Flipside Governance Recap | 16 December 2022
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 🚨
- The Govy Show Episode #14 with jokeDAO: This week, the Govy team is joined by David Phelps and Sean McCaffery of jokeDAO to discuss using jokeDAO’s Contests product to improve proposal drafting and selection, customizable governance, and making DAOs more accessible and fun.
- Afternoon Alpha: Blockworks Research x Flipside: Jess, Ian, and Avi joined this Blockwords Twitter Space to discuss Cosmos, along with Jack Zampolin from Strangelove and David Tse from Babylon Chain. They discussed the major trends on Cosmos, security and adoption, and the recent Proposition 82.
Our Research and Content ✏️
- Lessons from a Governance Contributor: How do we make Governance more fun and enticing? Look no further, Fig spills all here. From simple UX to intra DAO coordination to… dare we say, compensation 👀. Whether you’re a full time DAO contributor or a newbie, this piece you don’t want to miss.
Across the Industry: Governance News of the Week 📰
- MetaMask Institutional, Cobo and Gnosis DAO team up for soulbound token project: The quest for user identity in web3 continues as Cobo, MetaMask Institutional and Gnosis DAO start building SBT project, “Evolution”. Using the Evolution collection as an example, holders will receive exclusive quarterly research on the decentralized finance space unavailable to those outside their SBT community. Learn more about the SBT dilemma here!
- Optimism to elect Governance Fund Grants Council: For Season 3 of the Governance Fund grant process, the Optimism community is on track to establish a Grants Council to execute full decision making authority as to which grants are made. Non-Council delegates will no longer vote on each grant proposal and instead, elect Council members The vote went live Dec. 9 and will close on Dec. 22. 99.43% (11M OP) have voted in favour so far.
- Compound DAO sued by plaintiffs who held only $100 in COMP tokens: Compound DAO is among eight defendants listed in a case brought by three complainants who claim they suffered damages after buying $COMP tokens, which they allege are unlicensed securities sold by the defendants. The lawsuit was filed on Dec. 8 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Flipside Governance | Analysis of the Week 📊
Over the past weekend, two Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP) votes failed to meet the 320,000 quorum threshold. Using 2022 voting history, we explore the best times to submit proposals and begin voting windows to ensure quorum is met.
The proposals were about setting emissions for the Polygon v3 Liquidity Pool and Freezing Aave v1. Neither proposal was particularly contentious, with the vast majority of votes in favor of their passing, so it’s likely these proposals were not seen by all relevant parties before the voting period elapsed.
Short Executor votes are open for voting for 3 days. Figure 1 demonstrates that votes are more likely to succeed when they both open and close on a weekday and least likely to succeed when they are opened on a weekend.
Figure 2 displays the percentage of voters that vote on weekdays and weekends, grouped by the level of voting power they have. We see that voters with less voting power (0–50)are more likely to vote on weekends, but voters tend to submit their votes on weekdays across the board. Whales with 10,000+ voting power vote on weekdays over 84% of the time.
While it’s already clear that having votes open during the week is beneficial, breaking out voting power by group (shown in Figure 3) clearly demonstrates that voting periods should accommodate whale schedules if the goal is to receive as many votes as possible and meet quorum.
The Flipside Governance team is drafting a proposal that uses these insights to establish a regular cadence for Aave voting that ensures proposals get the attention and votes necessary for them to reach quorum. Stay tuned for an update on that proposal!
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.