This Week in Governance - May 5

A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance

Duncan Dobbelmann

May 05, 2022

📊 This Week’s Stats

Ecosystem Overview:

💰 $12.31 billion in treasuries 💰
✍️ 6,367 proposals ✍️
👥 95,179 unique voters 👥
🗳️ 698,501 ballots 🗳️

Governance Activity - Last 7 Days:

🗳️ 8,547 ballots were cast on 124 different proposals 🗳️
👥 4,246 unique voters 👥
🌐 45 DAOs with active voters 🌐
✍️ 65 new proposals created ✍️

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

🚢 Product Updates

If you’re anything like us, you own multiple wallets — hot, cold, and otherwise. And you probably should. But what if your voting tokens are spread across those different wallets?

In Boardroom you can now bundle all of your wallets into one voter profile, making it much easier to participate in all your favorite DAOs. Just connect your first wallet, navigate to your profile, select “edit profile,” and toggle “add additional wallets.”

Go to Your Dashboard

🗞️ Governance News in Brief

Variant issues a primer on the state of web3 and the ownership economy
Chris Ahn says we should think more about Business-Governance Fit
Forefront creates hilarious Governance Meltdown with Nicolas Gauge
Preston Byrne writes about “How to Build Decentralized Twitter”
And Balaji adds his take: “The Elondrop”
Mr.Nobody explores DAO leadership in depth
The DAOist presents an overview of the recent Global Governance Gathering

📝 Highlighted Proposals

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

1) ApeCoin: Staking Pool Allocation Reloaded

🔤 ELI5: Another attempt to create and define staking pools for ApeCoin holders.

This proposal, submitted in conjunction with AIP-21 (which also passed), resuscitates AIP-5, which was defeated in March because of the "absence of caps in the staking process." The absence of caps is undesirable because it could lead to dilution of the staking pools by whales. Where AIP-21 assigns caps to the number of ApeCoin that can be staked by NFT held (BAYC, MAYC, BAKC), AIP-22 presents the total ApeCoin allocation for each staking pool and delineates the three-year staking time frame. The self-described goal of both proposals is as follows:

"in order for ApeCoin to become the preferred token of web3, early NFT adopters and existing and potential ecosystem participants should be incentivized through participation in activities benefitting the APE Ecosystem."

There was significant criticism of the original proposals as well as the revised ones -- see Cobie's recent take describing the "death of staking."

See the forum post
95.36% voted for

View the Proposal

2) Index Coop: Implement Dynamic Quorum for Metagovernance

🔤 ELI5: A dynamic quorum allows for more community participation.

DAOs are sometimes plagued by lack of broad participation in the formation, discussion, and implementation (voting for or against) of proposals. This can lead to the outsized influence of those who hold a large number of tokens. Index Coop has tried different approaches to solve the participation problem, and this proposal seeks another iteration: instituting a dynamic quorum for metagovernance. The quorum for a given vote (currently fixed at 5%) would fluctuate depending on participation, helping to ensure that, whenever participation allows, the community decides. When participation falls short, the decision-making authority of the MetaGovernance Committee remains as a failsafe.

"Quorum for metagovernance voting will be reduced linearly from 5% down to 0% as support increases (on a per-proposal basis) to inspire greater decentralization and allow for greater participation in Index Coop metagovernance by the community."

See the discussion
86.77% voting for (at the time of writing)

View the Proposal

3)Juicebox: One-time JBX distribution to each member of the reserved JBX list

🔤 ELI5: The distribution JBX tokens from the treasury enables more voting power.

This proposal sought to distribute one million JBX tokens to each of the 16 members of the reserved JBX list in order to give already incentivized DAO participants more voting power -- and so leading to further decentralization, the proposal argues. The 16 members of the reserved list, identified by their .eth addresses in the proposal, are already trusted members of the DAO, and the 16M JBX distribution is only 9.7% of the treasury's JBX holdings. The JBX in the DAO treasury has not been used for voting, and this proposal aims to "put more JBX to work" by distributing the tokens to those who would use them.