Bribe Protocol Update: Incubating a Universe of DAO Infrastructure Powered by Liquid Governance Markets

Our goal at Bribe Protocol is to build DAO decision-making tooling powered by liquid, on-chain governance markets. In Phase One, we released VEV (Voter Extractable Value), a market for the value of governance tokens as votes, and our first voting coalition (the Aave Bribe Pool) as a proof-of-concept. We then demonstrated the on-chain implementation by voting in Aave governance on behalf of users, along with collecting feedback and discussing the future of DAOs with innovators across the globe.

Since then, we have been heads down building, working towards Governor Charlie, the synthesis of our roadmap and vision for DeFi governance. We would like to take this opportunity to inform the Bribe community of our progress so far and the protocol’s three key priorities as we head into an exciting season of shipping new integrations.

Primarily, our focus has been on the development and audit of Bribe Pots, a new incentives building block for bribery. Bribe users no longer need to stake to participate. Rather, depositors will provide incentives that users can claim after voting.

Other notable updates include exploration of sustainable liquidity options and new frameworks for pricing governance proposals through the still-WIP Bribe DAO. We are also working on a whitepaper covering the above topics in detail, which the community will be able to read on our website. These milestones lay the foundation for Bribe Pro, a governance market ecosystem which 1) lets anyone create voter incentives (Pots), 2) offers automated voting for voters to access incentives (Delegation), and 3) empowers BRIBE holders to govern key parameters of the platform (veBRIBE).

For additional details about our long-term plans, please see our Roadmap to Governor Charlie here.

1. Bribe Pots

We are excited to share that new Bribe integrations will be built on Bribe Pots, a foundational DeFi lego that allows for the distribution of incentives to DAO users or voters. Like existing bribery services, incentive providers simply deposit tokens as compensation for users who perform a predefined on-chain behavior — in this case, voting. Anyone can access these incentives, as long as they know where to claim them (app.bribe.xyz).

The Bribe Pots framework functions similarly to Votium’s role in the Convex ecosystem, and we look forward to providing these kinds of bribing opportunities for other DAOs. In particular, we will prioritize deployment on protocols with vote-escrow token (veToken) models. The first Bribe Pots integration is with QiDAO, with a codebase that can be simply replicated for any DAO on Snapshot.

***Do you have an idea for a new DAO that Bribe can integrate with? Partnership suggestion? Reach out to us at info@bribe.xyz!***

Building on the Bribe Pots framework affords several distinct benefits:

• Enabling new applications; such as conditionless incentives (paid out to general users of a protocol), liquidity directing applications (veTokens and gauge voting), as well as classic Bribe vote coalitions (the Aave Bribe Pool)
• Enabling scalability; the Bribe Pots codebase is highly interoperable across EVM chains and protocols
• Enabling democracy; Bribe Pots may accept multiple bidders, allowing for a truly liquid market for governance decisions
• Enabling delegation; Bribe Pots may distribute incentives to delegated votes, DAO delegates, and on-chain Bribe Pools.

We have written further about Bribe Pots here.

2. Sustainable Liquidity

As with many DeFi apps, liquidity is everything to Bribe. In our case specifically, vote liquidity enables Bribe Pools to act with influence in DAO governance, thereby improving the value of the protocol.

Our best tool for building and diversifying vote liquidity is the BRIBE token (via liquidity mining, collateralization, token exchange, etc.). As such, we are committed to driving sustained value to the token. To that end, we are pursuing a strategy of making BRIBE accessible on additional token exchange platforms. In an effort to increase bidding activity on our platform (the main revenue-generator for BRIBE), we have also expanded our business development team to codify and share the benefits of participation in governance across DAOs.

Because BRIBE is a fixed-cap currency, a liquidity base paid for with BRIBE cannot be sustained indefinitely. For this reason, we are exploring plans to bond BRIBE and/or accumulate protocol-owned liquidity in order to ensure stable and lasting liquidity for major integrations like the Aave Bribe Pool. In line with our broad understanding of voting in DeFi, the team is also cataloging sources of vote liquidity across DeFi (e.g., lending protocols) for the most prevalent voting tokens.

3. Neutral Facilitation

Finally, we believe good governance (for DAOs and otherwise) requires execution without bias. That is to say that the goal of governance tooling is to improve a DAO’s ability to come to pareto-optimal outcomes and deliver on them. Crucially, this goal requires that tooling providers make no pre-determination of what is “right” or “wrong” for governance in particular contexts.

With this in mind, the team at Bribe is committed to neutrality. We eagerly provide analysis of governance decisions where warranted (as in the case of our Aave Frax proposal). We will only ever support or advance governance decisions that have been approved by some means, be that on-chain voting, bribing, Snapshot temperature checks, etc.

Furthermore, we are preparing for the implementation of the Bribe DAO, which will be governed by our community of BRIBE token holders upon enactment later this year. The DAO will aid in the development of knowledge frameworks to inform protocol operations — everything from how bribing works to the ways governance proposals are written and advanced, including, but not limited to, proposal categorization and minimum starting bids. We hope to help leverage our community’s experience to host discussions on DAO decision-making, ultimately to introduce a fair pricing framework for governance decisions.

Our vision for DeFi governance culminates in liquid governance markets which allow Futarchy to exist on-chain. We’ll touch more on this topic in further posts soon.

Make sure to join our Discord and follow us on Twitter for more updates from Bribe — we’re excited to share our journey with you.