This Week in Governance - May 26

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

Duncan Dobbelmann

May 26, 2022

📊 This Week’s Stats

A snapshot of DAO governance activity and global treasury changes.

Ecosystem Overview:

Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:

🗳️ 15,115 ballots were cast on 109 different proposals 🗳️
👥 8,136 unique voters 👥
🌐 43 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 83 new proposals created ✍️

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

🚢 Product Updates

Comment directly on a proposal in Boardroom: Go to your Dashboard, check out a proposal, connect your wallet, and share your insights. (And also, see what others think.)

🗞️ News in Brief

Merit Circle DAO proposes kicking out early investor Yield Guild Games (see long discussion here)
Prime Deals launches a platform for DAO2DAO dealings
@Shanzzenith shares mega mindmap of DAO tooling
@tolusnotes announces Exponent Network — an “on-chain native token equity management solution for founders and DAOs”
Messari adds features to its DAO Governor database
Coordinate and achieve shared purpose with DAOhaus live on Optimism PBC

h/t @TWiDAOs & @forefront__ for the alerts.

📚 Goodreads

“The polyamorous work (or ‘polywork’) enabled by web3 isn’t a random deviation” — and that’s a good thing, says Joey DeBruin
Linda Xie shares some of her key takeaways from working in DAOs
a16z crypto releases “2022 State of Crypto Report”

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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

1) Forefront: Social Token Alliance Swap

🔤 ELI5: DAOs exchange tokens to align incentives and collaborate.

In an effort to model productive DAO2DAO relationships, diversify their treasury, and create alignment with specific DAOs, Forefront proposes to swap tokens with Bankless DAO, Cabin, DAO Haus, Krause House, and Yup.

“We are seeking to build a long-term alliance among the leading communities in the sector that should bring Forefront opportunities for years to come. This initial token swap is step one. This is an opportunity for Forefront to pioneer a D2D model with other leaders in the space.”

Forefront will send $25,000 worth of $FF to a multisig wallet and receive $5,000 worth of tokens from each of the above-mentioned DAOs; tokens will be subject to a lock-up of three years (i.e. no immediate sales for profit). In addition to creating a financial incentive for each of the participating DAOs to support each other, Forefront will gain meta governance rights in the DAOs and lay the groundwork for future collaborations (examples are provided).

100% voted for
See the discussion

View the Proposal

2) Balancer: Form the Emergency subDAO

🔤 ELI5: Create a way to “kill” gauges in problematic pools.

This proposal is meant to address the fact that a single liquidity provider has staked in the gauges of three Element pools “and has bribed on hidden hand to entice voters while this single actor collects all the emissions” of BAL. Since these Element pools were grandfathered into the gauge voting system when veBAL was launched, separate action must be taken to prevent the above behavior in pools that should not be issuing BAL because they have expired.

Taking a page from Curve, this proposal hopes to establish an Emergency subDAO that will be given the power to “kill” gauges. (The proposer points out that “Balancer pools cannot be ‘killed’ by governance after the pool factory has been deployed for three months.”) The Emergency subDAO would also be empowered to add a token to the “deny list” on the ProtocolFeesWithdrawer contract. A four-of-seven multisig will be created with the signers specified in the proposal.

97.1% voted for
See the discussion

View the Proposal

3) Lido: Should Lido support Terra reboot?

🔤 ELI5: A consideration of whether to deploy on the Terra fork.

As an “essential application developer” on the Terra blockchain — the chain that saw the total collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin UST — the Lido DAO in this proposal asks its members to consider whether or not to deploy on the new Terra blockchain (see the Terra Ecosystem Revival Plan, recently passed). If Lido had agreed to deploy on the new chain within this short time frame, it would have received specific benefits, including a share of the new network’s equity in addition to establishing itself as an early liquid staking provider.

While four different voting paths were initially suggested, these were reduced to two after discussion: 1) No relaunch of Lido on Terra; and 2) Relaunch Lido on Terra as described in the proposal (with distribution of the token allocation among UST holders). Among other things, the discussion considered reputational risk and “protocol agnosticism”; ultimately the community voted strongly in favor of not relaunching.