Flipside Governance Recap | 11 November 2022
Welcome to the Flipside Governance Team Recap! Here’s a weekly summary of heady governance activity, hard-hitting research & data analysis, sprinkled with key news from the broader governance space.
Team Highlights 🚨
- Govy Show Episode #9: Solana Breakpoint, Optimism, and Juno happenings. If you missed it, catch the recording.
Our Research and Content ✏️
- Meet Matt Van Ommeren aka quasimatt | Our Newest Contributor: The man, the myth, the…newest Flipside Governance contributor 😎. Come read about Matt’s hook into blockchain, time at Beanstalk and what he’s bringing to the Flipside team. We be recruiting the best!
- Evolution of the Cosmos — Why Flipside Governance Supports Prop 82: Controversial proposals demand robust rationale. Jess is here to do just that. The primary reason for our YES vote on prop 82 is that ATOM 2.0 will bring much needed utility to the token via both the technical aspects and via projects funded by the ATOM treasury.
Across the Industry: Governance News of the Week 📰
- Binance Backs Out of Deal to Buy FTX: One day after suggesting an acquisition to ease the liquidity crunch, Binance has pulled out of the deal. On-chain data showed that Binance had already moved $584 million worth of its FTT on Saturday as part of its plans to liquidate its holdings.
- A Take on the dYdX DAO’s Near Future: As dYdX continues on their migration to Cosmos for v4, the dYdX Foundation blog post states that the protocol’s future likely consists of “several autonomous subDAOs…that each work on core functional areas of the dYdX protocol and are ultimately accountable to the dYdX community”.
- Optimism’s Guide to Season 3 Course Correcting: As the Season 2 voting cycle for the Optimism Collective comes to an end, the community seeks modifications to its governance design. From concerns over delegate overload to committee conflict, the DAO is determined to self-improve. Taking notes.
Flipside Governance | Analysis of the Week 📊
The birth of safeDAO
We like to evaluate DAOs outside our core contributor set periodically to stay abreast of emerging communities, and this week we’re taking a stab at Gnosis. Cheers Jess for the chart!
Users require a $GNO governance token to participate in the DAO by supporting the Gnosis Chain, V2/balancer protocol management, and project funding. Voting takes place off chain on Snapshot.
Figure 1 shows the number of votes placed per proposal.
The most engaged with GIP (Gnosis Improvement Proposal) was GIP-29: Spin Off safeDAO and Launch SAFE Token back in April 2022 where 928 votes were cast totalling roughly 190k GNO.
safeDAO was born in order to enshrine Gnosis Safe — their legacy multi-sig wallet — as a community-owned project. As part of the SAFE Token distribution, 20% of the total supply went to the benefit of GNO holders.
A whopping 99.58% of the Gnosis community voted in favour of the safeDAO launch.
And we’re glad they did. Flipside has since become a safeDAO delegate (see below 👀) where exciting things are happening!
Post GIP-29, Gnosis DAO participation has remained consistently high — with the lowest turnout since at 337 votes for GIP-53. The enthusiasm for decentralizing Gnosis products through a DAO has carried through and energized the community long term.
The effect of the safeDAO launch on Gnosis DAO governance participation demonstrates how a community can splinter and at the same time rally. This is a top example of decentralization in action and provides a valuable lesson for other DAOs with products in a position to do the same.
Flipside Governance Activity 📜
For more all-round governance content, be sure to follow us on Twitter or here on Medium. We’ll keep you updated.
Hear, hear! If you dig the work we’re doing for our partner DAOs and want to delegate to us, click the links below to get to the delegation page:
If you are interested in joining the Flipside Governance team, we are always listening — DM @flipsidegov on Twitter.
