Flipside Governance Recap | 14 October 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 🚨
- Avi speaks on Jump xHack Governance Panel: Avi joined fellow governance pioneers on a panel for week 2 of Jump xHack. See panel members below!
- Fig at DevCon: Fig spent the better part of this week in Bogota, Columbia! Featuring the rAAVE, a Maker Delegate dinner, and all round crushing.
- Maker Proposal for MKR Holder only Discord Channel: Raph co-authors a Maker proposal with Tim Black for a token-gated channel on the MakerDAO Discord to bridge the communication gap between holders and contributors.
Our Research and Content ✏️
- Snapshot Death Match: NFT vs. Token-Based Voting Participation Rates: Ever wondered who does DAOs better?? Look no further. Raph and myself explore Snapshot data to determine whether NFT or token-based DAOs are superior when it comes to voter activity, number of proposals, and proposal authors. Check it out!
Across the Industry: Governance News of the Week 📰
- Solana DeFi Trading Platform Mango Markets Loses $100M in Hack: Mango Markets — governed by Mango DAO — is used to trade digital assets on the Solana blockchain for spot margin and trading perpetual futures. According to the blockchain auditing website OtterSec, the attacker temporarily drove up the value of their collateral and then took out loans from the Mango treasury.
- The State of Maker Q3 2022: According to Messari analyst Johnny_TVL, Maker saw its revenue plunge to just over $4 million in Q3, down 86% from the previous quarter bringing the collateral ratio down to 1:1. This was the protocol’s first net income loss since 2020. Will RWAs come to the rescue? And how does Endgame fit into this backdrop?!
- Stems DAO raises $4 million pre-seed round: The decentralized music NFT platform aims to encourage artist and fan engagement. Artists can release their music stems — or a composite of drums, bass, guitar and other individual musical tracks — to the Stem community and users can then remix the audio into new music NFTs, while the original artists receive royalties upon sale.
Flipside Governance | Analysis of the Week 📊
Enter 👻 Aave 👻
Aave — a decentralized lending platform — allows users to lend, borrow, and earn interest on digital assets. $AAVE token holders can participate in DAO governance to initiate and vote on proposals ranging from AIPs to grant allocations to tokenomics.
Using Flipside Crypto data @web3_analyst created this dashboard to take a deeper look into delegation on Aave.
Figure 1 shows how much support in AAVE tokens each of the 91 on-chain proposals has received.
Quorum is set at 320k meaning that proposals no. 20, 26, 54, 64, 77, 81, and 89 failed to meet the required participation threshold. Out of the proposals that did meet quorum, only three (22, 78, 83) were beat.
Overall the voting voting power issued to Aave proposals remains reasonably steady around the 0.5M mark.
One proposal that catches the eye would be yer man no. 14, who raked in 3.32M votes in favour. What on earth could that have been? Prop 14 was the Aavenomics quarterly upgrade Q2 2021 — a big deal. Discussions took place for 6 months prior to the vote.
Let’s compare voting power with voters.
Figure 2 indicates that the number of voters participating in on-chain voting has significantly increased since the Aave early days. Proposals number ≤76 saw no more than 109 wallets engaging.
Suddenly prop 85 collects 527 users participating and most recently, prop 91 had 714.
If voting power utilized for on-chain votes remains steady while the number of users turning up to vote increases, we can infer that governance on Aave is becoming more decentralized — especially over the last 7 proposals. YAY.
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 @avimeyers on Twitter.
