Keep Community Governance
As the KEEP network matures, we’re seeing a concentrated push towards progressive decentralization of power away from the company behind Keep and into the hands of the community. The first stage in this has materialized into the creation of a community multisig and the adoption of a v1 governance structure, which together will be employed to govern tBTC v1 onchain. In this early form, Keep V1 governance is intended to be a foundational system that the community builds on moving forward. The primary goal is to empower the Keep community to make actionable decisions that impact the network in a streamlined way.
Governance powers
Before getting into the details, it’s important to outline the following initial rights that governance of tBTC v1 will retain:
- Pause new deposits for a week (without affecting current deposits)
- Add a backup price feed, which will only activate after 90 days if the main price feed becomes inactive
- Change the acceptable sizes of new deposits
- Change the collateralization parameters of new deposits
- Set signer fees within the interval [0.03%, 10.0%]
All of these powers are verifiable onchain in the tBTC v1 contracts here. In the future the Keep team intends to transfer even more power to the community through a process called progressive community decentralized governance. These future powers include control over liquidity rewards and staking rewards, as well as control over systems such as the recently released KEEP-only pool. Additionally, there has already been discussion in the community about the collateralization parameters and how they could be adjusted.
Multisig
These discussions got the ball rolling, and a multisig was proposed to take care of these matters. To choose the members of the multisig, a Discord poll was created. The rules were simple: each discord account that had been provably active before poll creation would get a vote, and the 8 most voted members would comprise the multisig. The poll was successful concluded and the winners included:
shh
state
benlongstaff
Evandro Saturnino
corollari
agoristen
kferret
nahuus
Soon after the election was concluded, ssh created a Gnosis safe and the group elected to use Keybase as a secure method of communication. The official Keep community multisig address is — 0x19FcB32347ff4656E4E6746b4584192D185d640d.
V1 Governance Structure
The Keep v1 governance structure is designed as a streamlined foundational governance system that lets the community make actionable decisions. Anyone is free to suggest Keep Improvement Proposals (KIPs) in the governance section of the Keep Discord channel. However, at first only Keep team members and elected multisig representatives can formally propose a KIP on the community governance forums. This initial restriction is designed to safeguard against proposal spam, filter for quality, and deter governance exhaustion by limiting initial proposals on the multisig. The ability to propose KIPs will open in time to include more community stakeholders as the Keep community continues on the path towards progressive decentralized governance.
Once a KIP reaches the Keep community forums, anyone can debate and discuss the proposal directly. After 3 days the proposal will move on to a vote. The default voting mechanism is a direct community multisig vote in the Keep Discord channel, where multisig members have 24 hours to vote YES or NO on a proposal. This process is intentionally transparent; the result of each proposal vote will be directly logged for all to see. In the default case, if a KIP gets 5 of 8 YES votes from multisig members, it passes and moves onto the implementation phase. However, the Keep community decided to require a more broad constituency set to better reflect the will of all Keep community stakeholders. To address this, a constituency description section was added to the newly formed KIP template. The voting constituency of each KIP will therefore be determined on an individual basis. In this sense the early foundations of the Keep community governance system retains a solid measure of flexibility while still streamlining the decision-making process.
While an approved KIP is in the implementation phase, the Keep community multisig will leverage the secure Keybase group to arrange a time to conduct a transaction into the tBTC v1 contracts containing the correct governance update. It should be noted that each onchain governance update requires two transactions separated by a 48-hour governance time delay built directly into the tBTC v1 contracts.
Proposals — KIP template
Use this template as a guide to formatting your Keep Improvement Proposal (KIP). If there is more relevant information that goes beyond the scope of the template but is important to detail, feel free to expand. You should be able to answer the following questions:
Disclosures:
Contributors:
Outline the main argument for your proposal — what is it, and why is it needed?
In one sentence:
In one paragraph:
What is the stakeholder constituency of this proposal?
What changes are required to existing code, processes, deployments, etc?
What are the benefits of passing this proposal?
What are the potential risks, real or perceived, of passing this proposal?
Is there funding required to pass this proposal?
References:
Snapshot
It became clear that in the case of a broader constituency set, a mechanism was needed to poll community stakeholders on needed decisions. A snapshot page was created with a voting strategy that weighted votes based on how much KEEP the voter had staked, a methodology was chosen to decide how would the final outcome be calculated based on the votes (in a way that is game-theoretically strategy-proof) and the first polls started rolling in, with the following results:
While the emoji vote was a fun test run of the Keep community snapshot system, the initial collateralization and courtesy call threshold votes have real impact for tBTC v1. In fact, these changes will be implemented onchain in the inaugural multisig transactions. Furthermore, we’re already seeing new discussions arise in regard to the rewards distributed through the stakedrop and liquidity incentives. More concretely, we are reevaluating what are the best adjustments for these are, and considering a cut of current stakedrop rewards in order to save some for the release of tBTC v2.
Conclusion / How to get involved
Have something to say about any of this? Jump into Keep’s discord and check out the #governance-discussions channel. Whether you want to voice your opinion about how these changes affect you or just want to discuss other possible changes, any opinion is accepted there!
Thanks to Keep Community Member @corollari for writing this blog.
