This Week in Governance - June 16

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

Duncan Dobbelmann

Jun 16, 2022

📊 This Week’s Stats

A snapshot of DAO governance activity and global treasury changes.

Ecosystem Overview:

Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:

🗳️ 31,082 ballots were cast on 268 different proposals 🗳️
👥 10,769 unique voters 👥
🌐 45 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 111 new proposals created ✍️

For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, check out the Dashboard.

🚢 Boardroom API Integration

The four Synthetix Council governing bodies just opened up voting and nominations to elect their members, and Synthetix has integrated with the Boardroom API to contextualize the nominee governance wallet profiles.

The Boardroom API powers these profiles to include off-chain metadata including nomination pitches. This metadata is attached to each wallet and offers voters a clearer sense of who they are voting for and their potential value proposition. Read more about the nominations and integration here and play around with the API here:

swagger.boardroom.info

🚀 The above link can be used to make actual requests against the Boardroom API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!

🗞️ News in Brief

Merit Circle DAO and Yield Guild Games agree to part ways
Forefront releases Terminal, a suite of tools for tokenized communities
DAO contribution platform Clarity 2.0 is launched

📚 Good Reads & Listens

A Sybil attack explainer, by @magikinvestxyz
“Governance in Review,” by @Sim_Pop
Paradigm’s “DAO Legal Entity Matrix”
A lecture on “the purpose, design principles, experiments, and challenges of using DAOs,” by @orishim and @ronboger
“Governance Experiments,” by Andrew Beal

📝 Highlighted Proposals

Each week we select noteworthy proposals to draw your attention to. See all proposals on your Boardroom Dashboard.

1) ENS: Dissolve Community Working Group

🔤 ELI5: ENS reorganizes its working groups.

This proposal calls for the Community Working Group, established along with three other ENS working groups in December of 2021 via EP4, to be dissolved because “the DAO does not have enough active participants to justify having ‘community’ as a standalone working group.” Additionally, as discussed with stewards and participants within the Group, subgroups from the Community Working Group can be “comfortably” folded into the Ecosystem Working Group. EP4, “Creation of Foundational Working Groups and Working Group Rules,” established a mechanism for the creation of new working groups that also allows for their dissolution, the proposal argues. The new working group structure is to take effect on July 1, 2022. All unspent funds will be sent to the ENS DAO treasury. The remaining ENS groups will be: the Meta-Goverance Working Group; the Public Goods Working Group; and the ENS Ecosystem Working Group.

88.1% voted for
See the discussion
View the proposal

2) Decentraland: Decentraland scenes as NFTs

🔤 ELI5: Allow NFTs of Metaverse designs to be created and sold.

“The current representation of the Metaverse remains empty,” the author of this proposal writes. “Stakeholders want to embrace the Metaverse, but they are faced with vast plots of land that remain empty.” This proposal seeks to allow architects and designers the ability to generate NFTs from what they create in Decentraland; the NFTs could then be sold to those who like the designs, both creating a marketplace and incentivizing architects and designers to create more.

“Architects/designers can now become content producers, leveraging their efforts for exponential development through Decentraland, similarly to how the marketplace works currently for land and wearables, while at the same time reaching out to potential consumers with excellent material, keeping them engaged, and growing Decentraland’s user base.”

The proposal gained broad support in this opinion poll, though important questions were raised in the discussion. For example: Should Decentraland devs be turned to this work, or should it be assigned to a third party via a grant? And will there be DRM issues?

81.7% voted yes
See the discussion
View the proposal

3) Lido: 'Two-phase voting' proposal for Lido DAO

🔤 ELI5: A tactic is proposed to protect against “last-minute vote” attacks.

The Lido DAO has been discussing how to “harden” its governance process. As Lido has grown and become more mature, the possibility of governance attacks has increased. This proposal specifically addresses the “last moment vote” attack, in which the attacker gathers the minimum support value of the LDO token (5% of supply) to deploy in the last voting block, ensuring execution of the desired outcome (as long as 50% or more support for the outcome is reached). The proposed solution is to divide voting into two phases: the first is a 48-hour block during which one can vote for/against as usual, and the second is a 24-hour block during which one can only vote against. As the proposal states, this “prevent[s] unexpected changes from being propagated in the last moment” and creates a “24h period to react before the vote decision comes into force.” The proposal passed on Snapshot with quorum, and will now proceed to an on-chain vote.