The Weekly | 05 May 2023
Welcome to The Weekly, by Flipside Governance.
Here you’ll get a full view of what we‘re up to, from penning proposals to publishing research to our all-important voting activity & rationales. Enjoy!
Aave’s Delegate Code of Conduct & Delegate Framework
Working on these proposals concurrently, Flipside has presented Aave with two key documents to provide greater organization and guidance for the future of the delegate base.
Meet the first iteration of the Delegate Code of Conduct and a Framework Recognized Delegate:
[ARC] Framework For Recognized Delegates
[ARC] Delegate Code Of Conduct
We are excited to post these frameworks for the DAO, working with the community to reflect their true — and to recognize delegates’ continued value-additive work.
We believe these two proposals are pivotal for each other — defining the values to which delegates adhere and creating steps for becoming recognized, leads to higher quality contributions and delegates.
The Code Of Conduct outlines nine potential principles for the community to align with — and hopes to cement these values via ranked-choice voting The Framework For Recognized delegates builds off this document, requiring delegates to accept and acknowledge, participate in on-chain voting, communicate their decisions and rationales, and post a platform on the forum.
This process is intentionally left brief to allow for a range of types of delegates servicing the DAO. We are grateful for our experiences in other DAOs to use as a reference when building these pivotal processes.
We are excited by the next steps to clearly define the delegate bas and hope to get more of the community involved — jump into the proposal and get yourself heard!
Blockworks Launches “GovHub”
While we’re still unsure about the name, we’re excited to see more Governance solutions hit the market making it easier for token-holders, delegates, and teams like ourselves to engage with DAOs.
Meet GovHub — Blockworks’ shiny new all-in-one Governance platform:
https://twitter.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1654179131171512320
This platform is designed to assist users throughout the “five steps of the proposal lifecycle:”
- Ideation
- Development
- Gauging Sentiment
- Voting
- Implementation
GovHub presents itself as a superior solution to current platforms as it tracks Governance activity at its genesis — in the ideation phase. Plus it’s got all the bells and whistles — analyst notes, data, etc. In its current state, the platform supports Governance processes on top of Ethereum and Cosmos.
Scaling its Research team and raising its hands for delegation in Arbtirum and Aave, this product is a continuation of Blockworks’ growing investment in the Governance sector.
Co-founder, Jason Yanowitz used this announcement to reaffirm the organization’s conviction in Governance as a growing business and pivotal infrastructure for mainstream adoption:
“We envision a world where trillions of dollars of value flow through open protocols. In this world, governance plays a very crucial role.”
Check out the product yourself and poke around — how does it compare to Messari? Or to the barebones approach of multi-tab Snapshot votes?
https://www.blockworksresearch.com/
One caveat: it’s going to cost you — to a tune of $900 per quarter.
Congratulations to the Blockworks team for their latest product and their growing involvement in educating users — cheers to another Governance solution in-market!
Snapshot Spaces — How Many Are Actually Active?
There are over 13k spaces on Snapshot, each which enables a different DAO or organization to empower their community to assist in the decision making process. Of these +13k spaces, 6,645 spaces represent communities on Ethereum Mainnet. Some of these communities are very well known, such as Uniswap, AAVE, and Balancer. However, for every well-known and popular space there are many more with smaller membership.
This analysis created by Flipside Community member Jennifer Tran dives into if the average space on Snapshot is an effective way to make decentralized decisions by looking at median voting participation.
Tl;dr: for most spaces, Snapshot is probably not the best method.
Due to this analysis, the median number of votes a proposal on an Ethereum Mainnet Snapshot Space receives is 11. Yes, this number takes into account popular proposals on Stargate, Pancakeswap, and other large spaces that receive nearly 100k votes. Considering 11 is the median number of votes, half the proposals on Snapshot receive even less.
So what does this mean for quorum? The default quorum value on a Snapshot proposal is that 1,000 tokens of voting power must vote before quorum is reached. A relatively safe assumption would be that a majority of space creators and proposal writers do not adjust this quorum value. Yet still less than 10% of created proposals even reach quorum. This is likely due to the low voting participation.
Now let’s figure out who is voting on Snapshot. A quick breakdown of the number of votes shows that addresses that do participate on the platform are very enthusiastic about doing so. One percent of voters account for 93% of the total votes across all Ethereum Mainnet Snapshot spaces.
We all know that whales have diamond hands, but it also seems that they have diamond votes. While the top 1% of voters on the platform account for ~93% of the total votes, they also account for >99% of the total voting power! That is quite significant.
While Snapshot removes many barriers for governance participation, such as high gas fees, engagement in small or lesser known spaces is still very low. This is not a reflection of Snapshot as a product, but more a reflection of governance education and marketing around proposals. The task of increasing voter participation lies solely on the DAO or organization, and enhanced efforts to mobilize and communicate with voters seems to be sorely needed.
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.
