This Week in Governance - July 7
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
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📊 This Week’s Stats
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:
A snapshot of global governance activity on Ethereum:
🗳️ 49,125 ballots were cast on 236 different proposals 🗳️
👥 12,087 unique voters 👥
🌐 56 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 129 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 Boardroom API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Funds are once again Safu
DeFi project Wonderland re-embraces ousted leader and ex-convict Sifu. The protocol passed a governance proposal to purchase $25M in Sifu Vision token, the native token for Sifu’s decentralized investment fund. The amount purchased accounts for more than half of the circulating Sifu Vision token supply, further aligning the project with its old leader.
MakerDAO stays active, looks to add RWA
The DeFi titan is back with another historic proposal that aims to help it diversify into real-world assets. This proposal grants Huntingdon Valley Bank, a 150-year-old lender, the ability to draw $100M $DAI for general business use. Maker is paving the future of DeFi with its recent hard push into RWA diversification.
PieDAO acquires BasketDAO
PieDAO has pulled off a first-of-its-kind DAO-to-DAO acquisition of BasketDAO. BasketDAO previously wound down as a result of protocol exploits. The two protocols offer users similar DeFi index products making the acquisition a natural fit.
Game Studio Sempronia rage quits RomeDAO
Game development is complicated, especially in a DAO. Indie game studio Sempronia has severed ties to RomeDAO, the project building a DeFi-enabled RPG. The team of 20+ game developers found it extremely difficult to build within the context of a DAO and have called it quits.
SushiSwap and KlimaDAO partner to battle climate change
Leading DEX, Sushiswap, has passed a proposal intended to help mitigate climate change via KlimaDAO carbon offsets. Users of Sushi will be able to opt into a carbon-neutral swap option. The deal hopes to address some of the space’s climate change criticisms.
📚 Good Reads & Listens
“A Stupid Simple Governance Framework” by Andrew Beal
“DAO Governance, Tooling, and Culture” w/Stefen Deleveaux on Rehash Podcast
Aragon introduces OVOTE: Offchain Voting w/ Onchain Trustless Execution
“Has DAO Governance all been a show?” by Lior Goldenberg
MakerDAO has had record governance participation
“Here’s Why DAOs Fail” w/Joseph Delong on The Defiant Podcast
A brief roadmap to further decentralize Uniswap
📝 Highlighted Proposals
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Developer DAO: Improvement Proposal Formalization
ELI5: A proposal to create a new process for future proposals.
Developer DAO, a collection of “talented and like-minded people…interested in learning about and building on Web3,” created this meta-proposal in an effort to begin to lay the foundation for governance post $CODE token release. In effect this proposal lays out the process for future proposal creation, which is as follows: Proposals (or DDIPs) can be suggested in specified areas only. Anyone can begin discussion of a potential proposal in the appropriate channel in Discord. For the proposal to move to a forum vote, the proposal must have generated some level of consensus, be re-posted as a templated draft in another Discord channel, and be “championed” by someone who holds 50K $CODE and has been allow-listed. Once in the forum, the proposal can receive a “yes” vote, a “support but with amendments” vote, and a straight “no” vote, and (as with the following voting phase on Snapshot) is considered to have succeeded only with a supermajority of at least 66% “yes” votes. This proposal aims to set the DAO on the path of progressive decentralization (though there was some contention around that term in the forum discussion).
“Our explicit intention is to continue to remove controls around the proposal process. Proposal procedures are at risk for various governance attacks. As we mature our governance mechanisms, we can continue removing controls and decentralizing further.”
98.63% voted for
See the discussion
Optimism: Governance Fund Phase 1 Proposals
ELI5: Optimism moves through a lively second cycle of proposals.
Readers of this newsletter might remember that Optimism passed its first (mostly batched) set of proposals through the recently formed Optimism Collective just over two weeks ago. For the second cycle, known as Governance Fund Phase 1, proposals were not batched; some 17 separate proposals were submitted to the community for consideration – resulting in lively and thought-provoking engagement. A very high number (often 5k+) of wallets voted; more than half of the proposals did not pass, and a number of people abstained for reasons stated publicly. Most if not all discussions raised interesting questions (e.g. is open source a public good by its very nature?), assessed the current state of web3 (e.g. the complexity of wallets), or pondered the exact remit of the Governance Fund.
See links to the discussions here
CityDAO: The Big Parcel
ELI5: The aspiring network city considers pursuing a (large) parcel to serve as HQ.
This proposal is intended to gauge sentiment around the idea of pursuing The Big Parcel, a piece of land – hundreds of acres in size, located somewhere in America – that would serve as the headquarters for CityDAO, a hub of the organization’s vision of a “network city.” The requirements for the parcel are added that it must be fairly close to an airport, have existing structures that can be used right away, and have an ideologically aligned community. The parcel must also allow for a range of “experimental initiatives,” which might include co-living and working, affordable housing, public goods management, experiments in governance, and fractionalization or tokenization. The forum discussion includes links to examples of properties currently on the market.
97.38% voted to approve
See the discussion
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