Flipside Governance Recap | 21 April 2023
Welcome to this week’s Flipside Governance 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
Raphael on Quadratic Voting
‘Whale Wars’ may be a new series in crypto research… Inspired by these skippers’ willingness to tame and prospect whales, Raphael has presented his findings on Quadratic Voting, a way for DAOs to bring whales and shrimp into peaceful, eternal harmony. (Cue wind chimes and pan flutes)
Meet his latest piece below, which explores ways to get to eternal bliss:
Taming the Whales | What to Do About Sybil Attacks
Raph presents three solutions to Sybil Attacks so DAOs can actually pull off Quadratic Voting, damping the outsized influence of the top wallets. Quadratic voting only works when you can prevent whales spreading their stash to 100s of wallets to disguise themselves as shrimp. Shrimp don’t like that.
His research looks at three solutions to this problem and the leniency of today’s voting architecture: Gitcoin Passport, Klero’s Proof of Humanity, and Governor C, a dark horse from South Korea, that appears promising, until it doesn’t.
These new tools take different approaches to making it harder for one person to impersonate a multitude when voting. But when all is said and done, Sybil attacks are a complicated, multi-layered issue, with no one size fits all solution.
📰 Governance News of the Week
Butter Polls Candidates On Its Next Steps
Looking to bring its popularity and engagement to the next platform, Butter is polling delegates, token-holders, and Governance affiliates on the next step for the experiment.
After great success in Aave, Butter has expanded its sights to other DeFi protocols; potential options include: Compound, Euler, and Uniswap. Check out the sweet Dash by co-founder Lajarre:
Butter x Aave Delegate Election
His analysis showed that over 740K in voting power participated in the original election on AAVE. This level of participation is ~1.25x the average votes cast in a poll.
Inspired by the attendance, and competition, their ambitions have grown beyond AAVE — to more DAOs capable of garnering the same level of excitement.
If you registered for the last election, please help Butter with its next steps toward growth:
Where should Butter ‘spread’ next?
Flipside has signaled support for Uniswap and is excited by more programs like Butter which are bringing experimentation into the world of delegates.
📊 Analysis of the Week
Arbitrum — The Land of Indecisiveness?
Since the launch of the Arbitrum token on March 23, 2023, there have been five total proposals posted on the Arbitrum Foundation Snapshot space. Community interest in Arbitrum governance has been high right out of the gate, with 57,727 distinct addresses voting on at least one of these proposals and over 182 million ARB tokens being delegated.
The plot below shows the number of users that delegated ARB tokens either to themselves or to a delegate by day. Adding the “delegate” button at the end of the airdrop claim process proved to be super successful, as large numbers of users enthusiastically delegated ARB tokens, starting on the first day they were available to claim.
However, looking at the wallets that have cast the most votes, we see that many wallets have already cast over 20 votes on only five proposals! That’s four votes on average per proposal! Voters are changing their minds on the best path forward on a proposal multiple times during the voting period and re-submitting their vote.
To check out statistics about any Snapshot space, head over to this web application built by your Flipside Governance Team!
📜 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.
