🗳 This Week in Governance - May 18

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

May 18, 2023

Delegation week kicks off soon
Anchorage Digital enables Snapshot voting
dYdX community discusses subDAOs ahead of v4 launch

Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 33,435 ballots
👥 12,224 voters
📜 293 proposals
🌐 67 active DAOs

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🗞 News Brief

Delegation Week kicks off next week

Delegation Week (May 22-26) is a 5-day ecosystem-wide event dedicated to DAO governance engagement. It’s an effort from industry participants to raise awareness about the importance of active governance and to reduce long-dormant governance token allocations. Delegation Week makes it easy for voters to review delegations, for delegates to polish up their profiles, and for DAOs to signal their interest.

Update Your Delegate Profile

These services can be performed across DAOs through Tally and Boardroom, while Agora has created portals for Optimism and Uniswap (check out Uniswap’s delegate race). And you can also use Karma’s newly released delegate activity tracker to find out whom you’ve delegated to and how those delegates have performed. You can use the Delegate Discovery pages to browse through top delegates across projects.

Anchorage Digital Enables Snapshot Voting

On May 16 Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered digital asset bank, announced that Snapshot voting would be available to its clients. According to the firm’s website, Anchorage offers institutions “a regulated crypto platform built for an expanding range of institutional use cases, all powered by the most secure and usable digital asset architecture in the industry.” Many of those institutions may want to use tokens held by Anchorage to participate in protocol governance. The new WalletConnect integration now allows those customers to participate in offchain voting without moving their tokens. The bank currently supports over 60 ERC-20 tokens. The announcement was explained in a blog post and covered in The Block, Blockworks, and Decrypt.

dYdX Community Discusses SubDAOs Ahead of v4 Launch

The dYdX Foundation in a blog post published last November encouraged the community to discuss certain key topics — and subDAOs in particular — ahead of the mainnet (Cosmos) launch of dYdX v4, which is expected to be “a fully decentralized version of the protocol.” (A technical overview of v4’s architecture was published earlier this week.) SubDAOs are considered critical to the success of a fully decentralized protocol with no central entity “in charge.”

The Foundation pointed out recently that the six-month term of the Operations Trust, one of only two subDAOs active in the protocol, is set to expire in mid -une — meaning that the community will soon need to find a way to handle those responsibilities. Fox Labs Digital posted a long thread suggesting the types of subDAOs the dYdX community might consider going forward. The recommended subDAO areas include community, growth, governance, security, treasury management, and product development, among others.

📚 Good Reads

Season 4: Our Next Experiment in Community Governance, from The Optimism Collective
Onchain, by Jacob Horne
V4 Technical Architecture Overview, from dYdX
Chainlink’s Solutions for Decentralized Governance Challenges, by Jyotirmoy Barman
Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of DAO voting schemes, from DAO Times
Introducing Nouns Fork: A Last-Resort Community Protection Mechanism, from verb
DAOversity, by Fransisco Díaz
Court Accepts EFF’s Amicus Brief on the Right to Publish Code in Tornado Cash Case, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Enabling Trust at Scale, by Stefen Deleveaux

🧵 Threads

Arbitrum DAO’s power dynamics, by Traver Normandi
Thoughts on the Gitcoin beta round, from Kevin Owocki
How decentralized should rollup sequencer sets be? from DinoEggs
Absolutely nothing novel or exceptionally valuable has ever come from a DAO*, by Gwart

🎧 Listens

Do Aragon Association Members Get “Fat Salaries” With “Zero Accountability”?, on The Chopping Block
Governing AI + web3 data unions w/ Jake Brukhman, on On the Other Side
Redefining the Social Contract with John Paller, on The Ownership Economy

💬 Forums

0x: New 0x Governance Portal

In the spirit of decentralization and community ownership, this proposal suggests initiating a two-step process to develop a refreshed governance portal for 0x Protocol and its community, with the goal of making the protocol uncensorable and unstoppable through on-chain governance and treasury disbursements.

Aave: BGD. Aave Robot v1

Aave Robot v1 is introduced as a framework of smart contracts powered by Chainlink Automation to automate permissionless actions in Aave Governance, such as queuing, executing, and canceling proposals.

Aztec: Request for Proposals: Decentralized Sequencer Selection

The upcoming version of Aztec aims to be fully decentralized, and community participation is crucial in achieving this goal, including through proposal submissions for key network decisions, starting with the decentralized sequencer selection process that this forum post outlines.

Balancer: Change Snapshot to Weighted Voting

If approved, this proposal suggests changing the voting type from "Single Choice Voting" to "Weighted Voting" in Snapshot, allowing for additional use cases such as wrapper pass-through votes while retaining existing functionality.

Cosmos: Change the Meaning of “Abstain” Voting

The proposal introduces the meaning of abstaining from a governance vote in Cosmos, where abstaining signifies contributing to the quorum while formally declining to vote for or against the proposal.

Gitcoin: Conflict of Interest with Steward Voting

Starts a discussion on ensuring fairness and impartiality, and suggests stewards should abstain from voting on proposals that directly benefit themselves, as it creates conflicts of interest and compromises the integrity of the decision-making process.

Gnosis: README: Gnosis Governance Tutorial

This post provides a tutorial on how to participate in GnosisDAO platforms, including joining the Gnosis Forum, navigating the three phases of proposal discussions, creating GIPs, conducting forum polls, and using Snapshot for off-chain voting.

Hop: [Grant Proposal] Delegation Week

The proposal suggests partnering with Tally to provide a gasless delegation budget and encourage delegation during the upcoming Delegation Week, aiming to expand and diversify the delegate base in the Hop DAO.

Goldfinch: New Community Management

This proposal outlines an updated community management team structure with defined roles, responsibilities, and compensation, aiming to achieve the goals set forth in the Goldfinch Roadmap and subsequent initiatives.

Maker: Funding Request for Core Artificial Intelligence System (CAIS) Project

The Ecosystem Scope team is requesting 100,000 DAI from the CAIS Bootstrap Budget to pursue the Core Artificial Intelligence System (CAIS) project, with a further investment of 400,000 DAI anticipated based on successful project progression, demonstrating their commitment and confidence in its success.

Maker: The 5 Phases of Endgame

Describes the phases of Endgame, a proposed major update to MakerDAO that aims to enhance efficiency, resilience, and participation. It introduces AI tools and fine-tuned processes to create a strong governance equilibrium, enabling the growth of SubDAOs and parallelized product development.

Optimism: Grants Council Reviewer Nominations

Self-nominations for the Season 4 Grants Council must be submitted by May 17th at 19:00 GMT according to the provided template and process, with no minimum voting power requirement for Reviewers. Reviewers will be elected by the Token House via approval voting in Special Voting Cycle #12b from May 18th - May 31st.

Safe: Operational Manual Proposal

This proposal aims to consolidate information on SafeDAO governance by creating a comprehensive Gitbook manual, hosted on dao.safe.global, to simplify understanding of the governance structure and facilitate new members' onboarding process.

Uniswap: Deploy Uniswap v3 on Base

This proposal seeks community approval for the deployment of Uniswap v3 on Base, an open-source L2 EVM blockchain being incubated inside Coinbase. The proposal highlights the potential for Base to generate high TVL and attract new users to Uniswap due to its integration with Coinbase products and commitments from various dapps and protocols.

📜 Highlighted Proposals

KlimaDAO: Decentralizing KIPs & Snapshot

The aim of this proposal is to clarify “the path by which proposals may advance through KlimaDAO governance, increasing credible neutrality and further decentralizing the protocol’s operations.” Currently, while anyone can initiate a proposal by posting a request for comment (RFC) in the forum, only Policy team members can draft a formal Improvement Proposal and subsequently advance it to Snapshot. While this creates a smooth, consistent process resistant to spam, it prevents “aligned” community members from participating actively in the final stages of a proposal.

This proposal hopes to address this by creating a Klimate Review Committee comprised of aligned community members who go through a vetting process. Members of this committee would have access to a shared forum account that would require a majority consensus to move an RFC to a KIP (improvement proposal). Similarly, the proposal specifies how community members with the requisite number of wsKLIMA can bring KIPs to a Snapshot vote.

⏰ Voting ends: May 22 ⚡Type: Snapshot ✍ Author: khyzer 💬 Read the discussion

Nouns DAO: Refill voteRefund balance

Nouns has an existing program (through the voteRefund function) that allows Nouners and delegates to receive a refund of gas fees accrued during the voting process. The contract issuing the refund was created and funded about seven months ago and now needs to be refilled — in part because of the continuing growth of the DAO. This proposal estimates an ongoing cost of 1.6 ETH per month and asks that the contract be funded with 15 ETH. The proposer argues that voteRefund function is important “as it helps maintain a diverse voter base and combat voter apathy.”

⏰ Voting ends: May 21 ⛓️Type: Onchain ✍ Author: krel.eth

1inch: Allocate 1M USDC stables in treasury to lending pool on AAVE V3

As the title suggests, this proposal asks that 1m USDC be assigned to an Aave V3 lending pool so that the otherwise idle treasury funds can generate some yield (estimated at 1-2%). The vast majority (95%) of the 1inch treasury is denominated in USDC, and while other paths to earning yield on at least a portion of that amount exist — such as yield farming or providing liquidity on a DEX — the proposal argues that “that depositing in lending pools is the best risk-adjusted strategy for a large treasury allocation.” Because of its strong history and high TVL, Aave is the leading contender.

⏰ Voting ends: May 20 ⚡Type: Snapshot ✍ Author: DAOplomats.eth 💬 Read the discussion

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