This Week in Governance - May 19

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

Duncan Dobbelmann

May 19, 2022

📊 This Week’s Stats

Ecosystem Overview:

💰 $7.68 billion in treasuries 💰
✍️ 7,470 proposals ✍️
👥 115,261 unique voters 👥
🗳️ 889,284 ballots 🗳️

Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:

🗳️ 10,564 ballots were cast on 124 different proposals 🗳️
👥 4,186 unique voters 👥
🌐 44 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 66 new proposals created ✍️

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

🚢 Product Updates

Boardroom now lets you see all the discussion and debate in any DAO that uses Discourse — without leaving Boardroom. Go to your dashboard, pick a DAO or proposal to investigate, and select the “Discussions” tab.

📚 Goodreads

“Web3 Is Our Chance to Make a Better Internet,” by Li Jin and Katie Parrott
“Decentralising leadership: from monolithic to modular and polycentric,” by Daniel Ospina
“It's a VUCA world, we're just living in it: a new way to evaluate DAOs,” by Samantha Marin
“Early 2022 Survey of Metagovernance,” by Kenechukwu Eze

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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

1) Gitcoin: Feedback for FDD Budget Proposal

🔤 ELI5: A voting feedback mechanism is used to advance collective discussion and decision making.

Gitcoin’s Fraud Detection & Defense (FDD) team proposed a detailed budget for Season 14 that resulted in serious discussion and debate. As part of an effort to resolve some of the points at issue, a proposal for feedback was posted on Snapshot. As disruptionjoe.eth writes in the proposal:

“This is a test to get some feedback for our budget proposal. Rather than simply request a budget with a slight reduction, we wanted to get feedback from the community on each outcome FDD plans to work on during Season 14.”

The author maps out the different outcomes possible under the three stated priorities: Sybil Defense; Grants Intelligence Agency; and Evolution. Of the 17 outcomes voted for, the top vote-getters appear to be those that fall on the “operations” side of the operation-innovation spectrum laid out by the author.

The results of the vote will inform the final budget request submitted by FDD for Season 14.

See the discussion

View the Proposal

2) Aave: Freezing UST and Updating stETH Parameters

🔤 ELI5: The risks of unstable assets are eliminated or reduced on the popular liquidity protocol.

Given the recent dramatic collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST (which has received abundant coverage elsewhere), Gauntlet here proposes to freeze UST on Aave v2. And because of “current uncertainty around the stETH peg,” Gauntlet similarly proposes to adjust stETH (staked Ether) parameters on Aave, specifically by increasing the liquidation threshold from 75% to 81% and decreasing the loan-to-value rate from 73% to 69%. As noted by the proposer in the associated discussion, “there is ~2.8B worth of stETH collateral on Aave, so if stETH depegs more, the liquidation cascade could be catastrophic.” According to Gauntlet, the proposed adjustments will 1) decrease the likelihood of cascading liquidations should stETH continue to depeg; and 2) prevent new positions from adopting riskier strategies using stETH as collateral.

“Gauntlet’s simulations of the Aave protocol indicated that a decrease in LTV to between 66-69% and an increase in liquidation threshold to 81-82% could significantly decrease liquidation volume as well as total insolvencies while minimally decreasing capital efficiency.”

See the discussion
98.39% voted for

View the Proposal

3) EVMavericks Protocol Runoff Poll, L1 Ethereum Edition, Round 2

🔤 ELI5: ManeNet DAO creates a runoff poll game for engagement and education.

EVMavericks, “a collective of thought leaders dedicated to advancing the decentralized Ethereum Web3 ecosystem by aligning shared member incentives with funding, developing, and promoting public goods and education,” has created a simple game through its ManeNet DAO called the Protocol Runoff Poll. The game is meant to generate discussion and promote education by asking participants to vote on which protocol in a particular poll should be eliminated. While the mechanism of voting for something whose utility you don’t support has the potential to cause some confusion, the polls are ultimately intended to engage users and encourage them to learn more about each protocol in the game. The goal is also in part to observe participation rates and begin to determine quorum thresholds.

“It's fun, costs us absolutely nothing to organize, and is something that wasn't possible without bots and sock puppet engagement before, which demonstrates the value of the on-chain proof of uniqueness.”

In the first round of the L1 Ethereum Edition, the 12 protocols with highest voting weight were eliminated (OpenSea, Lido, and MIM/Abracadabra were among those with the most votes). In round 2, which concluded this week, the six most voted for protocols were eliminated (this included Tokemak, Liquify, ENS, and LooksRare). Assuming enough participation, multiple editions with different themes are planned.