Mean DAO on-chain governance goes live on Realms
TL;DR
- We just launched Mean DAO on-chain governance on Realms
- Now is the right time to do this; we have 1,243 sMEAN holders
- We initialized the governance with safety parameters that can be changed by governance itself
It’s been almost a year since we launched Mean DAO with a mission to become the financial equalizer and make crypto banking accessible to everyone. The reasoning behind making a DAO and not a traditional company is that we believe the future of work is decentralized and without golden handcuffs, and it looks a lot like a DAO.
It took a little time for the core team to feel comfortable putting these decisions online for 3 main reasons: Technical Capabilities, Market Conditions, and Team/Community Maturity. Let’s go through each of them.
Technical capabilities
We simply didn’t have our staking program implemented until May 2022, which was an important milestone to enable on-chain governance. Unlike many other protocols, we had a product before launching a token. This meant we needed to support those products, add stability, security, and other features, and go through business development cycles to generate revenue; all while figuring out how to launch a DAO with a token and a small core team.
Market conditions
The crypto market reached its zenith in November 2021, and it’s been a rollercoaster of bad news every other day since. We went through the Christmas crash, the monetary tightening by the feds, the hyper-inflation cycles, the market crash, the Terra/Luna vacuum, the Three Arrows Capital insolvency, the Celsius/Voyager bankruptcies, and many more unpleasant things hard to quantify emotionally. The timing simply was not right, and even though the market continues to be “bad”, it’s stable, and emotions have subsided for the most part.
Team/Community maturity
We launched the MEAN governance token at the peak of the market (December 2021), to an overly excited community that rallied for weeks over our protocol and token launch. It was inevitable, in a frothy bull market, to have many people that were not DAO-material in our rapidly growing community actors, like airdrop hunters (which we had), scammers (yep, we had lots of them too), paper-hands panicking over every market move (yes, yes), dream catchers looking to turn a quick buck but uninterested in meaningful contributions (also yes), and everything in between.
It takes time for those detractors to give up in their quest of sucking up value from an ecosystem without bringing any valuable contribution in, which is what DAOs are all about: extreme incentive alignment for each one according to their abilities and time invested in the organization. We didn’t have that, then, and even if today our community is not made exclusively of net-positive members, we have enough to make a difference. As of Sept 14th, 2022, we have 1,243 sMEAN token holders specific. And that, by any account is not a small organization at all.
Pushing Forward
The timing seems to be right at the moment for this kind of move, in getting closer to full decentralization. We wrote about this very thing on Twitter on July 21st:
https://twitter.com/meanfinance/status/1550318258594742272?s=20&t=H5AKnoAIHfePHGQIBwsT-w
Realms Governance
We launched the Mean DAO On-chain governance portal on Realms, the premiere Solana Governance platform for DAOs on Sept 14th, 2022, right on time for our 1st Anniversary. We chose Realms after extensive research and testing and realizing it is the most actively developed platform, with an active community of activists and DAOians experts like Sebastian Bor, DeanMachine, and Great Ape Pavelsan. We are grateful for their contributions and are happy to be able to add our own tiny one to make the DAO tooling and management experience in Solana amazing.
Since there are lots of knobs and settings when it comes to governance, is best if we address the most common questions on how ours was set up to get you going quickly. Let’s do this!
Where is the Mean DAO Governance portal?
Here’s the link: https://app.realms.today/dao/MEAN
How do I create a proposal?
You need to deposit 28k sMEAN to create proposals.
Why the “Create Proposal” threshold is 28k sMEAN, and not something smaller, like 1 sMEAN?
We set this threshold to avoid creating meaningless proposals and prevent spammers from attacking the DAO. 28k sMEAN, at the time of this writing (Sept 14th, 2022) is worth roughly $5k, which means the proposer is personally invested in the betterment of Mean DAO and therefore wants to make good proposals.
What’s the best way to create meaningful proposals?
The best way is to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). The best proposals have been tough out well, and are well written. Also, if you are thinking about making a proposal that is significant (i.e. requires a lot of work or funds), we recommend you bring it up and discuss it first in the forum (https://next.meanfi.com/), gather support from other community members, clean up your ideas, and finally bring it on-chain with a link to the forum discussion.
Ok, I see a proposal. How do I vote YES or NO?
To vote on active proposals, you must be a Mean DAO member on Realms. To become an official DAO member with voting power, you must deposit your sMEAN into Realm. Any amount of sMEAN will grant you membership.
How many votes are needed to pass a proposal?
Proposals will pass and get executed when DAO members vote YES with 20% or more of the sMEAN token current supply, which can be found here (https://solscan.io/token/sMEANebFMnd9uTYpyntGzBmTmzEukRFwCjEcnXT2E8z)
How do I get sMEAN so I can participate in Mean DAO Governance?
You get sMEAN when you Stake MEAN. You can Stake MEAN here: https://app.meanfi.com/staking
I don’t have enough sMEAN to create a proposal, but have a really good one to make. What can I do?
You can either buy enough sMEAN and make the proposal, or delegate your sMEAN to another DAO Member and aggregate your voting power to reach the required threshold. Note that delegating tokens ONLY allows the selected address to vote or create proposals with your deposited tokens, but WILL NOT allow the delegated wallet to withdraw or send your sMEAN tokens. Only you can do that.
Are there any tutorials on how to use the Realms UI?
Yes! → https://docs.realms.today/
If I deposit my sMEAN into Realms from my wallet, will it stop earning APY from the staking program?
Not at all. You will continue to earn rewards from the staking program on your sMEAN even after you deposit them into the Mean DAO Governance portal.
The short version
Too many things! Can you simplify these for me?
a) Get MEAN onto your wallet
b) Take that MEAN and stake it to earn a share of protocol revenues -> https://app.meanfi.com/staking
c) After staking it, you’ll get sMEAN into your wallet (sMEAN = Staked MEAN)
d) Take that sMEAN and deposit it on the DAO Governance Page -> https://app.realms.today/dao/MEAN
e) You are now an official Mean DAO member, ready to vote and make proposals
The Wrap
We look forward to seeing what you come up with and seeing the creativity of the Mean DAO community take us to new heights. The door is open now; it’s time to make some proposals at https://app.realms.today/dao/MEAN.
LFG! 🔥🔥🔥
Official Channels: Website || Twitter || Discord
Useful links for new Mean DAO & MeanFi users:
