Weekly Cosmos Governance Report 07–13 Dec.
Over the past week, we at Simply Staking have reviewed and voted on 14 governance proposals. Our votes include a Cosmos Hub proposal which seeks to claw back vested tokens from a previous proposal due to the major restructuring (and winding down) of a validator company, another Cosmos Hub proposal that left us disappointed by the lack of details and failure to adhere to standard governance practices, and more.
This report will dive further into the proposals we voted on and explain our rationale.
Below, you may also find a table of contents to help you go directly to a specific proposal easily. We hope you find this article insightful and if you do, please consider delegating to our Validator on any of the networks mentioned above!
Table of Contents
- Cosmos Hub #856 — Funding the first inscription COSS on Cosmos
- Cosmos Hub #860 — Signaling Proposal — Claw back unvested funds from Proposal 104
- Juno #325 — Juno Upgrade: Epona (v18)
- Persistence #58 — Contract Migration: Migrate Multi-Staking Contract on Dexter to version 3.0
- Persistence #59 — Instantiate Dexter Governance Admin contract
- Persistence #61 — Transfer Dexter Vault and Multi-staking contract ownership to the Governance Admin Contract
- Osmosis #694 — Sail with the Whale
Cosmos Hub #856
Before diving into this proposal, we would like to highlight the importance of following the standard procedures when publishing proposals on-chain.
The standard procedure on the Cosmos Hub is that of posting your proposal on the Forums at least two weeks before it goes on-chain. This period allows for the community to digest and give feedback on what you are proposing and for you to make all the necessary adjustments based on this feedback. This was the procedure we followed when posting our Proposals on-chain (#88, #687, #851).
We are big advocates of following procedure especially in the realm of decentralized governance as without some form of process, the likelihood that disorder would arise is quite high.
To the points made above
This proposal went live on the forum only a few hours before posting it on-chain. Historically we have voted NO on proposals that didn’t follow this procedure and we have applied the same reasoning to this proposal and voted NO.
Please note that we do not vote NO just because of this however it is a contributor to our reasoning as it shows a lack of alignment with the procedure that is highlighted on the Forums of the Cosmos Hub.
The Proposal
The ask of 20,000 $ATOM (~$200,000) to build the first Cosmos Inscription protocol : COSS (crc-20)
What are Inscriptions?
We had the same thought as you! The proposal fails to address a question that many people have seemed to ask in the Forum — another oversight from the proposer.
From the information we managed to source, Inscriptions stem from the Bitcoin Network.
Inscriptions in crypto are pieces of metadata that can be added to Bitcoin satoshis (sats). They can be used to store any type of data, such as text, images, or even code.
Inscriptions can be used to mint NFTs, create dAPPs, store data, & more.
Essentially, Inscriptions (and Ordinals) bring smart-contract-like capabilities to the Bitcoin Network. So the question would be — why does the Cosmos Hub need this? Again, they failed to give a comprehensive answer to this. Our viewpoint is that this adds unnecessary complexities and if the Cosmos Hub wanted smart-contract capabilities, it is better off adopting CosmWasm.
Overall, we are quite disappointed at the proposers who have failed to do a good job of proposing an idea to the Hub. The lack of detail and the failure to follow standard protocols leaves much to be desired from this proposal.
Cosmos Hub #860
This calls for the claw back of Funds from Notional previously granted to them following a series of events and public disputes that led to calls that the proposal that granted them the funding was no longer tenable.
The Backstory
Notional were granted 120,000 $ATOM (40,000 per year for 3 years) in Proposal #104 to work on Hub maintenance and Incident response.
The funds from this proposal went to a 3/5 multi-sig wallet with signers from the Notional team. This is important for context.
Present Day
Recently, on Twitter (or X), there was a public dispute that occurred between Notional and (now) ex-team members. We will not go into those details as we believe that this is something that should have been kept private.
Unfortunately, there was a mass resignation within the Notional team which also meant that the multi-sig mentioned above was compromised. 3/5 of the signers no longer work at Notional and with so many developers leaving the company, Proposal #104 seemed to be somewhat questionable now.
With Notional and CEO Jacob Gadikian stating that we should vote YES on the proposal to claw back vesting, we believe that this proposal should pass and that if they see fit, they can do another proposal.
At present, Notional are undergoing a massive restructuring while switching off their security (validation) operations.
We wish them all the best and hope to see them coming back when they are ready!
Juno Network #325
V18 Epona is here! Juno Upgraded to v18 earlier this week with our Validator upgrading seamlessly.
The upgrade included a few fixes and updates:
The upgrade occurred on block height #12,265,007 which happened on the 11th of December at roughly 17:00 CET.
Persistence proposals #58, #59, #61
These proposals aim to decentralize Dexter through the use of $XPRT governance.
To do this, the three proposals were required with each carrying out its function:
- Migration of the multi-staking contract
- Instantiation of Dexter Governance Admin contract
- Move ownership from Multi-staking admin and Vault-admin multi sigs to Governance admin contract
Proposal #58 — Migrate Multi-Staking Contract on Dexter to version 3.0
This proposal migrates the multi-staking contract from Mainnet version 1.0 to 3.0 which enables features such as:
- Instant LP Unbonding
- Streamlined Proposal Flow
Proposal #59 — Instantiate Dexter Governance Admin contract
Key features of the contract include:
- Dexter Governance Admin Role
- Chain Governance Control
- Enhanced Protocol Functionality
Proposal #61 — Transfer Dexter Vault and Multi-staking contract ownership to the Governance Admin Contract
This proposal transferred owner authority in the Vault and Multi-staking contract to the Governance Admin contract allowing for XPRT to become the default token for Dexter governance.
Osmosis #694
Call for Osmosis to ‘Sail with the Whale’ by joining and collaborating with the SAIL program.
We voted NO on this proposal given the large ask and lack of incorporating any feedback from the initial Commonwealth post.
The 5,000,000 $OSMO tokens would be subject to Liquid Staking on Eris Protocol and Backbone Labs and then paired into LP pools with the remaining 2,500,000 $OSMO tokens.
The benefit of joining the program would be that multiple projects from the RIDE Program including White Whale would deploy projects or tokens on the Osmosis Platform to further bootstrap the utility of the network.
For more information, please read the full proposal:
We would re-evaluate our stance once they take the feedback into account.
About Simply Staking
Simply Staking is a blockchain infra provider across 40+ networks, across various ecosystems. PoS validators on Cosmos Hub from Genesis, Oasis, Akash, Kusama, Polkadot, and many more.
We also operate node infrastructure on the Chainlink network providing price feeds to Aggregator contracts which are used by major Ethereum DeFi apps. Our participation in Chainlink aggregator contracts spans other networks such as Layers 2s, BSC, MATIC, XDAI, RSK, and more.
We’re also a Lido ETH2.0 operator, enabling us to run 1000s of ETH validators.
Simply Staking also comprises other development teams building financial, blockchain, and infra-monitoring tools.
All our infra is run off self-hosted or co-located servers, with no cloud usage at all and our base being in Malta.
Stay tuned to Simply Staking for more Governance updates:
- Website: https://simplystaking.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimplyStaking
- Discord: https://discord.gg/Kpzc58Gu9a
- Telegram: https://t.me/SimplyVC
