Karpatkey Delegate Platform

Governance
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Delegate Address: governance.karpatkey.eth (0x8787FC2De4De95c53e5E3a4e5459247D9773ea52)
Email: governance@karpatkey.com
Website: https://karpatkey.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/karpatkey

Abstract

karpatkey was born from and has been an active contributor to the GnosisDAO ecosystem, and we would like to present ourselves to the community as a trusted delegate. We have created this thread to share more about karpatkey, how we vote, why you should delegate your GNO to us, what we stand for, and how to do it.

Who is karpatkey?

To get the most out of the boom of governance-tokens yield farming peak in June 2020, Gnosis shifted its treasury management strategies, taking low-risk liquidity mining positions in a controlled environment for most of its ETH and stablecoin holdings. As part of a core unit incubated in Gnosis, the first karpatkey members had been tasked with the responsibility for the research, execution, and reporting of these treasury management activities.

Later that year, the transition of Gnosis from a traditional for-profit organisation to a DAO brought up all sorts of coordination issues from a treasury management perspective that needed to be addressed. The requirements imposed by the open nature of a decentralised organisation led GnosisDAO and karpatkey to implement autonomous open-source tooling for on-chain treasury execution on top of the Safe and Zodiac protocols.

GIP-20 would later ratify karpatkey as the official manager of the GnosisDAO treasury and inadvertently create an entire industry: the GnosisDAO treasury generated 53% of the top 65 DAOs’ yield in 2021, and karpatkey reports became a source of alpha for the ecosystem.

We’ve since expanded our organisation to support additional DAO treasuries, i.e. Balancer; ENS; and COW, and have been working closely together with Gnosis Guild to develop the de facto infrastructure for non-custodial treasury execution on-chain.

Our contributions to GnosisDAO

karpatkey has invested significant resources into developing the Gnosis Chain (GC) and GnosisDAO’s treasury, improving the long-term value of GNO. Here are some examples of our work with the GnosisDAO:

  • GnosisDAO treasury development: as per GIP-20 and later through a services extension (GIP-58), we’ve been developing the GnosisDAO treasury and sharing weekly reports with the community.
  • GnosisDAO Treasury Dashboard: Resource for diving into GnosisDAO’s treasury balance and growth, portfolio composition, and farming positions and rewards.
  • GIP-22: Posted the Balancer-GnosisDAO Partnership Proposal, including technical collaboration and marketing joint efforts, which was successfully carried out and resulted in the Balancer-CoW Partnership (BCP).
  • GIP-24: Posted a proposal for the 1st phase 50K GNO Incentives Program for Gnosis Chain, optimising GNO rewards and improving GC network effects by financially aligning the incentivised protocols and the GnosisDAO treasury.
  • GNO Incentives Dashboard: Created a dashboard to monitor incentives’ allocation and manage available funds.
  • GIP-28: Posted a proposal to allow GNO holders to obtain financial benefits in different protocols/networks without renouncing their voting rights on the Gnosis forum.
  • GIP-33: Co-developed a proposal to send vested COW tokens to daughter Safe for treasury management.
  • GIP-49: Posted a proposal to push a strategic partnership between GnosisDAO and MakerDAO, aligning DAI as a common denominator and improving both DAO’s growth and impact in the ecosystem.
  • ARC: Posted a proposal on Aave’s forum to add GNO as collateral in the Aave v2 protocol.
  • MIP6 Collateral Onboarding Application [GNO]: Discussed all aspects related to onboarding GNO as collateral in Maker e.g. minting caps; stability fee; available liquidity.
  • Gnosis Chain Validators: Currently running GC Nethermind and Prysm nodes, maintaining 3548 GC validators using our own server infrastructure, positioning ourselves among the top five depositors.
  • Official GC bridge validator: Currently running XDAI and AMB bridge validators (Mainnet/GC).
  • Agave’s Risk Dashboard: Developed a live dashboard together with RiskDAO to help design the Agave protocol’s risk parameters strategy i.e. liquidation thresholds; supply; borrowing caps.
  • 2022 YOY Report for Gnosis: published the report as after gathering, sorting, and cleaning information related to the initial balances and positions and their evolution throughout the year.
  • Gnosis Treasury Dashboard: In August 2023 we released a custom dashboard featuring treasury reports for the Gnosis DAO. These reports show important metrics such as total treasury funds, farming results, capital utilisation and a breakdown of positions held by the treasury. The report for July 2023 can be seen as an example here.

Why you should delegate

The Gnosis ecosystem has grown rapidly, attracting an increasing number of stakeholders to participate in the GnosisDAO community. As a result, the existing governance mechanisms have become overwhelming, becoming challenging to keep up with the growing coverage and complexity of the forum, as highlighted by @m3rlin5ky and briefly by @Mareen.

This phenomenon has largely contributed to a historic voter’s apathy, as demonstrated by the following chart:

Gnosis Voting Participation
Gnosis Voting Participation1349Ă—564 101 KB

In fairness, there have been additional UX limitations contributing to the low engagement, for example:

  • Snapshot not supporting Smart Contract wallets, adding the friction of GNO holdings stored in multisigs having to be delegated to EOAs;
  • GNO holders’ inability to vote with invested/staked/locked positions in Mainnet/GC (discussed in GIP-44);
  • Low-quality and/or spam proposals created in the GnosisDAO’s Snapshot space, as pointed out by @auryn_macmillan in GIP-77.

Causality aside, the GnosisDAO needs a robust and progressive governance system moving forward that gives community members more opportunities to become involved and directly influence the Gnosis ecosystem.

Our goal is to support it along its journey towards such a state through objective, long-term, and value-added decision-making. We believe our team has the knowledge, trust, and alignment to contribute meaningfully to GnosisDAO’s growth.

As delegates to the GnosisDAO, we commit to voting independently and impartially and sharing our rationale and decision-making process with the wider GnosisDAO community. Our governance team is organised in several verticals with protocol-specific subject matter experts and taps our network of engineers, DeFi strategists, data/financial/quant analysts, and accountants to come up with the most informed decision. Discussion of our proposal research takes place frequently and before our internal voting process.

What we stand for

We believe in the world’s transition into trust-minimised, permissionless, and composable capital markets built on public networks and open-source software. DeFi will reshape the structure of modern finance, and we want to accelerate this by bridging both worlds. Check out our values to understand a bit more about our guiding and decision-making principles.

We’ve been inspired by this Gnosis’ creativity and dedication to building and maintaining structural tooling for the Ethereum ecosystem. Its commitment to core values like decentralisation, open-source collaboration, and community-driven decision-making is unparalleled.

That’s how important products like Safe, CoW, and Zodiac came to be and how we believe Gnosis Chain will become an infrastructural piece of the Ethereum ecosystem in its quest for scalability.

As a GnosiDAO delegate and community member, we believe that these should be the main points of focus for us moving forward:

  • Developing the Gnosis Chain ecosystem by leveraging its credible neutrality and low fees to attract real-world use cases, e.g. RWAs; Payments;
  • Ensuring the security of the chain, as risk management is paramount to the establishment of the Gnosis Chain; and
  • Driving the decentralisation of the GnosisDAO’s governance model, strengthening its credible, neutral and community-driven decision-making process.

Our faith in the potential of the GnosisDAO is demonstrated by our fee structure under GIP-20: we’ve been paid in GNO, and we haven’t sold a single token since then. Instead, we’ve reinvested everything into providing liquidity and staking validators, as we’re committed to doing our part to support the growth and success of this ecosystem.

How to delegate

Using a Safe Multisig

  1. Navigate to https://snapshot.org/#/delegate/gnosis.eth and connect your Gnosis Safe Multisig using the Safe App for WalletConnect.
  2. Enter karpatkey’s governance ENS address (governance.karpatkey.eth) and click the Confirm button.

Using an EOA

  1. Navigate to https://snapshot.org/#/delegate/gnosis.eth and connect your wallet.
  2. Enter karpatkey’s governance ENS address (governance.karpatkey.eth) and click the Confirm button.
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