Boardroom

Uniswap Debates Bridge to BNB Chain

February 10th, 2023

Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange on Ethereum, has long embraced the idea of deploying on many chains. Bringing Uniswap’s advantages — fast transactions and low fees among them — to the wide world of other chains is almost universally seen as a net good. Uniswap v3 already exists on Arbitrum, Celo, Optimism, and Polygon, and there are others under consideration.

1inch DAO Considers Governance Improvements

February 2nd, 2023

The 1inch Network describes itself as providing “one-stop access to decentralized finance.” The network itself is a collection of protocols, the first of which was a DEX aggregator that “searches deals across multiple liquidity sources, offering users better rates than any individual exchange.” The network also includes an Aggregator Protocol, a Liquidity Protocol, and a Limit Order Protocol — as well as its own wallet. The 1inch DAO governs the network, and “all participants in the DAO are working towards a common goal: 1inch Network protocols and the 1INCH token to be completely decentralized, owned and governed by the DAO.” The DAO’s governance process, originally based on that of Balancer and Gnosis, is adapting to the needs of the DAO, as we see with the proposal at hand.

Euler Finance Formalizes Governance Processes

January 30th, 2023

Non-custodial, permissionless lending protocol Euler was originally founded by Euler Labs and has since been following the path of progressive decentralization. Now with an active DAO, Euler follows a fairly typical governance process that relies on Discourse, Discord, and Snapshot to debate ideas, surface prevailing sentiment, and rally the community to vote for (or against) changes to the protocol. Euler’s first proposal was put before the DAO on Snapshot in late June of 2022. But as the DAO has developed, the community has expressed the need to create more clarity and structure around the governance process — including an explicit procedure for fast-track proposals that deal with urgent concerns.

Hop Protocol Agrees to Fee Switch for DAO Funding and Public Goods

January 25th, 2023

Hop is a protocol that "allows users to send tokens from one rollup to another almost immediately" through its "scalable rollup-to-rollup general token bridge." While the protocol first went live on mainnet in July of 2021, a number of improvements to both its service and its governance process were recently introduced to the DAO. In December of 2022, Chris Whinfrey wrote post in the forums that guided community members to three requests-for-comment that would significantly affect Hop's future. One of these RFCs pointed to the protocol roadmap; another sought comment on a plan for protocol fees and public goods funding. Both plans were recently overwhelmingly approved in Snapshot polls. We'll take a closer look at the latter proposal below.

MakerDAO Debates Its Partnership with Gemini

January 19th, 2023

Maker is the DeFi protocol behind DAI, a stablecoin referred to as “the world’s first unbiased currency,” currently pegged to the U.S. dollar. DAI’s peg is maintained in part by the Peg Stability Module (PSM), which allows users to “swap other stablecoins for DAI at a fixed rate.” The fees generated from these swaps go directly to Maker’s DAO.

Developer DAO Simplifies its Governance Process

January 18th, 2023

Suffering from highly-motivated membership leads early-stage DAOs to develop transparent and effective processes that permit ideas and changes to occur more fluidly. Keeping this process up to date based on the growing needs of the organization makes them nimble and productive regardless of externalities. At Developer DAO, the social DAO that serves to “accelerate the education and impact of a new wave of web3 builders”, they set off to establish their own robust decision-making process.

Optimism Holds Protocol Delegation Elections

January 17th, 2023

This proposal outlines the process for selecting a subset of the protocols that will participate in the Protocol Delegation Program.

Goldfinch Proposes New Community Management

January 13th, 2023

Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol whose primary focus is to enable crypto loans that are collateralized off-chain (that is, with non-crypto assets). This supports Goldfinch’s mission of expanding “access to capital by creating a single global credit marketplace.” As the protocol’s documentation points out, while most DeFi protocols out there allow crypto loans when collateralized with other crypto assets, that prevents “the vast majority of borrowers in the world from participating.”

Decentraland Scrutinizes Its Vote Power Distribution

January 11th, 2023

Decentraland describes itself as the “first-ever virtual world owned by its users.” It is a metaverse that puts itself forward as a “public good” in contrast to the many virtual (and IRL) private goods already in existence. As its name and vision would suggest, Decentraland has a DAO, one which has taken several different forms over the years, moving back and forth from off-chain to on-chain governance structures over that period of time for various reasons. In its most recent form, the DAO relies on Snapshot to eliminate gas fees and increase voter participation; but there are concerns about the distribution of voting power — which the proposal at hand hopes to rebalance using several strategies.