🗳 This Week in Governance - June 29

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

Duncan Dobbelmann

Jun 29, 2023

Optimism to vote on Season 4 Missions
Mantle discusses Lido collaboration
ApeCoin elects two governance stewards
Frax Funds Core Development and Grants
Sushi gets legal update from Head Chef

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 33,362 ballots
👥 24,682 voters
📜 215 proposals
🌐 71 active DAOs

Let’s get into it 🔥

📜 Proposals

Recently Closed

Hop DAO Hosts Multisig Signer Elections

The Hop DAO community elected new multisig signers this week: Fourpoops, Francom, Rxpwnz, Thegreg.eth, and Olimpio received the most support. Each will receive compensation of $2,250 twice per year (for a total of $22,500). In addition to salary compensation, gas rebates are proposed for signers to be reimbursed for the exact amount of gas spent during the 6-month term. The responsibilities of the signers include verifying transactions, managing the nomination and election process, and handling day-to-day operations of the multisig.

ApeCoin Governance Working Group Elects Stewards

The ApeCoin Governance Working Group held an election to select two Stewards from a pool of five candidates. AllCityBAYC and tigerisfine received the most support. The elected Stewards will serve a one-year term starting on July 1, 2023. Each Steward will receive a compensation of $9,000.00 worth of ApeCoin equivalent per month until the end of August.

Compound Renews OpenZeppelin Security Partnership

OpenZeppelin has been providing security services for the Compound DAO, including continuous audit, security advisory, and monitoring, since December of 2021. This proposal requested payment for next quarter in the form of a lump-sum of COMP, with a total payment of 34,118 COMP. The proposal passed with 100% voting in favor.

Frax Funds Core Development, Community Outreach, and Grants

The proposal suggested staking 4.5 million FXS in veFXS for six months to generate yield, which will be used to fund the expansion of the team, bring on new team members, and establish the Frax Grants+Incubator Program. The remaining 500k FXS will also be used for similar initiatives. After six months, the proposal will be subject to another community vote for further allocation of funds, ensuring accountability to FXS tokenholders. The goal is to utilize the FXS Treasury strategically to accelerate FRAX development and increase community involvement. The proposal passed with 100% voting in favor.

Ending Soon

Appointing Delegates to Better Represent Dapps in Their Respective Ecosystem

The proposal suggests electing or appointing a Paladin representative for each ecosystem (Aura, Convex, and Aave), who would be delegated the voting power. This is to strengthen the underlying protocols and provide representation for depositors. If approved, an 18,000 PAL budget over 6 months would be allocated to reward these representatives. The representatives would have specific obligations to fulfill in order to maintain the delegated power and earn the rewards.

Providing Retroactive Funding for May Contributions in Unlock

The proposal aims to distribute retroactive funding from the Unlock DAO treasury to members of the Unlock DAO community who made notable contributions to the project during May 2023. A Snapshot proposal was submitted and voted on, resulting in the allocation of 100 UDT governance tokens to four community members. The specific amounts are 53.88 UDT for Rwalls, 26.99 UDT for Blahkheart, 12.51 UDT for Foskaay, and 6.62 UDT for Muhammadmusaab.

Upcoming

Optimism Token House to Vote on Season 4 “Missions”

On June 29th at 19:00 GMT Optimism’s Token House will be able to vote on all eligible Mission proposals using approval voting. Missions are part of a new experiment in Optimism’s Season 4 governance structure: they are “specific initiatives aimed at achieving” one of four Intents. Keep your eyes peeled for the proposal to go live on Boardroom.

🔦 Product Spotlight

Dawn is a mobile wallet and has recently launched “Dawn Vote” - a tool that lets you see governance proposals in the mobile wallet and vote via the app. It brings voting in DAOs to mobile, featuring:

Governance news feed of all your relevant votes
Push notifications for new votes, so you never miss a vote on the go
On-chain and off-chain proposal support
A page to explore DAOs

Dawn is building on top of Boardroom’s API and is the easiest way to stay up to date with governance votes on mobile. You can check out their announcement here and download Dawn from the app store.

Forums

Aztec Considers New Approaches to Governance

One forum post discusses a proposal called "The Republic," which focuses on a new approach to governance. The proposal consists of two parts: self-governed portals and the introduction of a decision-making system called the "Senate." The self-governed portals are categorized into three types: rollup-governed, portal-governed, and ungovernable, each offering different levels of control. The Senate, a smaller group elected by the Citizens through token-governance, aims to streamline the process of following forks without requiring migrations. The proposal emphasizes the flexibility of the system, allowing portals to reject governance and replace the Senate if desired.

A follow-up forum post presents a proposal for a governance system that uses staking and social consensus instead of on-chain token voting. The proposal suggests that stakers, who have a stake in maximizing the token's value and rewards, should decide on network upgrades through social consensus. The proposal highlights benefits such as lower voting costs, alignment of economic interests, involvement of software implementors, and harm to stakers who don't participate in social consensus. It also discusses comparisons with the “Republic” token-based voting and addresses potential issues like bootstraping and the immutability of the staking and incentives contracts.

Sushi Head Chef Provides Legal Update to the DAO

The Sushi community has decided to pursue a legal entity structure to protect the DAO from business liability. After initial discussions with Fenwick & West LLP, it was determined that additional legal advice from Gresham International would be beneficial. Gresham will help develop a custom international model, provide enhanced liability protections, create agreements, develop user terms, and offer regulatory support to ensure the growth and protection of the Sushi DAO. “Additional funds will likely be required to maintain the ongoing legal needs of the Sushi group,” says Head Chef Jared Grey.

Maker DAO Provides Real-World Asset Report for May

The May 2023 update on Maker's Real-World Asset (RWA) exposure shows a significant increase in Maker's RWA balance due to additional Dai deployed from the Monetalis Clydesdale vault, bringing the total RWAs to 2.34 billion Dai. RWAs accounted for 79.7% of all Stability Fees generated by Maker in May, and year-to-date, RWAs have generated 78.5% of the total Stability Fees. The update provides specific information on Monetalis Clydesdale, Huntingdon Valley Bank, BlockTower Credit, New Silver, 6s Capital Partners, Fortunafi, Harbor Trade, and ConsolFreight, detailing their respective activities and performance in May.

Reducing The Recognized Delegate Voting Weight Requirement in Hop

The proposal suggests reducing the current requirement of maintaining a 90,000 HOP voting weight for delegate compensation in order to increase accessibility to the delegate program for the broader Hop DAO community. Three options for the new required delegate voting weight are presented: 30,000 HOP, 40,000 HOP, or 50,000 HOP. Once a consensus is reached, the proposal will be voted on Snapshot to determine the new required HOP token amount for becoming a Hop Recognized Delegate.

Should the 1inch Recognized Delegates Program be Amended?

This proposal suggests amending the Recognized Delegates program to create a three-tiered system that incentivizes new delegates with lower voting weight to progress and become Tier 3 Recognized delegates. The proposal outlines the responsibilities of Recognized delegates, their compensation based on tiers, and the eligibility criteria. The process for becoming a Recognized delegate is also described, along with considerations for implementing reputation tracking, program duration, and the potential hiring of a Governance Operations Specialist.

A New Direction for Olympus DAO?

The forum post introduces a proposal for Olympus DAO called "Project Phaeton," suggesting a new direction for the protocol. The proposal outlines changing the backing to ETH, staking the majority in diverse protocols, and denominating Ranged Bound Stability (RBS) in ETH to increase OHM holders' exposure to ETH. The post also highlights challenges faced by Olympus, such as limited market adoption, treasury management difficulties, and increasing risks. The proposal suggests rebranding and repositioning OHM as an asset rather than a currency and emphasizes the potential benefits of the proposed changes, including reduced dependency on treasury management, lower smart contract and regulatory risk, and increased innovation.

Mantle Discusses Lido Collaboration

The proposal suggests allocating 40,000 ETH from the BitDAO treasury to stETH in order to bootstrap DEX liquidity and integrations across Mantle, establishing a revenue-sharing agreement between BitDAO and Lido DAO for 12 months, and collaborating on a gasless bridge for Mantle users powered by stETH. The revenue-sharing agreement would return a percentage of revenue earned by Lido DAO Treasury to BitDAO, and the allocated stETH would be used to bootstrap liquidity across DEXes.

📚 Good Reads

Economics of Love: On Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another,” from David Phelps
Accountability Special (Prop House), from MATY.ETH in the NounsDAO Newsletter
Rari DAO Plans to Launch A Delegate Launchpad Program, in DAO Times
V4 Governance Deep Dive, from dYdX

🧵 Threads

Deep dive into @lalalavendr’s DAO Archives for a takeaway on voting, from the Optimism Foundation
Why I am excited about DeFi more than ever, from Stani Kulechov
How is the playing field being leveled? from Gwart

🎧 Listens

GP A Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance, on Green Pill
Case Studies on Collaborative Currencies: A Conversation with Will Ruddick from Grassroots Economics, on The Ownership Economy
Vitalik Buterin Discusses The 2-Month Zuzalu Experiment, On Bankless
Interview with Gustav @ StableLab, on DAO Talk
What Makes a DAO Successful with Marco Grendel and 0xJustice, on Crypto Sapiens

💭 Ecosystem Takes

🎈 Have a Meme

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