This Week in Governance - July 21

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

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Jul 21, 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:

🗳️ 28,583 ballots were cast on 257 different proposals 🗳️
👥 10,012 unique voters 👥
🌐 48 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 106 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

Snapshot adds Shielded Voting

The staple governance tool is launching a feature that protects DAO governance votes. Snapshot and Shutter Network have teamed up to bring an encrypted shielded vote mechanism to the platform. Governance votes on the voting platform will be protected and hidden with encryption until voting has concluded to prevent voter apathy, collusion, and general bad behavior.

Lido looks to diversify its treasury

Lido, the liquid staking provider, has begun discussing selling its native token to help cover operational expenses. The DAO is looking to sell 20 million LDO tokens to venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital and other partners. The deal provides the DAO with $29m in DAI, helping secure runway and valuable strategic partners. Current forum sentiment seems mixed with amendments likely before it comes to a vote.

Uniswap continues exploring a fee switch

A new proposal at Uniswap continues a long history of fee switch discussions and debates. The proposal suggests activating the fee switch for two of its largest pools: USDC/ETH & USDC/USDT. This limited rollout allows the protocol to analyze and see potential impact quickly. The topic of a fee switch has been met with strong pushback before and looks to clear more hurdles this time around.

Aave & Balancer swap tokens

The two DeFi protocols have successfully completed a $1M token swap. Aave will receive 200,000 BAL tokens in exchange for 16,907 AAVE tokens. The swap makes both protocols large influences within their respective governance process. DAO treasury diversification continues to ramp up under current market conditions.

📚 Good Reads & Listens

“Three Key Takeaways on DAO Governance” by 0xJustice
“Evolutionary Organization” by Chase Chapman
“Rebuilding the Governance Premium” by Staking Rewards
“Meta Governance & The Lack of Consolidation In A Bear Market” by Degen Sensei
The Token Compensation Paradox: Losing Reputation To Earn Money.
How Decentralization is Reshaping Technology and Governance
‘Tabula: Blogs for DAOs’ by Gnosis Guild
Owocki discusses Gitcoin Passport

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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1) Compound: Goodbye and Thank You

ELI5: Getty Hill says goodbye to Compound.

View the proposal

This proposal, put forward by Getty Hill (co-founder of GFX Labs), ends Getty’s contributor grant at Compound. Getty was the first person to receive regular COMP payments at the protocol level. He joined Compound in the early days of V1, and reflected in a post in the forums about his own growth:

“I remember when COMP was introduced and the idea of protocol governance. Up until then, I just sat in Discord. COMP and Governor Alpha allowed me to take an active role in improving the protocol.”

He eventually put forward his first proposal: “I was amazed that someone with such limited credentials could make such a massive change, and that became my catalyst to continue to work in protocol governance.” He has since been responsible, among many other things, for adding AAVE, SUSHI, YFI, and MKR to the protocol. As one person in the forum thread wrote, Getty has been “a pivotal player in governance here, a true role model for protocol community members.”

100% voted for
See the discussion

2) SuperRare: Swap Tokens Between SuperRareDAO and BottoDAO

ELI5: A collaboration to further experiments in decentralized curation.

View the proposal

More than a simple token swap, this proposal sought to stimulate alignment and collaboration between two DAOs at the forefront of decentralized curation – one of which (Botto) oversees the development of a decentralized autonomous artist (DAA).

“Botto works in collaboration with a community of stewards who vote on its generated imagery to decide what is art. This community of stewards is collectively known as BottoDAO.”

Botto has been an artist on SuperRare since the early days and is among the all-time top ten artists on the platform. The token swap enables the SuperRare DAO to use $BOTTO to participate in Botto’s governance, in effect allowing $RARE holders to influence the creations of the DAA. BottoDAO in turn can use $RARE to vote in Space Races “to build out curation of related AI art projects.” The specifics of the exchange, its mechanics, and a fuller representation of its benefits are detailed in the proposal. There was one objection in the forum discussion: Does this proposal in effect show favoritism for a single artist? This question goes to the very nature of what BottoDAO is (and isn’t), and what decentralized curation entails.

88.3% voted yes
See the discussion

3) CityDAO: Acquire Baby Parcel for NFT Leases

ELI5: A little test run of tokenized land.

View the proposal

The purpose of this proposal is to obtain approval to buy a small, affordable piece of land (under $9,999, in Colorado) to concretely play out experiments with NFT leases to CityDAO citizens. This would help lay the groundwork for what is imagined with the Big Parcel (see July 7 newsletter), among other projects. “We view this as the training wheels for learning how to ride the Big Parcel bike with NFT leases, land purchases outside of Wyoming, and more.”

In the example provided, the DAO could purchase a five-acre piece of land, which could then be subdivided into 10 half-acre parcels NFTs that each represent certain rights (which could vary between parcels/NFTs). This gives the DAO a project that is achievable over the short term and which will inform future experiments with larger and more complicated properties. The proposal presents the associated costs as a kind of “tuition”:

“For a legitimately minimal expense, CityDAO can find out what does - and does not - work with respect to creating a land token standard and using NFTs to allocate property rights.”