ENS Considers Revamping Their DAO, and JPEG’d Buys CVX

[Excerpt from our Apr. 4 DAO Insights]

Active Votes

Anchor Protocol is currently voting on two proposals.
- BETH LTV: This proposal will raise the LTV for bETH collateral to 75%.
- Whitelist ATOM: Anchor will add wrapped stkATOM as collateral if this vote passes.
Beyond their weekly gauge voting, APWine is currently voting on three additional proposals.
- Treasury Fees: This proposal is to determine how the DAO distributes its fees. The proposal recommends directing 70% of the fees to veAPW holders. Voters are currently leaning towards accepting protocol fees in claimable APW.
- Fees Distributor Contract: This proposal gives the team approval for deploying the contract which will be responsible for distributing the fees decided upon in the previous proposal.
- Stake DAO Whitelist: If this vote passes, it will enable Stake DAO to lock their treasury APW tokens and vote in APWines gauge.
Boba Network is voting on enabling BOBA as a gas token. ETH will remain the default gas token for their network, but users have the option to switch to BOBA if they so choose.

Forum Spotlight

Synopsis: Proposed by Nick.eth, this forum post suggests a radical change to how ENS operates as a DAO. Nick feels that DAOs are often run as committees, which, in his estimation, are operationally cumbersome. He cites issues within ENS where good ideas remain unexecuted, lack of specific accountability stalls projects or small teams, and individuals bypass the DAO model completely. To remedy these issues, Nick suggests that ENS adopt this RFP process:

Someone identifies a need and proposes an RFP.
If there is consensus on its necessity, the working group can fund it, or propose funding through a DAO-wide vote.
If warranted, ENS will submit the RFP for approval on-chain.
Once the RFP is ratified, the working group accepts proposals to do the work.
The working group selects the winner, and will be responsible for evaluating progress, and also funding disbursement when complete.

Pro Arguments: Although users in the forum were generally supportive, they still made some recommendations. Mostly the forum identified the need for the DAO to use or develop some project management tools. Users recommended Kanban boards, forking GitLab, and Cthulu itself even highlighted their own proposed process for working groups.
Counter Arguments: The only vaguely critical comment in the forum was a user pointing out that tools and processes are ineffective if an organization lacks the culture to use them. This, in our opinion, is a fair criticism, but we can’t comment on the culture at ENS as we don’t know.
Our Position: We think that this proposal holds some promise for ENS. We agree with Nick that DAO operations currently leave a lot desired. Most DAOs struggle to ship products, complete complex tasks, coordinate their community, and even get people out to cast a vote. From what we can see, successful DAOs, or at least the ones that seem to be able to ship products, generally bypass these issues by being centralized. For example, ‘successful’ DAOs often have a highly centralized token supply or a process that ensures only team proposals are submitted and passed (i.e. require a high quorum). There are notable exceptions, and many DAOs are experimenting with new models and concepts that can potentially overcome these issues while still maintaining the core values and aspects that are expected from a DAO. But centralized productive DAOs are a trend that is hard to ignore. With a bit of streamlining, we think that ENS’ new DAO model could be a successful move for ENS, but it has a few obstacles to overcome. At face value, asking the delegates and working groups to assess each proposal for RFPs and the responses to the RFP feels clunky, and on the surface, seems to double their work. With this new system, proposals would need to debate issuing the RFP, selecting the proposal, and then follow up with evaluation and disbursement. It may also reduce the labor pool available to ENS as contributors would now need to commit work to a proposal without a guaranteed payoff. However, this model may appeal more to large groups of developers like Developer DAO or even groups like Alchemist or Raid Guild. We think the process has promise, but as mentioned earlier, it may need some streamlining and experimentation to run smoothly.
For more, Delphi members can see our latest DAO Insights here.

DISRUPTORS: Why DAOs? With Tracheopteryx

[Excerpt from The Delphi Podcast]

“The next Buddha may be a Sangha.”
DAOs are the next step in collective development, slated to transform life and work as we know it. We are now at the very beginning, and what we’ve seen is only the tip of the iceberg.
Our second DISRUPTORS guest, Tracheopteryx, gives a new definition for DAOs, laying out their anatomy, and contextualizing their value. Being a core contributor at Yearn and Coordinape, Tracheopteryx sits right at the frontier of the most decentralized DAOs on the planet.
What are DAOs? How do they work? Why do they matter? Tune in to find out.
Resources:
More
- 📺 Watch Video Interviews
- 💬 Follow Delphi Podcast on Twitter
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- 🧠 Access Delphi’s Research

For more, you can see our latest Delphi Podcast releases here.

Notable Tweets

Guide to Grow Your Twitter Audience

I went from 0 to 120k Twitter followers in 11 weeks.

If you’re interested in growing a Twitter audience, read this:

—The DeFi Edge 🗡️ (@thedefiedge) April 5, 2022

Omnichain NFTs

1/ In the wake of
@layerzero_labs
official launch, many people began to think about an obvious use case: NFTs. A thread on the
@gh0stlygh0sts
, and how omnichain NFTs may disrupt current NFT market dynamics in ways we didn’t expect 👇

— lz.intern() (@layerzerointern) April 5, 2022

Operational Efficiency for DAOs

1/ How do we get DAOs, decentralized teams, contributors to operate as efficiently as traditional companies?

Disable Discord for the community and remove it publicly

Stop on boarding the public to your community and focus on mission aligned front line contributors to start.

— Imran is hiring (@lmrankhan) April 5, 2022