‘Last month Gnosis DAO decided to close down Agave lending protocol.’
While it might be reasonable on financial terms it make me sad to see old valued projects disappear. But even more I wonder what Gnosis DAO is, if this comes to my attention only after the decision was made. Till now I thought: as an active community member, token holder and validator I might be part of Gnosis DAO. But seems I got this wrong. Or did I miss a place where these topics are being discussed? And if so, why do we need this forum?
thanks for raising this. I would say there are two answers here:
a) GnosisDAO vs Gnosis Ltd.
b) Governance of the DAO
First point a)
There is still a company: Gnosis Ltd. that still has its own independent budget and can make independent decisions. In this concrete case there was never a DAO vote to support Agave (other than the funds to help out with the hack) and in fact no DAO funds have been used to support the Agave team. Instead, they have been contracted from the Ltd.
Therefore, when we (Ltd., Agave team, Karpatkey) discussed wether it would make sense to continue that we did not went through a DAO process.
So I think the tweet should have said Gnosis Ltd. instead of Gnosis DAO. That being said - regardless it would have been worth to lay out reasoning and open up a discussion here in the forum.
b) I think DAO governance is not in the greatest state. How I would describe the state currently: proposals that come from the outside (while sometimes low quality) often don’t get any real attention even if interesting. What is missing here IMO is some tiered approach. Asking a lot of people (GNO holder) to pay attention to some (maybe random) forum post is already a relatively bis ask. So ideally there was some path where a few people (that have already some merits in the DAO) have a role of vetting new proposals and those could bring the proposal into a further stage. Also - Gnosis deals with so many different topics that it might make sense to have categories for proposals to make sure the right people can pay attention.
On the other hand - proposals that come from the “inside” (from people working full time on or around Gnosis) often are almost decided already once they hit the forum. Not sure how to fix that other than encouraging everyone to post ideas as early as possible into the forum.
I know @auryn_macmillan and Gnosis guild also had some ideas and interest in improving GnosisDAO governance - would be curious to hear your suggestions!
Do I understand correctly that Gnosis Ltd and all its assets (such as GNO vesting, for example) fall under Gnosis DAO, but Gnosis Ltd still operates independently? Is that correct?
no, Gnosis Ltd. does not fall under control of GnosisDAO. GnosisLtd. made a decision ~2 years ago to give ~90% of its assets (mainly ETH and GNO) to GnosisDAO but the remaining ones remain in control of Ltd.
I’m a bit confused by this response. Over a year ago, I asked on the GnosisDAO Discord (now closed) about this very issue and was told that yes, Gnosis Ltd falls under GnosisDAO. I can’t access the history there, but I’m 100% sure. It was one of the key pieces of information that led me to start buying GNO. If I remember correctly, Stefan George was the one who responded to me.
Ofc the differentiation of Gnosis Ltd and DAO is important, and having Karpatkey not only as a treasury manager of the DAO, but also as a large liquidity and incentive provider for the gnosischain ecosystem makes it even more complex to understand it from the outside.
And although I fully understand that work is going on much more straight forward if discussions between these parties aren’t public I am not sure if it’s a good decision long term, at least not if it’s a goal to attract ppl to join the ecosystem/community.
Imho this forum would attract much more attention if more topics that are decided internally by the mentioned parties above would have been discussed here before. But ofc it’s more work. As I said before (An Open Letter to the Gnosis Community - #12 by refri) it would be great to have a sign if this is really wanted, in this case, I am sure, we will get a great discussion about how to achieve this.
A little lower hanging fruit would be to have some person familiar about the internals posting regularly (on whatever channel, either Telegram, Discord or even here) about all topics that might be relevant to the community and answering questions seriously with internal knowledge (like @Mojmir did so well at the xDAI Stake Telegram). This would at least involve the community a little bit more and maybe lead to some more activity.
This is interesting, we think the role of governance facilitators could be useful in a case like this. The Governance Facilitator could be a neutral person, working group, or institution whose goal is to help GnosisDAO and Gnosis Ltd work efficiently toward the success of the Gnosis Chain. Some of the facilitator’s roles fit perfectly with what you mention, such as advising members in formulating proposals for the forum, drafting and publishing reports each month on the most relevant activities and news of the GnosisDAO that members should be aware of, supervising the correct following of governance flows and processes or moderating and maintaining the integrity of the governance forum. This has already been applied in the Maker and Decentraland DAOs.
Now, this facilitator will require a framework from which to draw the necessary processes to streamline internal governance and provide support to both internal and external collaborators. We are aware that there is a governance process but it seems that it’s not working as intended. At SEEDLatam, we believe that an updated framework is needed to provide a space for these actors and we are open to exploring ideas to optimize the experience for readers, reviewers, and proposers.
This is a big question that I think we’d need to put some more dedicated time toward to answer well.
But the immediate thing I’d like to do is get the split and transitive delegation work that we’ve been working on into the Gnosis DAO (GIP-77) and then coordinate campaign to encourage GNO holders to set their delegations.
Beyond that, my intuition is that it’s likely not clear to most people what things are in scope for governance; what things the GnosisDAO actually has control over. Partially because of the breadth of Gnosis as an ecosystem and partially because most decision making has been explicitly or implicitly delegated to Gnosis Ltd (or other entities in the Gnosis ecosystem).
To be clear, delegating this kind of decision making isn’t necessarily a bad thing (delegation is necessary to operate efficiently), so long as it’s a conscious decision by the DAO, and one that it can change later.
Perhaps a good first step, that would be beneficial to the community, is to clearly disambiguate GnosisDAO and Gnosis Ltd, and to clearly define the relationship and responsibilities between the two (or more) entities.
Thanks for all of your great suggestions @refri. A few thoughts -
The GnosisDAO Governance Summary that goes out biweekly via email and lives here is an attempt to routinely update the community about governance. We also post the summary on Discord. To be honest, we don’t field that many questions about governance on Discord or TG but when they do come up, Mert, Manuel and myself are hopefully providing fruitful answers.
That said, I think there’s a lot more we could do (we being community mods) to bring more transparency from the DAO side. Do you think a DAO Quarterly Report would achieve this? Or a monthly governance roundup that’s posted here on the forum? I think it would be a step in the right direction and a way to address this gap between internal ops and the Gnosis community.
As @auryn_macmillan mentioned, GIP-77 is nearing completion and then it will head to Snapshot. The delegate system has some exciting and unique features. We will make a formal Call for Delegates similar the ENS campaign. @SEEDLatam would you be interested in forming a working group together to get the word out about the GnosisDAO call for stewards?
I also agree that clearly defining the scope for GnosisDAO governance would help to address any confusion regarding what the DAO has control over. Currently, GIPs fall under the ‘meta’ or ‘funding’ category. ‘Meta’ being procedural treasury management proposals like GIP-49, or GIPs about client diversity for Gnosis Chain. GIPs falling under the ‘funding’ category are external teams, often value aligned, who are seeking funding from the DAO.
Community members also post topics to provoke discussion (obviously like this one :)) and, for the most part, there’s not too much engagement. Beyond sending out a biweekly governance summary, I’m wondering how we can re-imagine things to engage each other more. GIP-77 is an attempt to address voter apathy and improve governance generally. As a community member and contributor of the DAO, I’m eager to work on solutions and collectively steward the forum.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking us into account @john_szczepaniak!
Count us in!, it should serve as a starting point, as we believe that the most challenging aspect is to encourage GNO holders to establish their delegations and promote active participation in the DAO. We are eager to connect and look forward to someone getting in touch to form the working group.
We support the call for a more defined scope for governance. Although it is understood that Gnosis Ltd does not behave like or is a foundation, clarity is crucial and needs to be well-understood so that the community can actively contribute to discussions that matter and the whole structure can be more efficient.
We share your ideas for Gnosis and from our experience, we believe that a well-defined DAO constitution is essential for laying the foundations, clearly outlining the roles, responsibilities, delegations, decision-making processes of GnosisDAO. Some examples include Arbitrum,Optimism, Maker (1, 2), ConnextDAO.
Agave frontend is also hosted on IPFS, it means that it’s gonna take long enough (probably a few years) for other alternatives for sDAI to emerge. Agave - Liquidity Protocol
But yeah, the agave.finance domain will most probably go down sooner than the IPFS instance.
Thanks @john_szczepaniak, for sure I am enjoying the biweekly newsletters, this part and many other things are very well done by the comms team. And also all the communication related to the gnosischain tech and what is of interest for a validator works very well as I see it.
What imho can be improved is the involvement of the community (which in part can also be regarded as members of the DAO) in shaping the gc ecosystem. To detail this is hard as I don’t know who plays which role (Gnosis DAO, Gnosis Ltd, Karpatkey) and decide which part on their own (or together after internal discussion).
Just an example where I felt left behind: didn’t noticed the bribing for staking crv to 3pool some time ago (I staked for 3pool soon after inception of the pool on gc and just by chance discovered I can claim some gno for this).
Also other activities like how veBAL voting is used is hard to follow up, e.g. in the latest treasury report it is stated: ‘Locked B-80BAL-20WETH for veBAL and AURA to increase and maintain the DAO’s voting power and voted for Gnosis Chain pools on Balancer and Aura’. Who decides on which pools are voted? Most likely Karpatkey is deciding this, but I doubt they do it without some communication with either ppl from GnosisDAO and/or GnosisLtd.
In general, I would say: As long as DAO funds are used for shaping the ecosystem the details could be discussed in public.
Imho GIP-77 isn’t bad, but would be even more helpful if we would have a larger community here that likes to delegate. I would assume if more ‘insider’ topics are brought up here before decision is made this will attract people to join. Also it could be beneficial to see some more participation from insiders regarding some posts here that have been left without the notice they deserve. E.g. this or this (just my personal choice).
edit:
regarding
To me this seems less important, follow up reports are nice but it wont trigger participation (just consumption). Trying to involve ppl on matters early on is imho better suited to get more participation.
In terms of visibility and engagement on forum posts, do you find that conversations are easy to find and read? I think we need a, ‘front page’ that lists all recent posts so that people can easily discover them. For example, I think that the Safe forum achieves this with their UX. https://forum.safe.global/
I don’t have any problems reading through this forum as it is right now, but I agree that it might become a problem if it will be more crowded. So either a more flexible UI (like the one you linked) can be helpful, or we use another format (like our discord) for the discussions I miss, and use this only for topics shortly before a decision and maybe a vote will take place.
I am having a hard time understanding how $53M of DAI staked in Maker via Agave to create sDAI is about to have no web-UI. Is there really no alternative to the Agave UI?
Hey - sDAI is actually integrated into CoW Swap! So when swapping sDAI <> xDAI within Cow Swap you’re actually doing so directly with the sDAI contract or even splitting into liquidity pools if you get a better price there!
The Agave UI will still be around for a decent amount of time, plus I know of a few UIs in the works about to be released soon.
Hi @gno-investor Maybe the confusion arises because Gnosis Ltd. can be funded by GnosisDAO (while remaining an independent entity)?
I found this information in the blog post where the launch of GnosisDAO is described: Announcing GnosisDAO. GnosisDAO is the prediction… | by Gnosis | Medium
See the relevant part highlighted on attached screenshot.
