Roadmap to Governor Charlie
Note: We updated our roadmap on May 1, 2022 to reflect the evolving DeFi landscape and ensure the future success of Bribe Protocol. We remain committed to tackling pressing issues concerning DeFi governance and incentivizing voter participation.
DeFi governance today is hindered by low participation, leading to a lack of decentralization. Bribe Protocol is aiming to revolutionize dGov with transparent, incentivized governance, starting with the release of Voter Extractable Value (VEV) in Phase One.
There are several pressing issues in today’s DeFi governance ecosystem. Many governance token holders are not actively voting, nor do they feel incentivized to participate or even delegate their votes. Not to mention, there is a troubling disconnect between the value of governance tokens and the actual value of voting. This ultimately results in non-representative governance decisions for protocols, because most votes are dominated by just a few long-term holders.
Bribe Protocol addresses these problems in dGov with an ambitious phased implementation, as detailed in our roadmap below.
The Roadmap
Phase One: Voter Extractable Value (VEV)
Phase One lays the foundation for Bribe Protocol’s value proposition, incentivized participation facilitated through transparent governance markets. Bribe introduces Voter Extractable Value (VEV) to coordinate powerful coalitions of governance token holders. This solution not only addresses the problem of voter apathy, but does so by creating fair and open market competition, ultimately bringing value back to the DAOs that integrate with Bribe. Our first integration is with Aave, and we plan to expand our list of integrated pools in the near future, thus increasing options for users of the Bribe solution.
Phase Two: Bribe Pots
Bribe Pots deploys in Phase Two, allowing for the creation of incentives to bribe voters. Buyers interested in amassing voting power deposit incentives to reward supporters, and users claim those incentives after voting. This framework builds upon Phase One to expand the use case of Voter Extractable Value (VEV). In addition to “yes or no” proposals, Bribe Pots facilitates bribery for non-dichotomous decisions such as directing liquidity or allocating fee-shares. Our first integration is with QiDAO, which uses gauge voting to decide on the distribution of rewards to various collateral types. The Pots codebase is highly interoperable across EVM chains and protocols, so it can be simply replicated for any DAO on Snapshot.
Phase Three: Bribe Pro
Phase Three introduces Bribe Pro, a governance market ecosystem which compensates voters with incentives from buyers (Pots), offers automated voting for the best offered incentives or highest bids (Pools), and empowers BRIBE holders to govern key parameters of the platform through veBRIBE and the Bribe DAO. Notably, emissions for each Bribe Pool will be weighted according to the amount of veBRIBE allocated to the pool.
The DAO will also establish minimum starting bids for protocol pools based on a system of categorizing proposals. Aave proposals, for example, largely fall into three categories: grants, new collateral types, and disbursements to ecosystem participants (e.g., Gauntlet). Starting bids for each category of proposal will be determined by a vote of BRIBE and veBRIBE holders.
Phase Four: Bribe SDK
A Bribe SDK (Software Development Toolkit) will be deployed in Phase Four, allowing anyone to create Bribe Pools for protocols not already integrated with Bribe. As outlined in Phase Three, new Bribe integrations must define proposal categories, as well as corresponding starting bids, veto processes, and conditions for vote deposits and withdrawals. BRIBE and veBRIBE holders will be empowered to make these decisions about the governance of Bribe pools, enabling delegates, DAOs, and other experts to participate in structuring new Bribe Pools with less exposure to the underlying DAO’s token.
Phase Five: Cross-Chain Governance
Bribe is betting on a cross-chain future in Phase Five. Today, cross-layer governance lacks necessary tooling and intuitive user experiences. For example, Layer 2 Ethereum voters have to first, bridge tokens to the target L1 and second, compete with L1 voters to influence governance proposal outcomes.
We are in the early stages of developing cross-chain, cross-layer governance for protocols that sit on multiple chains. Bribe’s cross-layer governance 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, cross-chain governance offers support for distributed, layer-specific proposals.
Phase Six: Distributed DAOs
Phase Six empowers community subsets to carry out localized governance via distributed DAOs. These localized DAOs have greater flexibility to pilot innovations in DAO governance and tooling, all with the aim of testing models for the genuine decentralization of protocols. We expect that these pilots will trial distributed team models (e.g., yTeams), semi-autonomous DAOs within umbrella communities (e.g., a cross-chain protocol may base its sub-communities on the host chain/layer), new vote staking and fundraising mechanisms (e.g., Polkadot parachain auctions), and whatever else is exciting once we reach this phase.
Phase Seven: Governor Charlie
Governor Charlie is the synthesis of the Bribe SDK and Distributed DAO tooling. It will bring a forkable DAO framework for new protocols to launch high-participation, market-driven, decentralized governance. Setting a framework for the design of Governor Charlie is an ongoing exercise, representing the culmination of all previous phases as well as Bribe’s overall ethos of advancing decentralization in governance.
About Bribe
Bribe creates DAO infrastructure tooling to incentivize protocol participation. Bribe V1 introduces Voter Extractable Value (VEV) to coordinate and auction powerful coalitions of DAO votes. Depositors stake their governance tokens in the Bribe pool to earn income. Bidders borrow the staked votes to support or reject governance proposals. Bribe V2 introduces Bribe Pots, the incentives lego of Bribe Protocol. Buyers interested in amassing voting power deposit incentives to reward supporters, and users claim those incentives after voting. They no longer need to stake in the protocol to participate.
Bribe is best used as part of a well-balanced and active delegation strategy. For more information, visit:
