Flipside Governance Recap | 14 April 2023
Welcome to the Flipside Governance Team Recap. Here you’ll get a full view of what we‘re up to each week, from penning proposals to publishing research to our all-important voting activity & rationales. Enjoy!
🚨 Team Highlights
Flipside Publishes zkSync, LDO, & Stargate Proposals
Working closely with outside teams and organizations, Flipside has coordinated the use of its delegation power to publish high-impact proposals on-chain or Snapshot.
This week has been particularly busy in Aave, with three key votes live thanks to Flipside:
- Add LDO to Aave Ethereum V3
- Whitelist Stargate for V3 Portals
- Aave V3 Deployment on zkSync Era Mainnet
So far, all three proposals have garnered 99% votes in favor and we remain excited as they near completion. Adding assets, expanding V3 to new frontier markets, and integrating new infrastructure via bridging continue to be valuable growth initiatives for Aave.
We maintain this conviction towards expansion and are excited to continue to help on behalf of stakeholders within Aave. If you are interested in getting involved with blue-chip DeFi protocols like Aave, give us a shout — we’d be happy to help you throughout the process.
📰 Governance News of the Week
Arbitrum Tries Again (AIP-1.1 & AIP-1.2)
Introducing AIP-1.1 and AIP-1.2, Arbitrum Foundation returns to the DAO and its token holders to propose amendments to the constitution, bylaws, and an updated funding request.
Contrary to AIP-1, these two proposals seem to have much more support so far with 98% of the vote in favor. They focus on a more equitable future by:
- Lowering the threshold for on-chain proposal to 1,000,000 ABRs (20% of previous proposed level)
- Establishing a process to apply or remove directors from the Data Availability committee
- Clarity on the power and control of the DAO over the foundation
- $36,000,000 budget for one-year of operating, R&D, and infrastructure expenses
While this budget remains high, the foundation re-affirms this 7.5% level is more fair, and almost one-fifth of control compared to other foundations, such as Optimism
The community remains engaged and impassioned, quickly showing their support for this updated number via Snapshot and in forum discussions.
We are eager to see how Arbitrum matures beyond these initial votes and are reaffirmed by their willingness to amend and incorporate community feedback.
📊 Analysis of the Week
On-Chain AAVE Governance
Many blockchain enthusiasts are familiar with the lending and borrowing features of AAVE. Fewer are familiar with the protocol’s on-chain governance process. But have no fear! There is no question about this process that cannot be de-mystified by diving into on-chain data.
This week we are highlighting this comprehensive AAVE governance dashboard made by Flipside community member “Freemartian.” Not only does “Freemartian” provide an in-depth introduction to AAVE and its governance process on the first tab of the dashboard, but they also provide a plethora of statistics about voters, proposals, delegates, voting power, and how votes affect the AAVE token price. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting pieces of information from this dashboard.
On the “6-month trace” tab of this dashboard, statistics at the top of the page state that there are only 23 delegates that have cast a vote during this time period while there are 5,290 regular users that have voted. However, these 23 delegates have controlled almost 66% of the voting power that has voted on each distinct on-chain proposal. It is important to note that in this analysis, a delegate is defined as an address that has more than one address delegating the voting power of their tokens to it and has cast a vote.
While this dashboard states that only 23 delegates (or users that have the voting power of 2 or more wallets delegated to them) have cast an on-chain vote during this time, AAVE has a substantial amount more delegates than other ETH protocols when looking at users who are active on Snapshot.
The next most active space on Snapshot in terms of delegate voting is the Optimism Collective, which features less than half the number of delegates as the AAVE space.
One conclusion that may be drawn from these two data points is that AAVE’s mixed use of on-chain and off-chain voting on Snapshot has helped cultivate participation from a large number of delegates, resulting in a high degree of decentralization. Whatever AAVE’s secret governance sauce is, it is proving to be a wild success!
📜 Flipside Governance Activity
For more all-around 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.
