Bribe’s Fundamental Infrastructure
Bribe is proud to have launched our application, the Aave Bribe Pool, and our native token BRIBE. Bidding and staking through Pools is the foundation of Bribe Protocol, demonstrating the power of our Voter Extractable Value (VEV) tool. VEV coordinates voters into powerful coalitions up for auction. Governance token holders can stake their voting power in a Bribe pool and, in return, are rewarded in stables. On the other hand, bidders can borrow these staked votes in the Bribe pool to support or reject governance proposals. VEV is a key feature of the first iteration of Bribe. It is the first tool in the Bribe arsenal for addressing and solving low participation and voter apathy in DeFi.
Bidding and staking represent the foundational basis for realizing Bribe’s vision for cross-chain governance. DeFi continues to edge towards a cross-chain future; hence, eliminating any barrier for stakeholders to govern within this space is essentially critical. Bribe is fully committed to its mission — to help governance evolve simultaneously.
Bribe is tackling cross-chain governance in two contexts: Layer 2 Ethereum (L2) and Substrate. These two areas require that Bribe adopt separate infrastructures to facilitate governance cross-chain seamlessly.
Layer 2 ETH (L2)
L2 creates communication problems between instances of DAOs that exist on different layers across the Ethereum network. How can governance be achieved for a DAO that is sharded across several chains and layers?
Bribe reckons there are at least two ways to solve this problem: cross-layer vote messaging and autonomous governance. Cross-layer vote messaging allows the DAO to talk to itself on-chain across different instances. This allows for communication between separate instances of the DAO that exist on different layers. Snapshot X is a key piece of this, facilitating an on-chain voting framework. Snapshot X essentially enables on-chain voting on L2 while executing the decision on L1 in a fully trustless manner.
The second approach is autonomy. As is the case with the communities of sharded protocols, most of them have splintered communities, each with their different priorities. For example, Aave V2 on Polygon might vote differently than another instance of Aave. At the moment, all governance decisions are made by the Ethereum Aave DAO. By introducing autonomy for each instance of a DAO, each instance can be empowered to make governance decisions that make sense in their own specific context.
Bribe will be creating a sub-DAO framework (based on our cross-chain voting infrastructure) that allows each sub-DAO to vote on a predefined subset of governance decisions. By this, Bribe is creating DAOs within DAOs — all with their own Bribe pools. These “localized DAOs” have greater flexibility to pilot DAO governance and tooling innovations. This allows for further autonomy, where sub-DAOs can vote and execute decisions that apply to their individual contexts. As part of out roadmap, Bribe will also be releasing a cross-chain governance framework to help protocols streamline these governance processes.
Substrate
Bribe plans to create a separate infrastructure for cross-chain governance on Substrate. Substrate features individual applications known as “pallets” that are plugged directly into the run time of a chain. Parachains such as Picasso host their blockchains, which in turn have certain conditions of governance that parachain operators preset. Governance currently sits at the blockchain level, but the persisting issue has been what governance will look like for applications built on the parachain. Moreso, what happens if these applications deploy these instances across different parachains? This kind of challenge requires two infrastructure solutions.
The first is DAO and treasury pallets on Bribe. Bribe expects DAO pallets to be used by applications and sit on multiple parachains — these will be embedded with cross-chain messaging and transaction services that facilitate sending funds off-chain.
The second solution is to allow for autonomous governance for pallets. Similar to the autonomy that Bribe plans to bring to instances of protocols on L2, pallets will be given autonomy for certain decisions. This would allow these applications to have a semi-independent governance mechanism to update and improve their code. This tooling, working in tandem with VEV on Substrate, will position ecosystems like Polkadot for decentralized governance in the long run.
Building Infrastructure for the Future of dGov
Bribe is joining the cross-chain revolution to enable the next era of DeFi applications. As a governance-focused protocol, it is Bribe’s mission to ensure that dGov takes advantage of new and exciting cross-chain technologies. Bribe is starting with VEV in V1 in order to improve participation initially. This increased participation will allow us to tackle other issues in governance, such as the lack of interoperability between chains and layers. Our ambitious phased implementation aims to provide solutions for both L2 Ethereum as well as pallets on Substrate. Although we are still in the early stages of developing this infrastructure, we are optimistic that Bribe will play an integral role in helping DeFi and its governance realize the cross-chain future.
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