🗳 This Week in Governance - September 8
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
📣 What You Need to Know
Activity:
🗳️ 26,949 ballots (-45%)
👥 9,620 voters (-21%)
📜 245 proposals (+57%)
🌐 65 active DAOs (+51%)
Coinbase shocks Maker, DAOs airdrop governance tokens, Gitcoin holds elections, Klima helps form legislation, and much more.
Let’s get into it ✨
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Coinbase’s Pitch to MakerDAO
Centralized exchange, Coinbase, has posted a proposal to the MakerDAO forums that would have the DAO deposit $1.6B USDC into Prime - its institutional platform. The proposal requests a third of Maker’s USDC reserve in exchange for an annual yield of 1.5%. Maker’s decentralized DAI stablecoin is primarily backed by over $4.8B USDC. The deal would generate an estimated $24M in annual revenue for MakerDAO. The deal has shocked many as the DAO holds discussions about removing its USDC exposure altogether. Co-founder of Maker, Rune Christensen, has come out in support of the proposal in the forums and sees it as the same as holding USDC and aligned with his Endgame Plan.
Sudoswap Reveals Airdrop
Automated NFT market maker, Sudoswap, has outlined plans to airdrop its governance token. The airdrop introduces SUDO as a governance token to help govern the marketplace as they decentralize. There will be an initial supply of 60M SUDO tokens. Tokens will be distributed to XMON holders, 0xmons NFT holders, a retroactive LP airdrop, DAO treasury, initial team members, and SudoRandom Labs. SUDO will not be immediately transferrable until a governance proposal changes this parameter. This parameter hopes to drive early governance participation at the DAO.
Protocols Pause ETH Borrowing Ahead of Merge
A proposal to pause ETH borrowing in the period leading up to the Ethereum Merge passed on the Aave protocol. Ahead of the Merge, the Aave protocol faces the risk of high utilization in its ETH market - the proposal aimed to pause borrowing to mitigate this risk of high utilization. To do this, it will place a freeze on ETH borrowing and change the ETH variable borrow rate at max utilization from 103% to 1,000%. This comes just days after a proposal was passed and queued in Compound to mitigate merge risks for their v2 ETH market. The proposal set a borrow cap of 100,000 ETH and changed the interest rate model to a jump rate model with a 1,000% APR max rate. We’ll be closely tracking how other DAOs prepare for the upcoming merge.
KlimaDAO helps draft ‘DAO bill’
The DeFi carbon credit protocol has collaborated with U.S. legislators on a proposed ‘DAO Bill’. The 'Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act' is a piece of legislation that looks to define key terms in crypto, digital assets, and more importantly DAOs. Since May, the DAO has been working closely with staff members from Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Kirstin Gillibrand's office to draft a comprehensive and legitimate DAO bill. Under this proposed bill, DAOs would be classified as business entities.
GitcoinDAO Elects Steward Council v2
The public goods DAO has announced a fresh round of elections for its Steward Council. A total of thirteen Stewards have been elected for the upcoming cycle. Members in this batch include Linda Xie, Simona Pop, Kyle Weiss, Lefteris Karapetsas, and many more. The idea of a Steward Council was first proposed in December 2021 to align the most engaged community members and drive responsible governance participation. Under this council structure, Stewards hold their role for 180 days. Community members require an 8/10 score under Gitcoin’s famous Steward Report Cards to be considered for nomination.
Llama asks for $2.5M from Aave
The Llama community has submitted a proposal to the DeFi protocol for the creation of a 12-month working agreement. This proposal would have Llama compensated $2.5M for 12 months of protocol work. KPI focus includes treasury and revenue growth, maintenance of data and analytics, and general protocol maintenance & integrity. Llama previously funded its work through Aave Grants but now seeks a longer-term deal as it matures its contributions. Llama remains an extremely active contributor across various DAOs having previously worked with Nouns, Uniswap, dYdX, Lido, and many more. Sentiment in the forums has been positive as the proposal seems likely to be funded through governance.
📚 Good Reads
“Digital Cities” from Metropolis
“Describing power in DAOs” by Samantha Marin
“DAOs are APIs for Organizations” by carlosdp.eth
“Organizational transformation for dYdX” by Joana7459
“ImpactDAO Are Shaping the Future of Regenerative Organizations” from BanklessDAO
“Sharing insights: Governance Learning Forum 2022” by 0xdeniz
“Major DAOs in the Polygon Ecosystem” from StableNode
“Tornado Cash: What web3 Needs to Know” by Katie Haun
“The exchange theory of web3 governance” from RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub
🧵 Threads
Learnings from Stanford DAO Workshops from DAO Research Collective
The impact the merge has on Aave borrowing by DeFiyst
What DAOs are doing to prepare for the Merge by Michael Bentley
🎧 Listens
“Best Practices for Operating a DAO w/ Dennison Bertram” on Rehash Podcast
“MakerDAO Onchain Governance Tooling” on DAO Governance Education Podcast
“Delegated Voting in DAO Governance” on DAO Governance Education Podcast
“Minimizing Governance w/ Pet3rpan” on Seed Club Podcast
“Scaling Socialware w/ Julia Rosenberg” on Seed Club Podcast
“Allocating Treasuries w/ Jango” on Seed Club Podcast
“Incentivizing Contrarianism w/ David Phelps” on Seed Club Podcast
📜 Highlighted Proposals
🏦 Compound: Risk Parameter Changes for FEI
This proposal looks to adjust risk parameters for FEI at Compound. Proposed changes include pausing FEI borrowing and setting the reserve factor to 99%. This proposal would deprecate the FEI market at Compound in light of TribeDAO entering a “terminal state”.
✅ 99.9% voting ‘For’
💬 Read the discussion
🍣 SushiSwap: Head Chef Compensation
A series of six proposals have been posted as snapshot votes to determine the next Head Chef's compensation. The six proposals include Base Salary, Sushi Price Targets, Total Sushi Roadmap & Price Targets, Initial Cliff for Sushi Compensation, Contract Length, and Severance Length. These proposals look to split up the compensation package for the future Head Chef and allow the DAO to vote on each parameter. The controversial proposal to nominate Jonathan Howard as Head Chef prompted a more granular approach to the compensation package. SushiSwap continues its Head Chef Search.
💬 Read the discussion
🏊♂️ PoolTogether: PoolCollective Governance Committee
This proposal outlines the creation of the PoolCollective, a PoolTogether governance committee participating in Optimism’s governance. The committee would be comprised of three community members controlling a 2/3 multisig to execute votes. The proposal also calls for the delegation of $OP voting power from the protocol rewards. Motivations behind the proposal include increased participation in Optimism’s ecosystem, ensuring no voting power is lost, and learning from a PT meta governance experiment.
✅ 99.97% voting ‘For’
💬 Read the discussion
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For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, browse our Governance API - 🚀 This above link can be used to make requests against the API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!