Bribe Protocol’s Critical Role in Cross-Chain Governance for DeFi
As DeFi continues its growth trajectory, the next frontier to tackle is the fragmentation of voting powers across chains, especially as applications are now constantly being sharded across different chains and layers. The same way yield-seeking continues to move cross-chain, so is decentralized governance (dGov), even for primitives like Aave. Bribe recognizes this phenomenon and is focused on enabling the cross-chain capabilities of DAOs for governance — specifically, by building a generalizable cross-chain governance solution that can be utilized by any protocol. To this end, Bribe has deployed a VEV (Voter Extractable Value) tool for DAOs to improve their governance participation. While VEV is Bribe’s first product in the arena of dGov, we understand that applications for governance infrastructure in Web 3.0 will require more than just VEV.
Today, cross-layer governance lacks the necessary tooling and intuitive user experiences for dApp or protocol developers to leverage. For example, Layer 2 (L2) voters on Ethereum have a significant hurdle to surmount just to participate in dGov. They first must bridge their tokens to the target Layer 1 (L1) and then compete with L1 voters to influence governance proposal outcomes. This is already a disadvantage for L2 voters who have to grapple with gas charges and time lag for time-sensitive governance voting scenarios.
Although new protocol environments (namely, cross-layer ETH and substrate) are in an even less developed state than Ethereum mainnet, they possess more primitive governance capabilities and cultures of participation. Bribe’s purpose is to help unlock the scalability potentials that L2 provides for the Ethereum ecosystem by employing the cross-blockchain interoperability of substrate native Polkadot.
Bribe Protocol’s non custodial vote message for cross-layer L2 voting
To start with, take the instances of a protocol on L1 and different L2s like Arbitrum, Polygon, and Optimistic Rollups that will likely always operate in slightly different contexts deserving of semi-independent governance. For example, L2s today tend to be more heavily retail-oriented than Ethereum mainnet (due to lower gas fees). It is thus unreasonable for L2 users to amass a quorum of votes on Ethereum for decisions that will affect every instance of the protocol, for example supported collateral types, risk parameters, etc. To solve this problem, Bribe is developing a solution to facilitate voting across blockchains and Ethereum L2 through non-custodial vote messaging, in addition to a framework for protocols with on-chain governance to manage semi-independent governance on other instances.
Cross-chain Messaging (XCM) and Semi-independent governance for Substrate native protocols
Per Substrate (framework for building pallets on Kusama and Polkadot), governance challenges primarily derive from the unique quality of substrate for applications to take the form of pallets which are plugged directly into the runtime of a chain. This situation warrants at least two infrastructural solutions on Bribe’s development roadmap. First, DAO and treasury pallets on Bribe must be embedded with cross-chain messaging and transaction services that facilitate sending funds off-chain. Second, pallet developers incorporating pallets onto multiple parachains should have a semi-independent governance mechanism for updating and improving their pallet code. This tooling, working in tandem with VEV on Substrate, will position ecosystems like Polkadot for decentralized governance in the long-run.
Conclusion
Bribe is betting on a cross-chain future. Though still in the early stages of developing cross-chain, cross-layer governance for protocols that are sharded across multiple chains, Bribe’s solution will enable cross-chain voting, cross-chain decision propagation, and cross-chain payments. It will also allow protocols to engage in cross-chain message passing, which facilitates vote messaging, eliminating the need to bridge tokens to the underlying Ethereum network to register votes. Finally, our cross-chain governance will offer support for distributed, layer-specific proposals.
About Bribe
Bribe creates DAO infrastructure tooling to incentivize protocol participation. Depositors stake their governance tokens in the Bribe pool to earn income. Bidders borrow the staked votes to support or reject governance proposals. Bribe V1 introduces Voter Extractable Value (VEV) to coordinate and auction powerful coalitions of DAO votes. Bribe is best used as part of a well-balanced and active delegation strategy.
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