🗳 This Week in Governance - Mar. 16
🗳 This Week in Governance - Mar. 16
A weekly resource covering crypto governance, politics, and power.
📣 Key Points
Stablecoin governance at Aave, Compound, and Maker
Utah passes Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Act
GFX Labs introduces Community Proposal Factory
Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 139,467 ballots
👥 25,634 voters
📜 234 proposals
🌐 68 active DAOs
Let’s get into it 🔥
🎙️ Delegate Episode 4
In this episode, Cameron O'Donnell and Laurence Smith talk with two MakerDAO delegates about MIP101: The Maker Constitution.
MIP101 proposes a set of guiding principles aimed at steering the MakerDAO community toward enhanced decentralization while providing a clear decision-making and dispute-resolution framework. Apple | Spotify.
🗞 News Brief
Stablecoin governance at Aave, Compound, and Maker
USDC drifted far below its peg on Friday when Circle, the stablecoin’s issuer, announced that it held a substantial amount of the coin’s backing USD at Silicon Valley Bank — which had just collapsed under the pressure of a bank run. As USDC plays a major if not central role in many DeFi protocols, those protocols had to be prepared to take immediate governance action to protect themselves and their users. Paul Lei from Gauntlet noted the concern on March 11 in the Aave forum, stating that “action could be required both from on-chain governance and Guardian via emergency because of bad debt risk,” and initially recommended that all v2 and v3 markets be temporarily paused. As the situation stabilized and discussion with Chaos Labs and others continued, the initial recommendations were changed.
A similar discussion took place in the Compound forums, while at Maker monet-supply of the Risk Core Unit Team put forward an emergency governance proposal “intended to limit Maker’s exposure to potentially impaired stablecoins and other risky collateral, while maintaining enough liquidity to prevent DAI from trading significantly above $1 if conditions change, and ensuring there is adequate market liquidity to process potential liquidations of crypto collateralized vaults.”
Utah passes Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Act
Utah became the first state to legally recognize DAOs by way of H.B. 357, which was passed by the legislature on March 1. The bill “allows a decentralized autonomous organization that has not registered as a for-profit corporate entity or a non-profit entity to be treated as the legal equivalent of a domestic limited liability company.” It is based on the Coala Model Law, and was the outcome of efforts from the legislature’s Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force. Several concerns — including how to handle anonymity — were addressed via compromises.
GFX Labs introduces Community Proposal Factory
Getty Hill and GFX Labs recently introduced the Community Proposal Factory (CPF), a protocol-agnostic structure that lowers the threshold to initiate governance proposals — effectively democratizing proposal power. Taking a cue from the Compound Autonomous Proposals of old, the CPF is basically “sub-DAO of a larger protocol with a significantly lower proposal threshold and the same proposal functionality.” Those who meet the proposal threshold (intended to be much lower than that which is native to the protocol) can create a proposal, and if the proposal receives enough votes it can be promoted to the standard proposal process. The CPF is compatible with Compound Governor Bravo-based DAOs, but it can be adapted to other governance frameworks. GFX Labs has pitched a concrete implementation of the CPF in the Uniswap governance forum.
📚 Good Reads
Solving the DAO Data Problem, by Traver Normandi
Governance and DAOs, by polynya
The Oxcart Method, from mel.eth
Structure without Capture, from Hats Protocol
The Onboarding Experience of a Professional Delegate, by Kenechukwu Eze
DAOs Are Consumer Products, from Seed Club
Unpopular Opinion: Centralization is the Future, Not Decentralization, by Theo Delarosa
Multi-Message Aggregation (MMA) Design, on GitHub
Forums:
Cosmos: Proposal feedback on the forum
Decentraland: Should the DAO buy back LAND?
ENS: Forbidden domains. Racism, xenophobia, child porn, bullying and others
Maker: Back to basics
Optimism: RetroPGF round 2 voting rational
Redacted: RFF & RIP proposal process
Starknet: Retrodrop proposal
Uniswap: Continue the Uniswap v3 deployment on Gnosis Chain with different bridge provider
🧵 Threads
On the Global Digital Rights Charter, by Emilios
🎧 Listens
The Future of On-Chain DAOs (video), hosted by Dennison Bertram
Toward a More Cooperative Web3 with Maxwell Kanter, Sarah Hubbard, and George Oates, on GreenPill
Design, Distribution, and Tokenized Media: Insights from Jacob Horne of Zora, on Mint
📜 Highlighted Proposals
Humanity — Digital Health App
Humanity is an app that connects to various health-monitoring devices and activity apps, integrates the accumulated information in a single interface (”quantified self”), assigns a score that indicates the user’s rate of aging, and recommends interventions to increase longevity. This “assessment” proposal to VitaDAO floats the idea of using $VITA as a “longevity token in or adjacent to the app.”
✅ Voting started March 10
⏰ Voting ends: March 17
⚡ Type: Snapshot Vote
✍ Author: Eli Mohamad
Fund Q2 of This Week in Farcaster Production
This proposal to Purple DAO, which aims to “to proliferate and expand the Farcaster protocol and ecosystem,” asks for 1.5 ETH to fund twelve weeks of producing This Week in Farcaster, “a weekly roundup of everything happening in the Farcaster ecosystem.” Because the newsletter is currently dependent on a single person, the proposal author indicates that the funding may in part go to sourcing a freelancer to support writing and production.
⏰ Voting ends: March 17
⛓️ Type: on-chain
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: davisshaver.eth
Deploy Uniswap V3 on Avalanche
Following a number of recent proposals (including a highly contested one) to deploy Uniswap V3 on L1s other than Ethereum, Blockchain at Michigan here proposes to initiate deployment on Avalanche ahead of the expiration of Uniswap’s Business Source License on April 1. The hope is to support Uniswap in “establishing a robust, multichain future.” While the BNB deployment is using Wormhole as the bridge provider, the proposers here make the case for LayerZero for to ensure “agile deployment” — while acknowledging that there is potential for a multi-bridge system in the future.
⏰ Voting ends: March 17
⛓️ Type: on-chain
💬 Read the discussion
✍ Author: Abdullah Umar / Blockchain at Michigan
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