GoodDollar Community Call 03: Safety, Security and Stewardship
GoodDollar’s third Community Call, held on Thursday, March 10th, focused on the key issues of GoodDAO security and stewardship.
GoodDollar Protocol Community Lead Gustavo Segovia outlined a trio of agenda items aimed at making the protocol more robust, while easing the journey toward further decentralization of powers. Gus referenced GoodDollar’s recent enactment of a critical security upgrade as a timely starting point for discussion.
“We want to talk about these measures but also about the current process for taking these kinds of actions and what we can introduce to the community to enable it to act in a more decentralized way,” he said.
“We dealt with the emergency situation rapidly but, moving forward, its critical that the community has the responsibility and tools to secure the protocol.”
Hadar Rottenberg, GoodDollar Technical Lead, gave a firsthand account of his realization that an admin account retained as a temporary measure in the wake of the V2 upgrade might pose a vulnerability. He subsequently uncovered a bug regrading contract upgrade permissions, that needed to be urgently rectified.
This vulnerability could have been exploited to potentially tamper with the reserve, or from the UBI pool. SStaking funds, including both Trust Fund and Governance staking, were never at risk, however, they have undergo an additional audit.
While the bug was quickly addressed, the measures this required — including the temporary suspension of interaction with the GoodDollar Reserve — makes the GIP-02 proposal to transfer the role of GoodDollar guardian to a group of trusted community members highly relevant.
There are two steps to the proposal, which was already in the pipeline prior to the security upgrade:
- To ratify via the GoodDAO the role of the GoodDollar $ foundation as the current Governance Guardian and identity Guardian.
- To select a Council of Guardians with the mandate to modify the protocol directly in emergency situations, rather than going through the proposals procedure.
A relevant emergency in this context is defined as an ongoing economic attack or a bug reported via the Immunefi or Hats Protocol bounty programs.
Gus’s outline of the proposal was followed by a discussion of the ideal profile of a Community Protocol Guardian. There was strong consensus around the need for each guardian to be someone active within the community and/or public within the social impact and DeFi spaces.
While not all guardians need advanced technical skills, Hadar noted that having one or two tech experts on the Council would be a distinct advantage. Gus stressed the need for all guardians to observe the strictest confidentiality when dealing with sensitive information.
The community agreed to hand over next steps to the newly appointed Community Moderators, who are well-placed to raise awareness of the role and to set up initial votes once names have been submitted.
Attention then turned to the Community Steward Treasury, an on-chain vault funded by any sponsors that is in control of the GoodDAO.
Members are invited to apply to become a Treasury Steward and help to administer the fund. Those interested in the role should reply to the “Community Steward Treasury” post in the GoodDollar Discord channel, and include responses to the following questions:
- What is your name and your country of residence?
- When did you join GoodDollar and what have you done for our project?
- Why would you like to become a steward?
Candidates will be elected via a series of individual snapshot votes.
Looking ahead, Gus informed the community of the imminent release of the updated GoodDollar Roadmap, which will lay out the new protocol and app features lined up for 2022 and beyond. He advised members that Community Call 04 would include discussion of these development proposals.
Thanks to all those who attended Community 03! If you missed it, don’t worry. You can catch up on all the action here:
