Tribeca Protocol: How To Use

Since the initial launch of the Tribeca Protocol in December, several DAOs have incorporated the Tribeca framework into their governance stack in order to manage crucial aspects of their projects (such as emission rates, grants, and program upgrades) in a fully decentralized on-chain system.

Currently, maintainers of the protocol are working on simplifying the UX for non-technical users in order to facilitate large scale adoption. As more users understand concepts like gauges and how to create the proper instructions to be executed by a proposal — protocols will empower their long term supporters and everyday users to contribute to their development.

Many of the first DAOs that have been built with Tribeca have been built to govern a protocol (Saber, Sunny, Port, Cashio). However, the Tribeca framework can generalize to any type of DAO which utilizes an SPL token for governance decisions over a Goki wallet, such as the Solien DAO. This article will walk you through the steps to create and use the Tribeca Protocol with 0 technical skills. If you are not looking to create a new DAO, feel free to skip to the last section.

Currently the only client for users to interact with the Tribeca Protocol is the Tribeca Interface at tribeca.so

DAO Creation

You can access the DAO creation page on the Tribeca Interface here. Note that the the interface currently only allows Tribeca DAOs to be created using the recommended configuration. This configuration is depicted in the figure above, and it requires your Goki Smart Wallet to have three signers:

• Executive Council;
• Emergency Multisig;
• and Tribeca DAO Governor.

This tutorial also assumes you have a governance token ready to use. If you need help, follow this tutorial on How to Create and List a Solana Token with Zero Development in 5 Minutes.

Step 1: Connect your wallet and click Create Executive Council. You will be prompted to accept a transaction to create this council. A notification should pop up with a link to the successful transaction as the next page loads.

Step 2: On the next page, click Create Emergency Multisig. This will work exactly the same way as Step 1.

Step 3. Provide a Governance Token Mint. This step requires that you have the token ready in your wallet. After you click Launch DAO you will be prompted to approve three separate transactions:

1. Create Smart Wallet — This combines the three multisigs into a programmable smart wallet which is used for execution.
2. Create Governor — This creates the actual DAO that connects to your locker and smart wallet in order to manage proposals & votes.
3. Create Electorate — This creates the locker program responsible for escrowing user’s tokens and providing veToken balances.

By now, you should see a blank overview page on the Tribeca Interface for your newly created DAO. Notice that you were never prompted to set any parameters, and if you go to the parameters tab — it should look like this:

Currently, the only way to edit parameters is to send instructions by passing a proposal. This is out of the scope of this tutorial, but in the future UX updates users will be able to include parameters as part of the interface DAO onboarding process.

How to Govern

The only frontend interface available for use with Tribeca (at the time of writing) is the official Tribeca Interface which is hosted at https://tribeca.so for free use by any DAO. This example will use the Saber DAO as the instance of Tribeca which we will interface with.

Step 0: Acquire Governance Token, in this case SBR.

Step 1: Go to the Tribeca Interface Overview page, here you can see a lot of important info once you connect your wallet - including the amount of SBR staked, total SBR supply, Recent Proposals, and Programs owned by the DAO.

Step 2: Click Locker, and set the time to lock your SBR, most importantly, remember that locking tokens is an irreversible action.

Step 3: Click Create Proposal, this shows you a screen with options on what action to propose, as well as other fields to fill out. These can trigger a variety of Transactions on the blockchain which can do any of the following:

• Sign memos, attesting a message on the blockchain forever;
• Create and manage payment streams for grants;
• Issue or mint new tokens;
• Change emissions rate for liquidity mining;
• and Edit parameters to governance program.

Step 4: Click the Proposals tab, this shows past proposals and their status.

Step 5: Click On any Proposal, on this page you can cast your vote.

Step 6: Click the Gauges Tab, here you can view all the quarry pools which SBR is emitting tokens to. You can vote on which pool you want more emissions to go to, and rewards are weighted on these votes.

Gauges help determine the APY % on quarry pools

Step 7: Click the Parameters Tab, on this page you can see all relevant parameters, and if you wish you can create a proposal to edit anything.

Congrats! You now know how to participate in governance using the Tribeca Protocol. Although the Tribeca Protocol may sound like a one-stop-shop for all your DAO needs, it is only one tool in a wider DAO toolset. Luckily, Tribeca was specifically engineered to be able to evolve as more people build on top of it. For now, DAOs still require their own discussion forums, Knowledge Management platforms, access controls, onboarding best practices, and more. See the image below for context on how much more there is to build for DAOs.

Our goal is to see more teams build on top our framework, which will support the need for more integrations, which in turn supports the development for more tooling — in a decentralized and composable on chain system.

As you can see, there remains some open challenges which must be resolved in order to have a blooming DAO ecosystem:

• Improved treasury management UI needed for Tribeca, by allowing the ability to add treasury accounts for different assets and requiring users to set some configurable governance parameters for each account;
• Easy-to-understand instruction creation, so that users without technical skills can feel confident that the proposal triggers the correct actions;
• Reputation score and contribution tracking tools required, for optimal use of compensation infrastructure;
• Integrate and fund sub-DAOs within a main DAO (currently technically exists as the emergency/executive councils- but not flexible for users);
• Open the bribery market for entities to offer emissions in return for control over veToken voting balances. Makes use of set_vote_delegate from the locked_voter program for this.

You can read the docs to learn more about how Tribeca differs from SPL governance- but the most important point is that it’s much easier to build on Tribeca because of it’s modular, Anchor based design.

Disclaimer

All claims, content, designs, algorithms, estimates, roadmaps, specifications, and performance measurements described in this project are done with the author’s best effort. It is up to the reader to check and validate their accuracy and truthfulness. Furthermore, nothing in this project constitutes a solicitation for investment.