DAOs: Marshall Islands officially recognizes DAOs as legal entities, Curve on Moonbeam, PieDAO governance model updated, Yearn’s YIP-66 passed, Compound’s 084 failed, ENS response to controversy over core contributor, MolochDAO annual report, and more!

Paradigm
Paradigm

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Biweekly report on decentralized autonomous organizations vol.19, 5th February — 19th February

TL;DR

  • The Aave V3 deployment on several network mainnets is close to execution. The deployment governance framework approved. Vote to deploy Aave V3 on the Cronos chain is live. LensProtocol announced
  • Balancer proposals to increase the protocol fee and to implement protocol revenue sharing for pool creators passed. The 3rd Grants Wave live
  • Idle DAO introduces a set of modular tools & platforms called DAO stack
  • Bancor votes for onboarding, trading liquidity increases, fee changes, and more. Bancor drops condom NFTs “DEXLoverz” on Valentine’s day
  • PieDAO governance model has been updated. PIP-71 YPIE health-check & PIP-70 DeFi products revamping are live
  • BadgerDAO has implemented BIP 85 to count bveCVX and bveCVX LP towards native balance for Badger Boost. Citadel DAO introduced
  • Curve on Moonbeam. The community votes to add a gauge to the DYDX/ ETH pool
  • Compound proposal 084 failed, 083 executed
  • GnosisDAO GIP-19 is live for voting on Snapshot. Gnosis Safe plans to launch token and spin out project from parent Gnosis
  • Akropolis AIP-014 has passed the quorum with more than 133M AKRO. The team will proceed with the execution
  • ENS response to controversy over core contributor
  • Fei protocol proposes a new modular representative governance mechanism
  • DAOhaus Manifesto v2.0.0 released
  • The MolochDAO annual report is out. MolochDAO’s birthday
  • Tally wallet plans first Gitcoin aqueduct to automate public goods funding & ecosystem building
  • PoolTogether introduces DAO landing page. DAO Happiness Survey is now available on the governance forum. PTIP-54: Treasury Management is live
  • API3 Airnode v0.4 has been released
  • Index Coop’s IIPs 130, 58, 091, 131 passed
  • Kleros KIP-47 approved
  • A proposal for compensating security assessment costs for Lido-on-X (Solana, Polygon, Kusama/Polkadot, etc) projects via LidoGrants
  • mStable MCCP 15 & 16 approved. mstable X Polygon
  • Nexus Mutual’s poll for the Special resolution: operation wartortle is live
  • Uniswap oracle attack simulator released
  • Yearn’s YIP-66: Streamlining contributor compensation approved
  • Yam’s YIP-101 & 102 passed
  • Colony DAO builder survey 2022
  • Cosmos ecosystem chains face conflict over bridge policy
  • Synthetix Polaris and Hamal releases. SIP-202 sets a base level of inflation
  • Element Finance launches voting vaults as new governance primitive
  • Build Finance faces governance takeover attack
  • Osmosis validators reject deficient proposal after last minute community pushback
  • Solana Monke Business NFT project faces conflict with MonkeDAO
  • Former presidential candidate launches DAO to advocate for Web 3
  • AssangeDAO raises 38M to aid WikiLeaks founder’s Court Battle
  • Football club Manchester United “1992 legends” to create sports DAO
  • ETHDenver shows not all crypto communities are the same: ETHheads discussed “public goods,” Schelling Points and how DAOs can return power to the people
  • Active proposals: Aave, Curve, GitcoinDAO,GnosisDAO, LidoDAO, MakerDAO, Nexus Mutual, PoolTogether, Synthetix, PieDAO, Uniswap
  • New & ongoing discussions: Compound, Balancer, Index Coop, mStable, Yam Finance, Yearn Finance, BancorDAO, Akropolis, API3, Idle, KyberDAO, Kleros, Badger DAO
  • Podcasts on DAOs
  • And more!

Overview

Blockchain technology is already radically transforming the financial system. However, properties such as trustlessness and immutability aren’t only useful in monetary applications. Another potential application is governance. Blockchains could enable entirely new types of organizations that can run autonomously without the need for coordination by a central entity.

“Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain.”Vitalik Buterin

DAO stands for “decentralized autonomous organization” and can be described as an open-source blockchain protocol governed by a set of rules, created by its elected members, that automatically execute certain actions without the need for intermediaries.

In simple terms, a DAO is an organization that is governed by computer code and programs. As such, it has the ability to function autonomously, without the need for a central authority.

Like how DeFi is programmable money and how NFTs are programmable media, DAOs are programmable organizations of people.

DAOs Ecosystem Statistics

Deepdao.io

Top DAOs

Like two weeks ago, the rating is headed by BitDAO and Uniswap.

Deepdao.io

Global stats

Boardroom

Leading DAOs

Boardroom

Read & Listen

Tribute Labs (OpenLaw)

Governance

Aave

Deepdao.io
Boardroom

Active proposals

Closed proposals

New and ongoing discussions

Latest governance topics on governance forum.

Badger DAO

Deepdao.io
Boardroom

Closed proposals

New and ongoing discussions: Badger Discord

To read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision, check out the governance forum.

bveCVX Rooooadmap:

Better Know a Badger Vault:

Bancor

Deepdao.io

Recent blog posts and news

Closed proposals

  • Increase the trading liquidity limit in the PHTR pool from 100,000 BNT to 400,000 BNT
  • Increase trading liquidity limit in the VITA pool from 100K BNT to 500K BNT
  • Change the fee in the SNX pool from 0.2% to 1%
  • Change the fee in the MKR pool from 0.2% to 1%
  • Proposal to Whitelist FODL Finance (FODL) with 100,000 BNT trading liquidity limit
  • Extend LM rewards in the Stablepools (USDC, USDT, DAI) for 8 weeks from the 23rd February 2022
  • Change the fee in the MTA pool from 0.3% to 1%
  • Change the fee in the vBNT pool from 0.75% to 1.5%
  • Disable deposits on the XDATA pool
  • Increase space in the SNX pool from 5,000,000 BNT to 9,000,000 BNT
  • Change the fee in the REQ pool from 0.2% to 1.0%
  • Increase the trading liquidity limit in the REQ pool from 1m BNT to 1.75m BNT
  • Increase the trading liquidity limit in the DAO pool from 100k BNT to 200k BNT
  • Increase the trading liquidity limit in the SHEESHA pool from 50,000 BNT to 250,000 BNT
  • Gradually increase the trading liquidity limit in the wNXM pool from 2M BNT to 10M BNT in 1M BNT increments
  • Onboard rETH with 250K trading liquidity
  • Whitelist Tempus Finance (TEMP) with 100,000 BNT trading liquidity limit
  • Extension of Liquidity Mining on WBTC, LINK and ETH pools

New and ongoing discussions

To read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision, check out the forum.

DEXLoverz | Condom NFT airdrop:

Joshua Schone: Bancor, Decentralized Finance & Liquidity Pools | Dylan Shub Podcast 3:

Index Coop

Deepdao.io

Recent blog posts

Boardroom

Closed proposals

  • [AAVE-59] Aave V2 — Liquidity Mining Update (90 days at 30% reduced rate)
  • [AAVE-undefined] Add SEBA Bank as a whitelister on Aave Arc
  • [AAVE-58] Risk Parameter Updates 2022–02–10
  • [Balancer] — Increase the Protocol Fee
  • IIP-131: Update Operations Account Multi-sig — Liquidity Pod
  • [Balancer] — Introducing veBAL Tokenomics
  • IIP-58 DG2: Launch of Pulse Yield Products (PINT & PAY)
  • IIP-091 DG2: Launch the NFT Blue-Chip Index token ($JPG)
  • IIP-130: Redesign of Product Onboarding Process — Jan 2022
  • YIP-66: Streamlining contributor compensation
  • BIP 85: Add bveCVX and bveCVX LP as Native in Boost
  • [COMPOUND-84] TrueUSD Market Upgrades

New and ongoing discussions

Find latest Index Coop proposals here.

To read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision, check out the governance forum.

Kleros

Deepdao.io
Boardroom

Closed proposals

To read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision, check out the governance forum.

KyberDAO

Recent blog posts

There were no active proposals these weeks.

Find out all proposals here. Check them out on GitHub.

MakerDAO

Active Polls (8 Polls Ending Feb 28)

Ended Polls (16 Polls — Ended Feb 07)

Executive

New and ongoing discussions

and many more!

Read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision.

Governance Portal, Governance Forum

mStable

Deepdao.io
Boardroom

Closed proposals

  • MCCP 16: Fee restructuring for swaps and redemptions
  • MCCP 15: Whitelist Multisigs in Staking V2

New and ongoing discussions

To read more about the different proposals and take part in the decision, check out the governance forum.

Yearn Finance

Deepdao.io

Recent blog posts

Boardroom

Closed proposals

Check out the latest YIPs discussions here.

MISC

ENS Response to Controversy Over Core Contributor

This incident points towards potential challenges for protocol governance mechanisms.

In the past several weeks, the crypto community has seen several controversies develop over contributors’ past use of social media. Most recently, ENS core team member Brantly Millegan came under fire and was eventually let go from True Names Ltd (the ENS development company) due to comments about LGBT issues that many considered unacceptable. The events leading up to the separation have been well covered by other venues and on crypto twitter, so here we’ll focus on concrete impacts on governance mechanisms and DAO participation.

Delegation: Delegations seem to be very sticky — voters who delegate to someone are unlikely to change their delegation. Due to relatively high transaction costs required for re-delegation, we could also expect that smaller token holders will be even less likely to change their voting support. Brantly has seen a bit of outflow from his ENS delegate address, but he remains the largest voter by a comfortable margin. While this may partly reflect voter support for his work and track record despite the recent controversy, it also points to frictions in delegation UX.

Tally

Shortly after these events, the ENS DAO began funding a subsidy to pay gas costs for redelegating votes. But despite this incentive, relatively few token holders have changed their supported delegate. The ENS claims process was widely lauded at the time for encouraging all token holders to delegate voting power and increase participation. But this may also exacerbate issues around token holder apathy and vote stickiness, with coordination required between many more people to reduce a delegate’s voting power. In Brantly’s case, he retains voter support from over 5,000 addresses.

DAOs may be able to combat this with delegation expiry, which has already been adopted by MakerDAO. This type of mechanism would force voters to periodically reconfirm their delegation, which reduces the existing lock-in effect and promotes more fluidity of voting power.

DAOs versus development companies: While the ENS controversy was unfolding, there was widespread confusion about the limits of tokenholder authority. Brantly’s separation from True Names Ltd was decided internally, without direct token holder participation or voting. This is understandable considering that TNL is a private company and not directly answerable to ENS voters. But this nevertheless raises questions about the limits of DAO authority within a protocol.

Cosmos Ecosystem Chains Face Conflict Over Bridge Policy

While Osmosis founders want to align around a single bridge for each asset, others including the competing Sifchain team allege this is anticompetitive.

The past week has seen unusual bout of conflict break out between various chains and bridge protocols within the Cosmos ecosystem. While the cohort of chains built on the Cosmos SDK have traditionally operated fairly collaboratively, growing ecosystem adoption and key upcoming integrations are challenging this paradigm.

The first battle among Cosmos projects is being fought over bridges, which are likely to drive significant usage as they enable connection with dominant Ethereum and EVM ecosystems. There are already several bridges live, with newly launched Gravity Bridge Chain joining the existing Sifchain, Axelar, Secret Network, and Injective networks. But so far, none of the bridged tokens have been integrated beyond their respective chain’s home network using Cosmos IBC (inter blockchain communications protocol designed for trustlessly bridging assets and messages).

The current conflict stems from the Osmosis team’s preference for integrating a single, canonical version of each bridged token. Stated benefits include better UX and less liquidity fragmentation. But this also means a single bridge operator will have a huge leg up in building network effects within the Cosmos ecosystem (by integrating with Osmosis, the most widely used DEX).

The choice of token would be enforced via two mechanisms: DAO controlled incentive allocations, and visibility on the team controlled user interface. This raises additional issues of DAO versus team authority, as the Osmosis.zone site remains by far the most prominent way to access the Osmosis protocol and exchange. Currently, the OSMO team seems to be favoring integration with Gravity Bridge chain, which caused competitor Sifchain to cry foul.

Shortly afterwards, members of the Osmosis core team hit back at Sifchain for questionable marketing and business tactics, including a proposal to carry out wash trading for greater OSMO incentives. Parallel to this debate, Gravity Bridge has also begun to face criticism of their recent token distribution. Around 9% of supply has been allocated to airdrops for Cosmos ecosystem users (ATOM stakers and the OSMO community pool), compared with over 40% to insiders and investors.

With the ATOM public sale providing the seed funding for Gravity Bridge, many ATOM holders expected a larger allocation. But beyond this, Cosmos chains’ broad governance powers means that insiders may have defacto custody of bridged assets. In this context, wide token distribution and governance decentralization become a prerequisite for bridge security.

  • Fei protocol proposes a new modular representative governance mechanism:
  • Gnosis Safe plans to launch token and spin out project from parent Gnosis:
  • Element Finance launches voting vaults as new governance primitive:
  • Build Finance faces governance takeover attack:
  • Celestia announces Ethereum L2s using proprietary data availability system with Ethereum settlement:
  • Osmosis validators reject deficient proposal after last minute community pushback:
  • Solana Monke Business NFT project faces conflict with MonkeDAO (community organization for NFT token holders):

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Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Telegram Chat. Reddit. LinkedIn.

Main Sources

Projects’ blogs and forums

Research articles

Boardroom

Snapshot

Tally

That’s all for today! Your feedback is highly appreciated!👥

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