🗳 This Week in Governance - June 1

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

Jun 01, 2023

The Aave Chan Initiative introduces Orbit to boost delegates
1inch, Hop, and others move to recognize delegates
Uniswap Doesn’t Pass Fee Switch Proposal
Karma reveals the ‘Tip A Delegate’ feature

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 485,930 ballots
👥 251,300 voters
📜 253 proposals
🌐 76 active DAOs

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🗞 News

The Aave Chan Initiative introduces Orbit to boost delegates

The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), a leading delegate within the Aave DAO, this week introduced Orbit, “a delegate platform funding initiative that aims to professionalize the Aave DAO governance and reward top current contributors who are not currently compensated for this role.” Orbit is for the time being a pilot program funded by the ACI itself. Three delegate platforms — StableLab, Flipside, and the LBS Blockchain Society — will receive $5k each per month for the quarter beginning June 1. This initiative from the ACI follows their recently launched Skyward program, which supports Aave DAO members in navigating the proposal process.

1inch, Hop, and others move to recognize delegates

Movements to recognize delegates in various ways are active in several DAOs right now, as StableLab pointed out in a recent tweet thread. Aave, Hop, and Paladin have all been busy on this front of late. Following these similar initiatives in other DAOs, the 1inch DAO is now considering a proposal — put forward by the DAOplomats — that aims to create a six-month trial of a funded recognized delegates program. The stated goal is “to reduce the collective cost of governance and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the governance process” within the DAO. Arguing that being a delegate is a “specialized” role upon which DAOs increasingly depend, the proposers suggest how the role can be defined as well as how potential candidates can be vetted and compensated.

Uniswap Community Doesn’t Pass Fee Switch Proposal

The recent fee switch proposal in the Uniswap community did not receive enough votes to pass. The voting results showed that approximately 45% of the community favored no fee, while around 42% supported the implementation of a fee. The proposed fee would have been a fraction of the pool fees across Uniswap V3 pools, and a test would have been conducted on the Polygon deployment before potentially expanding it to other pools. Concerns regarding tax and legal implications surrounding the fee switch were raised by community members, with discussions highlighting the absence of a legal entity structure and the need to mitigate potential tax risks.

Karma reveals the Tip A Delegate feature

Following on the heels of recent cross-DAO movements to aid in the discovery and compensation of delegates, Karma has released an experimental feature that allows users to tip delegates whose work they believe has added value to a DAO or ecosystem. Users can search for delegates using an ENS or ETH address and tip using a stablecoin on various networks.

📚 Good Reads

Factors of Decentralization of Web3 Protocols: Tools for Planning Greater Decentralization, by Jennings, Wink, and Zuckerman
Chain of thought: Exploring blockchain through the lens of philosophy, by Sasha Shilina
Singapore University of Social Sciences Proposed A New Voting Mechanism for DAO Governance, by Jyotirmoy Barman
FWB DAO Legal Wrapper Proposal
A Crypto Future: An Exploration, by 0xsmac and Compound Crypto
Pathways to the Regulation of Crypto-Assets: A Global Approach, from the World Economic Forum
An Empirical Study on Snapshot DAOs, by Wang, Yu, Sai, Sun, Nguyen, Xu, Chen
Adventures in Onchain Ownership, by Caleb Shough

🧵 Threads

What are the issues of decentralized governance? (highlights from the empirical study listed above), from Snapshot Labs
The structure of voting power at Uniswap, from Butter
The Chinese government white paper (I read 98 pages of Chinese so you don’t have to), from @Milestones_NFT
The importance of gauges to DeFi governance, by Ken Deeter
On governments & public blockchains, by punk6529

🎧 Listens

Delegation Week Roundup, from the Rari Foundation
Summoning Ether’s Phoenix with Karl Floersch, on Green Pill
Patrick @ The Arbitrum Foundation, on DAO Talk
Research Day 2023, videos from the conference co-hosted by Celestia, DBA, Geometry, & Robot
The Tinder of On-Chain Voting with Griff Green, on Green Pill

💬 Forums

Aave: [TEMP CHECK] Integrating MakerDAO’s DSR into Aave V3 Ethereum Pool

This proposal suggests “integrating MakerDAO's Dai Savings Rate (DSR) into the Aave V3 ETH pool by incorporating sDAI, an ERC-4626 Vault token that includes the DSR yield, into the Aave protocol.” This integration aims to enable Aave liquidity providers to benefit from the DSR rate without additional cost to Aave DAI borrowers.

Arbitrum: #2 Arbitrum Open Governance Call

The second Arbitrum Open Governance Call took place on May 30. The agenda for the call included an introduction, updates on AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2, updates from the Foundation, an open discussion on active forum topics, and a Q&A session.

Decentraland: Establishing A DAO Treasury Management Process

This proposal aims to establish a “systematic management approach for the DAO Treasury, focusing on long-term financial analytics, planning, and a sustainable financial strategy.” The proposal suggests measures such as improving financial reporting and transparency, diversifying holdings across different assets, implementing internal controls, and creating comprehensive risk assessment strategies.

ENS: Steward Nominations — Meta-Governance WG (Q3/Q4 2023 Term)

Three stewards will be elected for the working group, and the nomination process will be followed by a five-day election window. The voting period for nominations is from June 6 to June 9. Steward elections will use approval voting, with the election period starting on June 10 and ending on June 15.

Radicle: Governance Manual

Following the approval of the Governance Improvements Proposal in March 2023, an upgraded version-controlled Governance Manual has been introduced as the official documentation for the governance process, providing comprehensive information and instructions.

Tornado: Full Governance Attack Description

The attacker's objectives were to capture funds and gain majority voting power, while remaining unnoticed, which was not achieved. The attack involved deploying contracts, including a backdoored proposal, locking balances, executing malicious logic, and withdrawing TORN tokens. The attacker eventually rug-pulled the treasury, and after realizing the rewards had been claimed, proposed setting the locked balances back to zero.

Uniswap: Structure of Power

Butter has created a dashboard to provide insights into the voting power structure of Uniswap, highlighting the concentration of voting power among the top 50 delegates, the prevalence of single-holder delegates, the representation of minority holders, and the participation in voting.

📜 Proposals

Builder DAO: Prop House Open Dev Round

The proposer here makes the case for an open prop house round to fund contributors to nouns.build. This would help expand the reach of the engineering community while allowing for experiments with onboarding to the DAO. Up to this point, the proposer argues, “client development has been very top down.”

⏰ Voting ends: June 3 ⛓️ Type: Onchain ✍ Author: hot.neocry.eth

BitDAO: Mantle Token Design, Conversion Parameters, and Asset Handling

As noted in last week’s newsletter, BitDAO is undergoing a rebrand to become Mantle, which will focus entirely and being a Layer 2. This proposal details elements of the design and identifies some of the parameters of the forthcoming $MNT token. For example, $MNT will have a conversion ratio of 1:1 with $BIT, and it will have functions analogous to some found in $ARB and $OP. More details are laid out in the text of the proposal.

⏰ Voting ends: June 7 ⚡Type: Snapshot ✍ Author: Cateatpeanut and the Mantle Network Team 💬 Read the discussion

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