Conundrum” from Fyde Treasury
“[2023] Guide to Web3 Data Tools” by Andrew Hong
“DeFi and Crypto: A Retrospective and Analysis of the 2022’s Developments and Trends” by Jack Lipstone
“TalentDAO to launch series of governance experiments piloting voting tool Zodiac bot” from TalentDAO
“Governance by Algorithms, Governance of Algorithms: Human-Machine Politics in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” by Kelsie Nabben
“So you’ve made a valueless token… now what?” by OneTrueKirk
“Why DAO Contribution Sucks (And How to Fix It)” by Finn Lobsien
“A Decentralized Governance Philosophy” by Kickflip
“Aztec Protocol - Grant RFPs” from Aztec Grants Program
“Nouns Builder Recap” by bk
BanklessDAO: “Introducing a Compensation System for BanklessDAO”
🧵 Threads
“DAO IN/OUTs 2023” by Samantha Marin
“F*** it. Let’s review some DAO Governance Contributor / Service Provider Contracts” by Deven Matthews
“Governance tokens for liquid staking derivatives have been outperforming over the past few days… Why?” by 0xpibblez
“If you were teaching a class on DAOs 101, what would you include?” by Kevin Owocki
“How Nounish Media DAOs will upend content creation” by pbrianandj.eth
“Meet the Governerds” by Shawn Grubb
“When ATOM Interchain Security?” by Robb Stack
“Metropolis Pods: Scaling Trust” by JD Lorax
🎧 Listens
“DAOs and Legal w/ Kyle Smith, Legal Engineer LexDAO” on All About Impact DAOs
📜 Proposals
Fund Balancer Grants Q1 2023
This proposal looks to continue funding the existing Balancer Grants program through the end of Q1 2023. The Balancer Grants Program has operated since August 2021 with the goal of “accelerating the development of the BAL ecosystem while optimizing contributor rewards”. In this proposal, the independent and community-owned program requests an additional 84K BAL from the DAO to fund its work through March 31st, 2023. Included in the budget are operational costs for the 7-person team, grant rewards, and other expenses related to the program. Any unallocated BAL from this budget will be sent back to the DAO treasury or set aside for the next epoch.
✅ 73% voting ‘Yes, let’s do it’
⏰ Voting Ends: Jan 9
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: burns
bDIP-02: Coordinated Timing Across BanklessDAO
This proposal looks to establish ‘Universal Coordinated Time’ (UTC) as the officially recognized time zone to coordinate events and meetings across bDAO. Bankless DAO Improvement Proposals are a special proposal framework used to make amendments to the DAOs Constitution. The proposal changes bDAO's Constitution to adopt UTC in an effort to prevent further confusion within the global Bankless DAO community.
✅ 93% voting ‘Approve’
⏰ Voting Ends: Jan 10
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Rowan
Updating Voting Frameworks for Community Governance
This proposal looks to modify the current voting framework at Hop Protocol. Currently, the bridge protocol uses Snapshot and on-chain voting to make decisions. Under the proposed system, the community multisig would be able to make decisions involving small amounts (<$5K) of money without a vote. For decisions involving larger amounts (>$5K) of money or that do not affect the core protocol, a Snapshot vote would be used. The full on-chain voting process would only be used for significant changes to the protocol or for votes that include executable code. This HIP is considered the first proposal to use the second category.
✅ 90% voting ‘For’
⏰ Voting Ends: Jan 10
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: fourpoops
Governance & Snapshot Update #2
This proposal aims to introduce the timelock feature and make parameter changes to the Morpho Snapshot space. The timelock will be powered by a governance module called the Zodiac Delay Modifier and will be used as an extra layer of security in the governance process. In addition to introducing timelocks, the proposal also includes requests to reduce vote times, add Snapshot subspaces for gauge proposals, reduce the number of voting rules, and add the HAL proposal notification system plugin. Snapshot subspaces are a feature that allows projects to create multiple spaces and link them together, often for the purpose of enforcing different voting settings for different types of proposals.
👥 Type: Forum Discussion
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