This Week in Governance - July 14

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

Jul 14, 2022

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📊 This Week’s Stats

A snapshot of DAO governance activity and global treasury changes.

Ecosystem Overview:

Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:

🗳️ 83,495 ballots were cast on 323 different proposals 🗳️
👥 17,774 unique voters 👥
🌐 54 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 134 new proposals created ✍️

For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, browse our Governance API - 🚀 This above link can be used to make requests against the API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!

🗞️ DAO News in Brief

Aave proposes GHO Stablecoin

The DeFi giant has proposed plans to create its own native stablecoin, GHO. The stablecoin aims to be a decentralized over-collateralized algorithmic stablecoin. Users will be able to mint GHO after supplying collateral to the protocol. The initial proposal has been met with mostly positive sentiment from the Aave community and is expected to be voted on soon.

Reactions here, here, and here

Yam Finance governance attacked

An attacker attempted to siphon $3M from the Yam Finance DAO Treasury. The attacker slipped a governance proposal through without anyone noticing that would have granted them access to the DAOs treasury. The attack vector was detected and the proposal was canceled before an exploit could occur.

Gnosis Safe raises $100M, rebrands to Safe

Popular DAO tooling and infrastructure provider Gnosis Safe has raised $100M from investors including 1kx, Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and more. The company also rebranded itself to ‘Safe’, dropping the Gnosis name. The project previously voted to spin off Gnosis and form what is now SafeDAO. Funds from the round will help grow its ecosystem of applications and tools.

A StarkNet Token is coming

The Layer 2 scaling solution has announced plans to launch its native token. The token will be used for governance, payment of transaction fees, and staking. A total of 10 billion tokens have been minted and allocated to investors and core contributors. The token will go live later this year.

GitcoinDAO diversifies its treasury

GitcoinDAO begins executing its treasury diversification efforts. The Public Goods DAO has passed a proposal whereby $3M of GTC will be swapped for USDC. By diversifying its DAO treasury, Gitcoin looks to become more resilient to current market conditions and help its overall operating needs.

📚 Good Reads & Listens

“MonetSupply: Perspectives on MakerDAO Governance” on I Pledge Allegiance Podcast
2022 Stanford DAO Workshop presented by DAO Research Collective
“Governance is about action, not decision-making” by Spencer Graham
“Magic Internet Society w/ Dennison Bertram” on On the Other Side Podcast
The Metagovernance Project explores DAO constitutions
The Challenges of D2D M&A
“Snapshot | Digital Governance w/ Nathan VDH” on Crypto Sapiens Podcast
Element Finance begins exploring Orca Pods
Decentralized Governance and the Lessons of Corporate Governance
JokeDAO officially launches w/ bottom-up, on-chain governance
“First Principles of Crypto Governance” by Luca Prosperi
“GitcoinDAO Governance Evolution” on Green Pill Podcast

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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1) Radicle // Gitcoin Public Goods Alliance

ELI5: Two public goods oriented DAOs model a governance partnership.

View the proposal

This proposal seeks to formally establish an alliance between two DAOs long committed to supporting public goods. By exchanging a significant amount of tokens (500K GTC and an equivalent amount of RAD, vested for two years), each DAO takes on an influential governance role in the other DAO (diversifying both governance communities). This will allow the DAOs to more formally “collaborate on shared visions” and “develop synergistic features and products” while modeling how such an alliance could work for other DAOs. The proposal includes the description of a committee that would be responsible for coordination and liaising, and details reporting, criteria for success, ragequit scenarios, and compensation. The entire process is facilitated by Llama (an organization that helps DAOs create economic infrastructure). A nearly identical proposal was ratified by the Gitcoin community on June 20th.

100% voting for
See the discussion

2) Alchemix: Set rETH and stETH Deposit Caps to Zero

ELI5: Staked ETH depegging requires platform to reduce risk of losses.

View the proposal

Alchemix Finance is a platform that makes it possible for users to “get advances on their yield farming via a synthetic token.” The recent volatility of staked ETH, which at the time of this proposal’s writing had lost its peg with ETH (0.970:1), led the Alchemix DAO to consider whether to prevent future deposits of rETH and stETH. While Alchemix stETH vault functionality is operational, any users who want to withdraw or harvest will realize the market discount (if de-pegging continues), reducing the vault APR. And, due to differences in how rETH is managed, withdrawing or harvesting from the rETH vault in Alchemix is not currently possible (a solution for this is included in the proposal). Additionally, arbitrage could push down the value of alETH, Alchemix’s synthetic token. The proposal aims to contain losses on these fronts by setting deposit limits to zero.

97.44% voted for
See the discussion

3) FWB: Leadership Vision + Results

ELI5: A call for vision, transparency, and accountability from the leaders.

View the proposal

This proposal asks Friends with Benefits leadership to provide a clarity of vision believed to be currently lacking:

“FWB’s runway is limited, and our path to long-term viability is unclear to members. While operating in a centralized way (relying on a core, salaried team for day to day operations and strategic direction) has advantages, this also means that the core team needs to ensure that holders of the token have a faith in the vision leadership sets forth and clarity on the steps being taken to achieve long-term goals.”

The proposed solution is for DAO leaders to present within 60 days a long-term vision for FWB together with expected objectives and key results for each salaried member (or group) over the next 12 months, detailing the steps necessary to achieve desired outcomes. The FWB community should also receive quarterly updates on progress towards the OKRs, along with notification of any changes called for in the twelve-month plan. As the proposer argues, “increased transparency will result in increased community buy-in, increased mutual accountability, and is critical to the continued success of FWB.”