This Week in Governance - June 23
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
📊 This Week’s Stats
A snapshot of DAO governance activity and global treasury changes.
Ecosystem Overview:
Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:
🗳️ 16,933 ballots were cast on 215 different proposals 🗳️
👥 7,523 unique voters 👥
🌐 48 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 120 new proposals created ✍️
For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, check out the Dashboard.
🚀 Newly Added
Hop Protocol is now live on Boardroom
Delegate and vote using your HOP tokens, all from one seamless interface:
Check start and end dates for proposals in the Calendar page
Browse for relevant discourse on the Discussions page
Discover active and engaged delegates on the Delegate page
Create and vote on proposals on the Proposals page
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Solend faces decentralization criticism
Solend, a lending and borrowing protocol on Solana, has had an eventful week with numerous questionable “governance proposals”. First, users voted in favor of taking over a whale account to mitigate the risk of liquidation that would hurt the underlying assets. Next, a proposal reversed course, invalidated the previous proposal, and introduced new protocol parameter changes to mitigate similar risks in the future. Now, the whale account has shuffled around its position to reduce liquidation risk but the protocol is still not completely in the clear.
Index Coop faces an existential risk
Index Coop, creators of financial products such as DPI, will be reducing 40% of its contributor spend as a reaction to the market downturn. Several core hires will be relieved of their roles, others will reduce their time commitments, and others will have their salaries reduced all in an attempt to secure the Coop's longevity.
Uniswap Labs acquires Genie
Uniswap has expanded its product offering into NFTs by acquiring Genie, the NFT Marketplace aggregator. The DEX will now offer NFTs alongside its existing ERC-20 offerings as well as developer APIs and widgets to build a developer ecosystem.
Circle Announces EUROC — a Euro-backed stablecoin
USDC issuer Circle has announced a new stablecoin pegged to the Euro, EUROC. The stablecoin will be 100% backed by euros and offer investors broader opportunities for payments and use-cases.
dYdX to launch as its own standalone blockchain
The largest decentralized derivatives exchange, dYdX, has announced plans to create its own blockchain on the Cosmos network. The plan allows the DeFi project to properly scale its order book and leave behind its StrarkEx implementation.
NFT Marketplace Magic Eden raises $130M in a Series B round
The largest NFT Marketplace on Solana has received a fresh round of funding of $130m at a $1.6B valuation. Investors in the round include Electric Capital, Greylock, Lightspeed & others.
📚 Good Reads & Listens
“The Bull Case for Pods”, by Orca Protocol
“DAO Delegation: To Delegate to an Individual or a DAO?”, w/ Linda Xie and Julia Rosenberg on DAOn the RabbitHole with Anay Sim
A retrospective on the last 1.5 years of the Uniswap Grants Program
“Monolithic to Modular DAOs” w/ Julia Rosenberg on Layer Zero
The ULTIMATE thread on wtf happened at 3AC, by Miles Deutscher
“Public Goods are Good” w/ Scott Moore on Rehash: A Web3 Podcast with Diana Chen
DAO Treasury Management Guide by Deus Ex DAO and Ape/rture
“Web3 Use Cases: Today” by Packy McCormick
📝 Highlighted Proposals
Each week we select noteworthy proposals to draw your attention to. See all proposals on your Boardroom Dashboard.
Proposal A: Governance Fund Phase 0 - Batch Vote
🔤 ELI5: Optimism’s Token House exercises its first opportunity to vote.
The first set of proposals in Optimism governance was posted for voting on Snapshot on June 9, not long after Airdrop #1 initiated the Token House, part of the recently announced Optimism Collective. This first voting Cycle, known as “Governance Fund Phase 0,” was in part a test run of voting with Token House and was unusual in the following ways: project eligibility was determined by on-chain metrics; the Optimism Foundation worked with eligible projects to construct applications; projects were asked to follow specific guidelines in their proposals; and the proposals considered ready after discussion and review in the forum were batched together to form one proposal on Snapshot. This batched proposal was called “Proposal A: Governance Fund Phase 0 - Batch Vote” and contains some 24 separate proposals.
Several people expressed frustration that 24 proposals were batched together, preventing the community from voting on the proposals individually. Lefteris Karapetsas wrote: “I don’t like rubber-stamping anything. Governance is not just logging in snapshot and signing a YES or NO message.” This was echoed by Deven Matthews, representing Blockchain at Berkeley. Others, like Linda Xie, while registering reservations, felt that the approach was pragmatic and expedient: “I have confidence in the Optimism Foundation working with the teams to iterate the proposals” to make sure they’ll be “beneficial to the ecosystem,” she wrote. Linda, like others, noted that future voting cycles will not batch proposals.
89.35% voted for
See the discussion
Ratify Foundation changes, DAO gov updates, and asset transfer
🔤 ELI5: A wide-ranging proposal ratifying shifts in structure and governance.
This is an encompassing proposal meant to ratify a number of important changes that have been aired and discussed by the Gitcoin community. The changes are in three main areas, the first of which covers Gitcoin Foundation updates. There is a new Memorandum of Association and a new set of Bylaws. The Foundation is also set to become "ownerless," meaning that it can "act in accordance with DAO governance without any obligations to any equity holders." Three subsidiaries have been formed to facilitate IRL needs: the first to hold Bitcoin trademarks and other IP; the second to serve as the primary operating entity (e.g. to pay the bills, among other things); and the third to function as the custodian of the Gitcoin Grants Multisig.
Governance process updates constitute the second area of change: the DAO has moved to v3, which captures a process the DAO has been "largely already following." Lastly, the third area addressed by this proposal covers asset transfers to the DAO (among which are treasury, trademarks, and smart contracts).
"Gitcoin Holdings will be transferring these Assets to us, as well as some additional capital to ensure the Foundation and subsidiaries can pay their operating costs for some time and run as an independent and decentralized enterprise."
100% voted yes
See the discussion
Should GnosisDAO do a BFF Partnership with MakerDAO?
🔤 ELI5: DAO besties plan to promote and strengthen DAI and DeFi.
As the title suggests, this proposal aimed to formally establish a close relationship between two organizations that already have aligned commitments—among which is the use of the stablecoin DAI. DAI is generated by Maker Vaults, while Gnosis Chain bridges DAI as xDAI for use as a gas token. Both organizations are fully in support of increasing the adoption of DAI to "build a decentralized digital global economy that is fair, transparent and efficient." By joining together in this DAO2DAO relationship, both DAOs, as well as the DeFi ecosystem, more generally will be strengthened, the proposal argues.
The two DAOs will partner to promote DeFi; but this collaboration isn't only promotional. Among other things, the DAOs will arrange a token swap of $70M to create a liquidity pool (the multiple benefits of this are specified); explore the creation of an institutional MakerDAO vault to mint DAI to assist in the development of Gnosis Chain; consider a collaborative grant to further awareness and adoption of Gnosis Chain; and rebrand xDAI to DAI.
100% voted for
See the discussion
🚢 Product Updates
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Users who wish to represent voters as delegates are now able to include a delegation pitch in their delegate profiles. Delegation pitches offer users a better understanding of the value proposition a delegate brings.
Add your delegation pitch here.
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