SAFE Encounters of the Governance Kind | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
This week’s Community Call saw the return of the roundtable format with a discussion about the DAOstewards’ proposal for delegation of SafeDAO tokens. You can read more about the DAOstewards and their plans for meta-governance in this week’s editorial by HiroKennelly. As Hiro points out, the SAFE token drop is a unique opportunity for bDAO to refine our approaches to internal and external governance and delegated voting power.
DAO-wide Coordinape is live this week. While allocating GIVE is important, it’s also great if you take the time to leave a note of appreciation for someone who has made a difference to your experience in the DAO. It’s been a pretty tough time lately, thanks to budgets and bears, and a few positive words could lift another’s spirits at just the right moment.
Funding proposals from guilds and projects have been landing on the Forum and the anticipation for Season 6 is building. Links to each proposal are available in the forum-proposals channel. Spend some time reading these and you could earn rewards through the DAO’s partnership with ThriveCoin, which aims to recognize meaningful contribution in web3.
Speaking of recognition, congratulations to our latest L2 nominees: Vibranty, Cisco, SpiritedF, ETrinity, and Paulito. You may be relentless, but make sure you know how to relax too! That goes for everyone in the bDAO fam — have a safe, wonderful, and relaxing weekend wherever you may be.
Contributors: anointingthompson1.eth, Lucent1, Warrior, angelspeaks, HAshBrown27, WinVerse, Liquidiot, siddhearta, Trewkat, pub-gmn.eth, HiroKennelly
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🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor
MetaMask Institutional
Today there are close to 5,000 official DAOs revolutionizing the structure of traditional organizations and giving ownership back to builders and creators.
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On November 3, join experts from MetaMask Institutional and the ConsenSys Cryptoeconomic Research team as they share best practices and lead breakout sessions around core DAO ops problem areas including governance, treasury management, payments, community engagement and development.
Across these rooms expect to discuss the following topics:
The ‘hierarchy of needs’ around treasury management
Creating an investment policy statement for your DAO
What is decentralized identity (DID) and how to erect DID systems with your DAO
DAO governance and legal ramifications
DAO tokenomics
Popular web2 and web3 DAO tools
👉 Register now.
🗓 Weekly Recap
Community Highlights
📺 Weekly Rollup Recap with Liquidiot
This week, the fun bubbles over with Liquidiot and WinVerse recapping the last Weekly Rollup into a bumper ten-minute video. These weekly clips are available via the BanklessDAO YouTube channel but we love them so much we are happy to include it here for your viewing pleasure!
🎉 October Coordinape Allocation
The allocation phase of the October Coordinape round (for work done in September) started with this week’s Community Call! Head over to Coordinape, select teammates, and allocate GIVE tokens to folks who have been contributing and spreading good vibes throughout the DAO in the last month. The allocation phase starts at 15:00 UTC on October 14 and ends at 15:00 UTC October 19. Everyone who signed up should make sure they allocate their GIVE.
For more clarification on this allocation phase, it is important that you watch this excellent tutorial. If you still have questions, please post in the contributor-remuneration channel and tag LiviuC.
👨🏾🎓 BanklessDAO x ThriveCoin Contributor Recognition Program
On Tuesday, the founding members of ThriveCoin, Robert Rome and Daniel Jacobs, discussed the importance of ThriveCoin and the need for recognizing and rewarding web3 contributors. The role BanklessDAO plays in the program was also discussed. This program, which was held on Twitter Spaces, was hosted by 0xSenad. Huge shout out to him and all the parties that made this happen. If you missed the program, get up to date on the issues discussed by listening to the recording.
🌊 Liquidity Update
The liquidity in the Balancer Polygon BANK/ETH pool has been deepened to $55,342. This was done to alleviate slippage when swapping BANK on the Polygon network. Anyone still facing some challenges should reach out in the tokenomics channel.
Check out the Balancer pool here.
🥇 Bankless Academy and 1inch Launch DEX Aggregators Lesson
It’s shipping time with the Academy Squad. After successfully deploying their new Academy Badges, a new lesson — the first one co-built with 1inch — is ready for discovery!
That's right, Explorers, a new challenge awaits. Be one of the FIRST to take the lesson and claim your DEX Aggregators Academy Badge. Since the launch of the new feature, more than 500 Badges have been claimed by Explorers worldwide.
In this new lesson, let's dive into:
💲 How Liquidity Affects Prices
💫 What is Thin Liquidity
🔄 What does Recombining Liquidity mean
⛽ How Aggregators Reduce Gas Costs
⚙ Meta-Aggregators
😈 Sandwich Attacks
🤝 Over-the-Counter (OTC) Trades
Put your skills to the test with each Knowledge Check, succeed at our final mission, the Lesson Quest, and get ready to mint your on-chain recognition thanks to Kudos and Gitcoin Passport. A big thank you and shout out to the 1inch core team for the first Academy/protocol collaboration.
Thank you to all Explorers who have participated in our Feedback Cohorts and the Level Up Live Learning Sessions. This lesson was co-built with YOU! It's time to level up, stay curious, and keep learning with us. Get onboard, Explorer, right now. Take the lesson here 🚀
To stay up to date with the team, follow Bankless Academy on Twitter, and join the Explorer Community on gm.xyz.
🙉 The Clean Cup Initiative
The Mad Hatter MGMT has announced an idea, and it may just end the announcement madness for all members of the community in the next season! This important 'upgrade' is known as the 'Clean Cup Initiative'. The idea is as follows:
Projects, guilds, and individual members would submit their announcements to Mad Hatter via a command/form, and Mad Hatter would post these to a dedicated channel, pinging Level 1, Level 2, and Guest Pass members twice a day: once at 12 midnight UTC, and again at 12 noon UTC.
Every day, the channel is wiped clean and the next day’s announcements are posted. Hence the “Clean Cup” nomenclature.
To find out more and add your thoughts, visit the Forum post.
🌐 Global Events
Powerhouse bDAO contributor salmanneedsajob has shared a video he published a while back; it’s a conversation with a fellow BanklessDAO contributor who was part of the DAO last year. Kriti is also a DAOpunk, and the founder of a company called Partnr. Hear about Kriti’s experience in BanklessDAO, and soak up the shared bDAO vibes.
#️⃣ WeAreDAO
There is no danger of the ice cream melting this week - ‘cos we have Icedcool in the house! By the way, did you hear they passed a law banning ice cream? Don’t worry, it was ruled un-cone-stitutional!
What is your favourite DeFi protocol?
RookWhat is your favourite ice-cream flavour?
Mint Chocolate ChipWhich of the NFTs that you own is your favourite?
The Icedcool chippi
Where would you love to travel to?
Japan! (I'd love to go back. Love Japan)What did you aspire to before you discovered crypto, and has that changed at all?
Prior to crypto I aspired to financial freedom, so that I could help the world be a better place. I was tired of working for initiatives that I had no ownership or control over and not having the financials to do and pursue what I wanted. This has 100% changed, through getting involved at BanklessDAO. I find myself very deeply involved in coordination, governance, and exploring what money, value and being humans together actually is all about!
That’s it — short and sweet! If you would like to be featured in Kat’s Roll Call, answer the questions via this form, and keep consuming the Weekly Rollup goodness.
Fresh Content
🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts
🧠 Crypto Sapiens Podcast
🌍 Bankless Africa
💰 Making Bank
🏹 Bounty Hunter
✍️ Bankless Publishing
🌏 Bankless Africa Newsletter
🗞 The Rug Newsletter
Get Involved
🌱 New Joiners Session S5x05
Do you wish to spend some time with seasoned BanklessDAO contributors to discuss your DAO experience and receive advice? This New Joiners Session may just be what you are looking for, a pleasant chat with no bots allowed. Join us on Monday, October 17 at 14:45 UTC to discover more about BanklessDAO, connect with fellow new joiners on the Bankless journey, and meet others who may serve as mentors on your path to DAO life. To get plugged in and feel the BanklessDAO vibes, RSVP and fill out the form in the calendar channel.
Learning Opportunities
🏛️ How to Governance Session
Governance is a very important aspect of decentralization, especially in DAOs as it helps comprise structures with an objective to uplift the management of DAOs to achieve its mission and vision. Join Quietfox for a monthly dose of “How to Governance” which will be held on the watercooler voice channel on Tuesday, October 18. To set a reminder, RSVP to the event.
🛡️ How to Sobol Session
Sobol is a web-based platform that provides flexibility for teams to govern themselves and run their organization according to their unique culture. If you want to know the organization of the DAO and how to find different information about roles, guilds, Notion pages, multi-sigs, and members of a community, join Quietfox in the watercooler voice channel on Thursday, October 20 at 13:00 UTC as she conducts a learning session on how to use Sobol. To set a reminder, RSVP to the event.
🙏 Sponsor: MetaMask Institutional → The DeFi Wallet and Web3 Gateway for Organizations
SAFE Encounters of the Governance Kind
Author: HiroKennelly
A token airdrop is a web3 phenomenon that encapsulates the excitement and positive vibes of the cryptoverse — that moment when a community of users, supporters, and ecosystem participants is tokenized and social capital combines with digital currency to catalyze a community and build a DAO. There are many ways to distribute a token, but the two biggest recent airdrops, ENS and OP, offer a case study in approaches to tokenization.
ENS rewarded its users, multiplying allocations based upon the length of time the domain was registered and whether the ENS name’s reverse record was set. Optimism’s OP drop took a different approach, optimizing its distribution to land in the wallets of those with an on-chain history of broader ecosystem participation, boosting recipients’ OP tokens based upon Snapshot voting records, Gitcoin Grants donations, and whether the user was a signer on a multi-signature wallet.
The SAFE Drop
Speaking of multi-signature wallets, Gnosis recently announced that it has spun out its Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet product — now rebranded as Safe - and will drop 50 million SAFE token to nearly 21 thousand multi-sig wallet addresses over a four-year period. SAFE token holders will help to launch and govern SafeDAO, which like ENS and Optimism, will depend on delegated voting for governance. Delegated voting is the mechanism by which airdrop recipients are required to delegate their voting to a specific wallet address, either to themselves or others. Without completion of the delegation, there are no voting rights and you often can’t claim the airdrop.
The SAFE drop is similar to the ENS airdrop in that it was engineered to directly reward users of Safe rather than ecosystem supporters, but it was unique because the SAFE tokens can only be claimed by the actual multi-sig wallet instead of its signers’ individual wallets. The mechanisms of this drop turn the SAFE token launch into a micro-governance experiment: How do multi-sig signers reach consensus about delegation of SAFE and help move the mission of SafeDAO forward, and what happens on a meta-governance level when organizations have dozens of associated multi-sig wallets? Which leads us to BanklessDAO.
Parachuting Into BanklessDAO
BanklessDAO runs on multi-sigs. According to a spreadsheet compiled by LiviuC, there are more than 30 multi-sig addresses associated with our DAO’s guilds, projects, and subDAOs. In total, these wallets are eligible to claim approximately 80,000 SAFE tokens, or .002% of the total supply.
Shortly after the SAFE drop was announced, members lit up BanklessDAO’s Discord with a raft of suggestions on how the DAO could best take advantage of this only-in-crypto event, including:
Keep SafeDAO governance more decentralized by self-delegating to each multi-sig (i.e. each multi-sig retains its voting power by delegating to its own address).
Come up with a DAO-wide plan to collectively delegate to the same wallet address to increase the DAO’s voting power.
Sell the SAFE to increase and diversify of our individual multi-sig holdings.
Sell the SAFE and transfer the proceeds to the DAO Treasury.
Although there has not been a formal DAO-wide temp check on how best to proceed, one project team within the DAO is keen to take the lead on SafeDAO governance on behalf of BanklessDAO: the DAOstewards.
DAOstewards and Meta-Governance
DAOstewards is a workstream within a relatively new external DAOplomats.eth brand (stay tuned for an editorial on DAOstewards/DAOplomats in early Season 6). The squad consists of jengajojo.eth, senad.eth, 0xBaer, thinkDecade, links, and gruad. DAOstewards provides meta-governance solutions for projects and protocols which are focused on web3 public goods, but whose work also impact the activities of bDAO. Solutions on offer include writing and coordinating proposals, and being available to act as delegates for these projects to help ease governance issues that plague web3, such as failures to meet quorum requirements (sound familiar, BanklessDAO?) and general DAO voter fatigue.
Two weeks ago, DAOstewards dropped a proposal seeking consensus within the DAO to consolidate the SAFE tokens and delegate them to DAOstewards to participate in the governance of SafeDAO. Meta-governance is the idea that there is a group of professionals focused on governance who represent the will of the delegated token holders — a fiat-space analogy would be meta-governance as representative democracy. And like representative democracy at its best, meta-governance is a sense-and-respond process where those represented retain strong veto power (or re-delegation authority).
Jengajojo was kind enough to respond to a few questions about DAOstewards (with light editing for readability), meta-governance, and its place in the DAO. His answers were approved by the team.
How does DAOstewards make internal decisions regarding meta governance?
DAOstewards upholds Bankless values and any decision which needs to be made when it concerns voting, we look at through the lens of these values. If we decide to vote against these principles we will release a clear summary on why we have chosen to vote a certain way.
In terms of the mechanics, we use Orca Pods (recently rebranded as Metropolis) to be transparent with our on-chain votes.
Why should the guilds, projects, and subDAOs delegate to DAOstewards?
Recently, OP token holders voted to approve Bankless Academy’s proposal to create an L2 course. In order to do this, they had to reach out to different delegates who hold majority voting power and convince them that an L2 course was worthy of support. Now imagine if bDAO had delegated OP tokens to DAOstewards? We could have achieved the same results (but much faster), and we can do the same for other groups in bDAO.
Another way to look at it is through the lens of the governance activity in BanklessDAO itself. The average Forum post receives fewer votes than the number of multi-sigs which received SAFE; how do we expect to be active in SAFE governance if we are not active in our own governance? This is why it makes sense to pool expertise and voting power to a workstream dedicated to this purpose.
How can the DAO compel multi-sig owners to agree to delegate their SAFE tokens?
There is no precedent for this. We suggest a Snapshot vote to get the delegation from the community treasury multi-sig, and hopefully that Snapshot is sufficient to signal the intentions of the greater DAO to the other multi-sig signers. However, I also expect we’ll need to engage with multi-sig signers on a case-by-case basis to achieve full consensus.
What does the conversation around the SAFE drop reveal about the evolutionary phase of our DAO's governance?
I think it's interesting to see that we have so many different multi-sigs in the DAO that can make independent decisions, but there is no framework which compels everyone to vote as one. In the long run, we need to figure out a way to verifiably execute the wishes of DAO members (Snapshot results), and implement this will across multiple sovereign teams without having to cat-herd everyone at the same time.
Learning How to Meta-DAO
In many ways, the SAFE drop into our multi-sigs is a gift carrying an opportunity. Projects and guilds will be forced to have a discussion about how to delegate or otherwise use their SAFE, and may realize their own internal decision-making procedures are insufficient for the task. What a great opportunity to build better governance structures into our work!
The even greater opportunity is that we can use the SAFE drop as an impetus to further focus on the robustness of the DAO’s decision making capacity. Jenga is right, of course, that there are no mechanisms in place to compel multi-sig holders to direct funds in a particular way, as there are no automatic treasury triggers associated with BanklessDAO’s voting mechanisms. In an organizational structure that is working to become more decentralized and distributed, perhaps that’s how it should be.
Of all the consensus mechanisms in crypto, none are more important than Layer 0. This consensus mechanism is the one formed by the bonds we develop as we build with one another. Layer 0 is the chain of humanity that links us all together as we move the mission of the DAO forward. Consensus on Layer 0 is achieved by holding space for each other and dancing with one another until we discover, together, the next steps.
The community’s response to the SAFE proposal indicated a clear preference for delegating the tokens to DAOstewards — of the 55 total votes, 93% were in favor — but there is no DAO-wide mechanism to actually enact this result; consensus must still be reached by dancing with the multi-sig signers. DAOstewards may or may not succeed in having all 80 thousand SAFE tokens delegated to them, but it matters not the number. It’s the experiment, it’s the work in progress, it’s the dance that’s important.
We’re all still learning how to DAO, and meta-governance and delegated voting is an integral part of this education. As we think about the importance of decision making throughout the DAO, let’s continue to focus on the hard work of building the human consensus mechanism along with our internal and external governance structures. As people and processes sync up, the true meta-structures, the ones that transcend both ourselves and our organizational limits, will be revealed, propelling all of us into the future we are working so hard to build.
If you are interested in becoming a DAOsteward, please check out their Notion page.
🏛 Governance
🧐 Season 6 — Grants Committee Election Applications
The Grants Committee (GC) is responsible and accountable for managing the grants system, reviewing grant applications, and managing the grants treasury, with the help of other guilds as needed (e.g. Treasury). The GC consists of 5-7 members along with a multi-sig with all committee members as signers. There will be 4 (potentially 5) seats open for Season 6 Grants Committee. If you feel drawn to serve the DAO this way, you can share your application information in the comments.
🗣 It's Community Vote Time
This Forum post serves to collect community sentiment about a range of DAO-related topics and the results will inform the Season 6 Specification. Responses are not limited to the polls included with the post, so if you have an idea or change to propose for Season 6, please include a comment for discussion.
Proposals in Discussion
🚀 Project Funding Framework Upgrade (Vibe Check)
This draft proposes three upgrades to the bDAO project funding framework. The most prominent is to establish a new class of entities called ‘Incubators’ and upgrade several existing projects to this new structure. Proposed changes would include allowing incubators to set up their own guidelines for project acceptance, developing a standard price list for incubation, and establishing a ‘graduation’ criteria for incubated projects. Jump in to share your thoughts and help shape this important discussion.
🦦 bDAO Season Role Holder Badges (Otterspace Pilot)
This is a pilot proposal to generate seasonal badges for BanklessDAO role holders using the Otterspace protocol. This would include all Guild Coordinators and Project Champions who would then be permitted to issue other role badges required within their groups. Doing so will make our org structure visible on chain, create a more holistic representation of membership, generate data for future reputations systems, and aid the community in communication.
The authors say this proposal is a low-risk way to increase our resiliency, transparency, and reputation mechanics, but there is some push back about the suggestion to issue soulbound tokens to verify DAO participation. What do you think?
✅ Action Items
✍🏼 Apply: Grants Committee applications are open from October 14 - 24.
☑️ Vote: Community voting on DAO-wide topics is ongoing.
🎇 Allocate: Head over to Coordinape to allocate GIVE.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
🙏 Sponsored by MetaMask Institutional
🤣 Meme of the Week
Thanks EthHunter!
And because you can never have too much Icedcool (thanks Links):
