Yearn Governance Roundup #11

Week Ending December 6, 2020

Nomad

Published in

Yearn Governance Roundup

5 min readDec 4, 2020

Welcome to the Yearn Governance Roundup — a weekly newsletter covering everything in the Yearn Governance pipeline.

Quick Hits

⚖️ Governance Summary

Make sure you join the governance forum if you want to get involved with these discussions!

Active Votes

🗳️ [Sentiment] Create a YFI Governance Vault: Create a new YFI Governance Vault that deposits YFI into MakerDAO to mint DAI; this DAI is then used to yield farm. Depositors receive governance fees and yield-farming profits. Part of profits would support protocol initiatives. This Governance Vault would replace governance staking. Discussion here.

Non-binding vote is live until Dec. 9, 2020.

October and November Community Grants

One-time grants have been sent out for October and November. These grants are not just rewards for work done, but investments in community members to keep contributing in the future.

This round of grants is the first to use the new yGift system. yGift represents each grant as a collectible NFT and also includes a tipping feature available for anyone that wants to show their gratitude to our team. For example: My yGift is here — please don’t tip!

Grant recipients include:

You can read the full announcement post here.

📢 I’m covering the Akropolis and Sushi collaborations because they are important developments in Yearn’s ecosystem and could affect Yearn’s governance decisions in the future. Not because these were governance decisions or proposals.

Μα τον Δια! Yearn x Akropolis

The collaborations / partnerships continue! This week, Akropolis, an easy to use interface for financial operations and decision-making, joined the fold.

Here’s the list of synergies emerging from this partnership:

Akropolis & Yearn merge development resources
Akropolis & Yearn TVL increases
Akropolis gets access to Yearn, Pickle, and Cream products, and can integrate its DCA solutions with these
Yearn gets access to new investment strategies created by Akropolis
Yearn accesses Akropolis business development expertise and exposure to its institutional client network

To facilitate high iteration, testing, and deployment speeds, the Akropolis multi-sig keys will be rotated. Additionally, Akropolis will become a strategist for the new Yearn Vaults (coming soon).

Learn more about this partnership by reading the announcement post here.

Yearn x Sushi 行ってきます

The other big partnership announcement this week is with SushiSwap — an automated market making (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX).

Since forking Uniswap, SushiSwap has focused on expanding their AMM ecosystem, and as Yearn focused on expanding our strategies, the overlap became apparent. Yearn needs custom AMM experiences for our strategies, and SushiSwap has started pushing the boundaries of yield and money markets.

The list of synergies that emerge from this partnership is… long. Here’s a short version:

Sushiswap & Yearn merge development resources
Sushiwap & Yearn TVL increases
Sushiswap will complete and launch Deriswap
Yearn strategies will use Sushiswap moving forward
Yearn will help create xSushi vaults so people can earn SUSHI-ETH-YFI-wBTC.
Sushiswap will be involved in a stealth project following Deriswap release with Yearn
Sushiswap money market will be launched that uses Sushi LP as collateral
0xMaki will lead the AMM arm of yEarn

This is an extremely exciting development in the Yearn ecosystem and I’m looking forward to the results this partnership yields.

Learn more about this partnership by reading the announcement post here.

Bonus: PowerPool Yearn Ecosystem Token Index (YETI)

This proposal was shared by RyanW on the PowerPool governance forum on Dec. 3. Here’s the summary:

Launch an index in the PowerPool ecosystem consisting of Yearn ecosystem projects 6: YFI, SUSHI, CREAM, AKRO, COVER, K3PR, CVP, PICKLE. The proposed weights of tokens will be: YFI 35%, SUSHI 17%, other tokens 8% each. The name of the new index is proposed to be “Yearn Ecosystem Token Index”, with the ticker “YETI”.

For those unfamiliar: PowerPool is a protocol for pooling governance tokens that allows the token holders to lend, pool, borrow governance tokens, get income from it, and accumulate governance power in protocols based on Ethereum.

In Ryan’s proposal, he goes on to explain that the Yearn ecosystem has expanded through a series of mergers and partnerships that now contains 8 tokens: YFI, SUSHI, CREAM, AKRO, COVER, K3PR, CVP, PICKLE. They all share developer resources and community. He also notes that despite development and community resources being merged, governance among these protocols remains separate — an important point.

Ryan believes there is a significant opportunity to create one simple instrument to invest in our ecosystem as a whole, while also formally aligning incentives among Yearn ecosystem protocols through coordinated meta-governance.

I find this proposal interesting and would love to see it in action. If you have feedback or questions, make sure to visit the governance post here.