🗳 This Week in Governance - Sept 14
Discover more from Boardroom
🗳 This Week in Governance - Sept 14
A weekly resource covering crypto governance, politics, and power.
📣 Key Points
Nouns is forking
Government of India partners with Questbook
Aave to add freeze stewards
Optimism details RetroPGF 3
Gitcoin discusses guardrails for partnerships
Voting Activity (L7)
🗳️ 181,483 ballots
👥 56,571 voters
📜 248 proposals
🌐 72 active DAOsQuery more data using the Governance API
Let’s get into it 🔥
📰 News
Nouns is Forking
Nouns DAO is undergoing its first fork. The Nouns Fork mechanism, recently introduced with V3, is designed to serve as a minority protection mechanism within the DAO. Some members are leaving the DAO due to longstanding disagreements about fund allocation, while others, known as arbitrageurs, are seeking to profit from the fork. William M. Peaster provides a clear, balanced write-up of the situation. Despite the split, some see this as an opportunity for the remaining members to refocus on supporting creative experiments, and Nouns DAO is expected to continue evolving with ongoing governance experiments and innovations.
Meanwhile, the Verbs team — which created Nouns V3 — published an article discussing the development of a new version of Nouns DAO called "Nouns Governor," which represents a departure from the previously used Compound Governor Bravo. The key feature of Nouns Governor is NFT-based voting, allowing Noun token holders to vote with their NFTs rather than traditional wallets. This change aims to address various issues, including delegate override problems, user experience improvements, and voting granularity while enabling sub-delegation and enhancing onchain data legibility. The article highlights the importance of community feedback in shaping the development of Nouns Governor and mentions potential future updates related to NFT voting designs, gas efficiency, and Fork V2 details.
Government of India partners with Questbook
Questbook, known in part for supporting DAO grant programs (such as in Compound), recently signed a memo of understanding with the government of India to help design web3 curricula, facilitate grant opportunities, and provide verified credentials for the National Institute of Electrical and Information Technology, using Questbook’s new Reclaim Protocol. This is believed to be one of the few partnerships (and perhaps the only one) the government has with a crypto company.
🎙️ Rather Listen?
The Boardroom Roundup brings you the latest DAO news headlines and governance proposals every week:
Subscribe to the Boardroom Podcast → Apple | Spotify | Google
📜 Proposals
Recently Closed
Decentraland: Implementation of a Fee for DAO Proposal Submissions
This proposal seeks community feedback on introducing a fee for submitting proposals within the DAO. The proposed fees range from 5 MANA to 200 MANA, depending on the type of proposal. The benefits include generating revenue for the DAO, improving proposal quality, and establishing trust within the community. Counterarguments mention concerns about financial barriers but suggest it could encourage collaboration and partnerships within the community. The voting period closed on September 13th with 81.4% opting not to implement any submission fees.
Ending Soon
Aave: Freeze Stewards
This proposal suggests adding a FreezingSteward as the riskAdmin to synchronize functionality across Aave V3 deployments on multiple networks, including Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Metis, and Base. This ensures that emergencyAdmin listed in the ACLManager can freeze reserves for security purposes, and it also serves as approval for executing the payload on the Avalanche network. Voting for the onchain proposal ends on September 15th.
Upcoming
The proposal suggests creating the "Digital Art Movement Collection," an NFT collection consisting of Yuga assets (BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, and Punks) and other notable NFTs to promote digital art globally. The team, led by MachiBigBrother, aims to increase awareness of ApeCoin's cultural influence in digital art and will fund the collection's creation and curation through ApeCoin staking and token distribution. The proposal outlines the allocation of DAM tokens, governance, and milestones for implementing the collection. The cost is estimated at 11,000,000 ApeCoin, provided in tranches over an indefinite timeline. Voting opens on September 14th.
📚 Reads
DAO Governance and AI, from StableLab
Nouns Will Survive, by William M. Peaster
Capitalism Onchained, by Packy McCormick
Leadership Transition Proposal V3, from Friends with Benefits
Conflict and how it plays out in DAOs, from Justine (via the Optimism Foundation)
Decision-making in a decentralized community, from BanklessWriters
🎧 Listens
It’s Not a DAO, It’s a Crime, on DAO Talk
How Blockchain is Unleashing a Governance Revolution w/ Cedric Warny, on Green Pill
Day in the Life of a Professional Delegate — Nethermind — Bobby Bola, from The DAOist
💬 Forums
Aave: Aave Grants Continuation Proposal
The proposal discusses continuing the Aave Grants DAO (AGD) for six months to preserve the current AGD treasury holdings and provide $700,000 of new funding between ARB and AAVE. It also seeks to increase AGD's stablecoin allowance by $870,000, enabling the support of developer grants, events, and operations within the Aave ecosystem. The proposal highlights the history and impact of AGD's initiatives, metrics, and operational focuses for the upcoming period.
Arbitrum: Activate ARB Staking
This post suggests introducing a locking mechanism for the Arbitrum (ARB) token, allowing users to lock their ARB for up to 365 days in exchange for native yield generated from an annual inflation of 1.75% of the total ARB supply. The proposal aims to incentivize long-term ARB holders, promote ARB utility, and differentiate ARB from other Layer 2 tokens. The timeline for implementation includes community feedback, audits, and an onchain vote, with costs primarily related to contract creation and auditing.
This proposal aims to expand the active validator set of the Cosmos Hub from 180 to 200. The current minimum delegation requirement of 78,430 ATOM is seen as a barrier for potential validators, and increasing the validator set would enable greater community participation, enhance integration with validator communities, and lower the entry threshold. However, it also comes with potential risks related to security, networking, and central coordination.
Gitcoin: Setting Guardrails and Best Practices for Partnerships
This post discusses a proposal to change the partnership decision-making process at Gitcoin, particularly for the Gitcoin Grants Program. The proposal suggests implementing guardrails to exclude certain industries or sectors (e.g., weapons manufacturers, hate groups, tobacco, and fossil fuel companies) from consideration for partnerships within the grants program based on community consensus. This change aims to align partnerships with community values and engagement levels, with further discussions, formal proposals, and potential adoption outlined in the post.
Optimism: RetroPGF 3: Round Design
The Optimism Foundation here provides an overview of RetroPGF 3, an ongoing experiment in Retroactive Public Goods Funding. It discusses what was learned from RetroPGF round 2. It outlines improvements for round 3, including a more detailed project sign-up process to gather high-quality data, the introduction of Lists for collaborative evaluation by badgeholders, efforts to provide better mental models and definitions for impact evaluation, and enhancements to the voting experience for badgeholders.
ShapeShift: Remove Incubation as a required step in the DAO's governance process
This proposal aims to simplify the governance process of the DAO by removing the mandatory "Incubation" step, which will be made optional. It also suggests using “[RFC] (request for comment)" for forum posts of this nature and extending the minimum final vote time from 3 days to 5 days. The change aims to streamline decision-making while improving clarity in naming conventions.
💭 Ecosystem Takes
🎈 Have a Meme
📮 Stay Up to Date
Follow us: Twitter | Discord
Subscribe to: Newsletter | Mirror | Apple | Amazon | Spotify
📥 Sign up for Vote Updates
Set up custom notifications to receive daily roundups of new and upcoming proposals in three simple steps:
Connect Your Wallet → Select Your Projects → Save Preferences 👏