🗳 This Week in Governance - September 15
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
📣 What You Need to Know
Activity:
🗳️ 17,303 ballots (-36%)
👥 8,353 voters (-10%)
📜 197 proposals (-20%)
🌐 64 active DAOs (-2%)
Ethereum successfully merges, TribeDAO offers full repayment, SushiSwap offers a timeline for Head Chef search, Optimism enters Season 2, Synthetix holds Council Elections, and more
Let’s get into it ✨
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Ethereum has successfully merged to Proof-of-Stake. At approximately 6:43 am UTC on September 15th, 2022 the merge was finalized. The merge marks a monumental moment for the Layer 1 blockchain. The move comes after years of hard work and collaboration from hundreds of Ethereum developers, builders, and evangelists. The merge stands as the largest upgrade in the network’s history. Ethereum is notably home to thousands of DAOs and protocols. Protocols that had paused activity in anticipation of the Merge now look to resume on-chain activities and governance on their new consensus layer. Ethereum continues on its path to being the global settlement layer.
TribeDAO Offers Full Repayment
The controversial Fuse hack repayment saga continues at TribeDAO. On September 8th a snapshot vote to fully repay hack victims passed with 95% approval. The proposal details an exchange of cTokens from affected pools for FEI for which victims will be paid out in equal value of their bad debt (losses). A forum post now requests affected protocols to post their wallet addresses to receive repayment, and an on-chain binding vote is expected to start on September 16th.
Separately, proposal TIP-123 was also posted which looks to deprecate both the Optimistic Governance and Tribal Council smart contracts. This would effectively dismantle two key governance processes set up by the DAO. TribeDAO nears its end.
SushiSwap narrows its Head Chef Search
Sushi’s search for a new Head Chef appears close. On September 12th, a snapshot vote was posted to approve a final schedule and process to appoint a Head Chef. The timeline is described as follows: first, hold a snapshot vote on the schedule itself, next, a two-week period of nominee campaigning and lobbying. Thereafter, a week of nominee debates, and finally a snapshot vote on September 26th to confirm a Head Chef. A total of five nominees are on the shortlist for Head Chef which includes Kenneth Hurley, Jared Grey, Jared Cohen, Pauly Walton, and Andy Forman. The coveted DeFi leadership role has been vacant since December 2021. The role appears to finally have a clear timeline.
Optimism Kicks Off Season 2
It’s officially Season 2 at Optimism’s Token House. After a brief off-season, the Governance Fund resumes voting with Voting Cycle #6. Voting Cycles are dedicated voting windows to streamline and consolidate proposals. Proposals in the GF mainly focus on building and incentivizing sustainable growth of the Optimism ecosystem. Updates for Season 2 include an updated Operating Manual, a new Grant Proposal Template, the introduction of Governance Committees, and a new Committee Formation Template. Four governance committees have been introduced to help offload proposal filtering to more specialized groups including two DeFi committees, one for Tooling, and one for NFTs and Gaming. Proposers of grant proposals now need to specify which governance committee they’d like to review their proposal. Importantly, governance committees can only make recommendations and not any final decisions. Season 2 runs from September 8th through November 9th.
Synthetix opens Council Elections
Nominations for the next Synthetix Councils’ epoch have just opened. Nominations run now through September 17th. Synthetix is governed by four council bodies. The four councils are Spartans, Grants, Treasury, and Ambassador and all serve vital roles in the protocol. Elected council members hold their roles for 3 months and receive a monthly stipend of $2K SNX. Starting September 17th, Synthetix tokenholders can head over to the nomination UI to read, nominate, and vote on their favorite nominees.
📚 Good Reads
“Effective Accountability for Uniswap Governance” from Other Internet
“Contributors Need To Be More Accountable to the DAOs They Serve” by John Morrow
“Tribes and Endgames: DAOs Stretching Themselves” by Luca Prosperi
“Accrual Accounting for DAOs” from LoupeDAO
“Except by Consent of the Governed” from Volt Protocol
“Major DAOs in Solana Ecosystem” from StableNode
🧵 Threads
“Top 10 Key Research Outcomes” from StableNode
“DAOs Are in Their Teenage Phase: 15 DAO Insights from MCON” by @_juliettech
🎧 Listens
“Tokenized Communities and Creator Ownership, with Jihad Esmail of ForefrontDAO” on The Ownership Economy Podcast
“Breaking Down The Merge and Why it's Just the Beginning for Ethereum w/ Jon Charbonneau” on DAOn the Rabbithole Podcast
“Non-Financial Use Cases for Tokens w/ David Phelps” on Rehash Podcast
“BanklessDAO Governance 2.0 w/ 0xJustice” on DAO Governance Education Podcast
“Stablecoin Decentralization and Governance w/ Ameen Soleimani & Sam Kazemian” on The Flywheelpod
📜 Highlighted Proposals
Re-enable ETH Borrowing
This proposal looks to re-enable ETH borrowing on the Aave V2 Ethereum market. Proposal AIP-97 was previously passed to pause all ETH borrowing ahead of the Ethereum Merge. Pausing borrowing on the protocol helped mitigate insolvency risk caused by liquidation failures. This on-chain proposal would revert the pause and enable borrowing on the DeFi protocol while a set of protocol conditions will be monitored closely to ensure stability. A complete post-mortem with analytics and statistics will also be shared.
✅ 100% voting ‘Yae’
💬 Read the discussion
Deploy Uniswap v3 on zksync
This proposal looks for the approval of a license exemption to deploy Uniswap v3 on zkSync, a layer 2 scaling solution on Ethereum. Penn Blockchain, in collaboration with Matter Labs, looks to enable the growth and mission of the Uniswap protocol to deploy on multiple chains. zkSync is an EVM-compatible ZK Rollup with a growing number of user activity and deployed protocols. The proposal looks to make Uniswap the largest DEX in the zkSync ecosystem. This is a temperature check vote with possible consensus and on-chain votes to follow.
✅ 100% voting ‘Yes’
💬 Read the discussion
Improved Delegation Experience
This proposal looks to create a more robust and dedicated delegate experience directly on the ApeCoin site. The proposal would fund a dedicated team of engineers with $150k APE. Four improvements are outlined: 1) Process For Delegate Applications; 2) Dedicated UI/UX for Delegation; 3) Creation of Governance Leaderboard; 4) Open Sourcing the tech. ApeCoin DAO looks to benefit from improving its delegation model due to low governance participation.
✅ 99.26% voting ‘In favor’
💬 Read the discussion
Increase the Number of Serving Ambassadors
This proposal looks to increase the number of seats on the Synthetix Ambassador Council from three to five. An increased workload for the council has prompted the need for a larger council. The Ambassador Council serves to promote and advocate for the interests of Synthetix across the ecosystem. An increase in protocol partnerships, governance activity, and high-value Optimism integration warrants the change. Synthetix’s Council nomination window is now open.
✅ 100% voting ‘sYes’
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For a deeper dive into DAO governance data, browse our Governance API - 🚀 This link can be used to make requests against the API and is an excellent way to start exploring our governance data!