Hello World from Bribe đź‘‹
— Stake. Wait. Earn. Bribe on Aave
Today we are excited to introduce Bribe, a new DeFi protocol that pays DAO token holders to govern. Bribe Protocol aims to revolutionize dGov with incentivized protocol participation. Depositors stake their governance tokens in a Bribe pool to earn income; bidders borrow the staked votes to support or reject governance proposals.
The Bribe Solution: Transparent Markets for DAO Governance Decisions
Governance markets are inherent to DeFi. This is because influence in governance is distributed through votes which can be bought, sold, lended, borrowed, and priced. It follows that governance outcomes can also be bought and sold. Due to the early stage of development for many token markets, large sums of governance tokens required to “buy” DAO outcomes are not typically available on open markets like Aave or Compound. Instead, these deals tend to happen over-the-counter, between trusted counterparties. In short, “bribery” already happens, but most protocol users are left out.
Bribe improves upon current DAO governance models by coordinating voters into powerful coalitions up for auction. Bidders can access the voting power of these pools with USDC, rather than accumulating large amounts of DAO tokens. Now, anyone can participate in governance markets, not just whales.
We are coining the term Voter Extractable Value (VEV) as a name for our flagship product. In the tradition of Flashbots’ approach to MEV, we recognize that making governance markets work better for DAOs starts with improving transparency and access. By reducing opportunity costs for voters, we expect that VEV will increase DAO participation, add use cases for voting, and help keep Web 3.0 governance on chain.
What to Expect in the Coming Months
Bribe Protocol will first integrate with Aave in January 2022 — so join our community to stay up to date on all things Bribe during our launch. Due to the specific nature of the Aave DAO, the Bribe pool for Aave takes the form of a staking contract on Ethereum. It is currently being audited by Stela Labs and was peer reviewed by Mudit Gupta.
We will follow the launch of the Aave Bribe pool with a Tokemak Bribe pool later in Q1 2022. Bribe will host auctions for new reactor candidates based on a single, transparent, transaction distributed directly to voters. Read more about Tokemak reactor governance here.
Bribe Protocol is the next step in decentralized governance, but not the last. Future tooling will advance our goals of expanding governance participation and helping DAOs function more effectively in the evolving Web 3.0 world. Bribe is best used as part of a well-balanced and active delegation strategy. We are committed to future product improvements that will ensure users do not vote against their aggregate best interest.
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