The Weekly | 12 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!
dYdX Gets A New Delegate: Flipside Crypto
With the development of V4 of its offering in close reach, dYdX is in a pivotal moment of growth and transformation, embracing its future home within the Cosmos / IBC ecosystem.
Recently governance there has made some serious headway:
- Migrated the forum from Commonwealth to Discourse, in order to build more engagement
- Introduction of the Delegate Huddle and Chatter
Most importantly, Flipside has presented profile to the community and applied to be an Endorsed Delegate, so that we can help guide the DAO during this special time in its history.
Thanks to a succesfull grants application for delegation research, Flipside intends to rely on its robust cross-chain data infrastructure to research and recommend a bold new path forward.
We’re particularly interested in helping guide the community’s transition to Cosmos / IBC because our data capabilities, and deep Governance experience within IBC and EVM ecosystems allow us to provide a unique perspective.
Give us a shout on the forum — @Fig & @Avi — and if you’re around next week please join the chatter on Thursday, May 18th. If you’re interested in our delegate pitch you can find it here.
Some alfa our ambitions can be found in this tweet, which the community seemed to love.
We’re excited to roll up our sleeves and get involved, guiding dYdX and its users to the next stage of the protocol.
Uniswap Experiments with A “Delegate Race”
Responsible for organizing the DAO, grants program, and management of other stakeholders — the Uniswap Foundation (UF) is experimenting with new incentives to attract a greater diversity of delegates.
Wowing the community with two major releases — Uniswap Foundation announced the creation of Uniswap Agora (built by our friends Charlie Feng and Co.) and a fresh new delegate race.
If you’re interested in participating, give it a read here.
This delegate race features two phases:
- Delegate Setup: New and existing delegates make delegate profiles on Agora by Friday, May 12th
- Delegation: UNI token holders review and allocate to delegates starting on Saturday, May 13th
So far this race has reaffirmed the commitment of existing delegates such as GFX Labs, and attracted a myriad of new, qualified delegates — like monetsupply, Wintermute, and Llama, just to name a few.
This delegate race comes on the heels of programs like Butter, which seek to inject more choice, competition, and a broader range of expertise into the wider delegate pool.
Experimenting with new Voting infrastructure, Uniswap Agora, and now, a delegate race, Uniswap is investing more resources into growing the engagement and resiliency of one of the most notable protocols.
Uniswap Debates Turning on the Fee
In parallel with the Delegate Race, the Uniswap community returns to the topic of turning on the “fee switch” and enabling more profitability for the protocol. This time this initiative is led by a delegate team, GFX Labs, who argue it is time to capitalize on the strong market share of the decentralized exchange.
GFX’s proposal seeks to introduce a ⅕ fee across all V3 Uniswap pools. They use centralized exchange fee tables such as Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken as a comparison.
Some key considerations the community discusses:
- The sustainability of fees and their effect on promoting cheaper competitors
- Tax implications — and the need to pay income tax
- Legal concerns for token holders and the DAO
While different delegates take a range of perspectives, this proposal (if passed) seeks to introduce a possibility of $52,147,182 in 6-month revenue. Not too shabby for a decentralized protocol…
Be sure to watch and tune in on how crypto’s leading DEX takes on this conundrum of introducing fees and greater profitability.
Osmosis Validator Governance Participation: A Study
This analysis, created by Flipside community member adriaparcerisas, investigates both the ratio of changed votes per validator and the frequency at which specific validators vote together. These metrics provide greater insight into the Osmosis governance process and identify emerging political alliances.
When analyzing common votes by validator pairs, we can see that some validators have voted together on more than 100 proposals, with CryptoCrew and Stakecito being the pair with the highest number of common votes.
Looking at the correlation between validator pairs, it can be seen that there are pairs with almost 100% correlation, indicating a high degree of agreement, while there are many other pairs with a correlation below 0.3.
Looking at the chart below, it can be seen that the average number of votes changed has been increasing over time, which could be due to the increasing activity on the platform and the entry of new validators.
However, the last chart indicates that the number of votes changed as soon as other validators vote is low, suggesting that there is no significant impact in this case.
We can be conclude that some validators consistently vote together, indicating that there may be some clustering of voting behavior. This could be due to shared interests, affiliations, or other factors.
However, the number of votes changed by validators after another validator votes is relatively low. This suggests that validators are not highly influenced by the votes of their peers on Osmosis.
For additional data points, the entire dashboard can be visited at this link: https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/adriaparcerisas/osmosis-governance-validators-study-QWEtSo
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, click the links below to learn more about how we contribute:
If you are interested in joining the Flipside Governance team, we are always listening — DM @flipsidegov on Twitter.
