• General
  • Request for Comment: Allocate OHM To Create a Governance Team

TL;DR:

  • The current DAO Structure is full of Conflicts of Interests
  • The Community Should not be the most important decision-maker. (even though it is the most important stakeholder)
  • Allocate OHM to create a Governance team with the goal of creating and proposing governance models to the community, implementing, and sustaining them.

The DAO is a relatively new concept with a free-floating definition. Its popularity has been increasing in 2021, and will likely continue being an important topic in the crypto space in 2022. As the popularity grows, naturally, problems arise that need to be addressed rather sooner than later. How can we structure the DAO so that we can make decisions productively without giving up on decentralisation? How can we make sure that a few players do not get a majority of the votes and steer the project in a direction that they want it to be?

I would like to argue that we (the community), should not be the most active decision-maker in the DAO. Yes, we are the most important stakeholder. However, by far not 100% has either the time to research or the capability to understand the full processes in Olympus. Besides that, the motivation between the community and the DAO are often not aligned. Let's imagine that Apple becomes a DAO and uses the same governance model as Olympus uses today. They create a vote about the pricing of their new iPhone 14, the community would probably want a cheaper phone but the Apple DAO might think that a higher price point would be healthier for the company. The community of Apple outnumbers the DAO by far, so if the vote is democratic, the price of the iPhone 14 should be lower. The current model of the DAO is full of conflicts of interest (and it is not democratic, nor is it a meritocracy).

This year, OlympusDAO went from a market cap of $38m in March, to a 2.5bln market cap in December. If we expect growth to continue in 2022 and the following years, then structuring the DAO governance model should be one of the highest priorities.

Olympus could become the decentralised reserve currency of DeFi, but only if we can find the right governance structure.

Due to the importance of this topic, I would like Olympus to allocate X amount of OHM to establish a Governance team with the goal of creating and proposing governance models to the community, implementing them, and sustaining them.

I am curious to hear everyones thoughts.

Some great reads:

thank you @ivelin117 for sharing <3

Sushi DAO Restructure Proposal

DAO's & Democracy Voting Mechanisms

DAO's Social Networks that can Rewire the World

Informal Poll

This poll has ended.

I would argue there are already multiple areas where the community has delegated decision making responsibility to the DAO. Treasury management, Olympus pro partnerships and incubator partnerships to name a few. I think this demonstrates that the community recognises the time and energy required to make informed decisions and is happy to delegate that responsibility to dedicated ohmies in the DAO.

The recent vote in favour of reward rate drop also demonstrates ohmies value long-term health over short term gain. I don't believe ohmies would have voted for this if they weren't aligned with the views of the DAO - particularly the policy team in this case.

For that reason I don't think there is an urgent need to reform our governance and so I dont think the DAO should be funding a gov working group.

That said, I agree there is value in keeping track of governance practises and we should be open to change if needs be, I just don't think we are there now.

    kleb Thank you for your thoughtful response!

    Are the votes really representing the community though? The reward rate proposal just had 931 votes. If you scroll down in the snapshot you will also see that the amount of 'against' votes increase as the amount of OHM used for the vote gets lower.

    In the discord, I responded to lots of ohmies that were against the reward reduction until they were shown the positive effect it would have on the price action.

    Thirdly, I want to emphasise the importance of true decentralisation of the Olympus protocol. I think we can agree that the problem with the reserve currencies in TradFi is the centralised governance. Therefore, solving this issue should be of high importance in the DAO. It is, in my opinion, the biggest value proposition Olympus has to offer.

    I do not think it is possible to completely change the governance structure ASAP. I just want to vouch for a team that is constantly trying to explore the possibilities of this topic. If that team would find a solution within 6 months, great. If the team would find a solution after 2 years, also great.

    Curious to hear your thoughts on this.

    edit: If a governance team would be established, one of their activities could be improving the turnout rate for example.

      Yella I think this is an important topic to consider. In order to scale the DAO we need a more formal, trustless and automated system that scales.

      Implementing Voting Delegation along with Quadratic Voting would allow:

      1. Stakeholders to choose who they trust to participate in day-to-day decision making on their behalf.
      2. Active ohmies with smaller ownership stake to have a voice in the DAO.
      3. Motivate new ohmies to hodl and delegate, because their votes matter.
      4. Automated reporting on participation, results and sentiment for each proposal.
      5. Policy team to generate reports from on-chain data instead of composing informal summaries that can be error prone and are hard to verify for DAO members.
      6. OHM to elevate its status in the web3 community as a thought leader. DAO governance is in its early days. Blogging and conference workshops on practical OHM's application of DAO governance will be hot topics for awhile.
      7. OHM to productize its DAO management tools and turn them into sources of revenue for future subDAOs, partners and next-gen web3 projects.

      I'm a big fan of this idea and would be happy to put my hand up for it, having done a fair bit of this kind of thing in the past.

      Agreed as far as the points that Ivelin laid out above as it feels like there are a bunch of areas to work on/look for improvements in here and any opportunity for Olympus to become more of a thought leader in this space is important. Continuous systems and process improvement should be a core component of everything the DAO does and it can be very hard to worry about doing that alongside all of the current focus areas the different teams have at this stage.

      Ensuring that all Ohmies have a voice that is both heard and that means something in context of the DAO's management and decision-making processes is of primary importance to the DAO's long-term success and the Governance team should have a core driver around not only growth in participation but also quality.

      On another level, having been involved in some other discussions in different places over the past few days I would suggest that an Advisory/organisational effectiveness role for the Governance team would be important. To be specific, in context of other discussions around human resources / management structure / etc - I don't necessarily believe that there is a need for a 'HR' team, however I do believe that there is a need for a cross-functional team focused on the DAO's effectiveness (considering this in a 'servant' capacity to the rest of the teams rather than as anything intrinsically structurally hierarchical). A function of this may be to look at further ways of fostering / creating matrix structures for the DAO (since I believe that the DAO has tended towards a more normalised silo structure at this stage).

      All good stuff and worth considering.

      Yella Interesting. Your initial post gave me the impression you viewed the community as having too much power vs the DAO. This I disagree with but I do see the merits in exploring governance options.

      Perhaps this could exist as a working group within one of the existing departments in the DAO? I'll tag the operations team in discord to give this post a read and offer some comments.

        The Devs and Whales already have all the power in the Dao voting by simple sheer numbers of owned Ohm. Just go look at votes and you will see almost any Dev or Whale could overrule the entire midsize and small size ownership of ohmies.

        I propose a slight difference.

        Wallets under 500 Ohm should be able to vote on 4 people from within their ownership size. These four people vote as well with at least 2 of them needing to agree to the proposal of devs and whales and it would pass.

        Big enough to matter if its a terrible idea for smaller investors but easy enough to meet for normal everyday type proposals.

        kleb Maybe I have not explained myself correctly (im not native and sometimes find it hard to put my thoughts into words). I believe the community should have the most power. However, I believe the current governance system is not only ineffective, but it is also not democratic. I personally can imagine a governance model where the community has some kind of veto-right while the DAO can work and implement things effectively.

        This brings me to one of my biggest points though, I dont have a f clue how to implement a new governance model. And to this day, I think all DAO's are stuck on this topic. Therefore I think we need a separate team that is actively researching and brainstorming on this topioc.

        Reserve currencies are failing due to centralised governance. I am wondering what Olympus truly is if there is no proper governance model. How can we become the reserve currency of DeFi and beyond if we are effectively doing close to the same as the federal reserve? Governance should be a core part in the DAO, that's why I am vouching for a team that can establish and maintain a democratic protocol.

        I understood the core of your earlier point and still support it.

        I believe that the governance team / function you propose makes sense alongside the current Operations group, given a logical split between 'current' structure / operational process / procedures etc and 'new' or future governance innovation. It's a logical split as I said as it is additive to the current structure.

        7 days later

        I am for a governance team that does research and makes recommendations. They are probably also going to be tasked with developing the ethical mission of this coin ecosystem. OHM has a stated reason for existence as a reserve currency which will probably evolve in a variety of directions, but all of this is technical or functional direction. Somewhere along the road, and sooner rather than later, the OHM community must decide what principles they want the community to stand for: who do we fund (anyone with money, or a 'good cause'?), who do we partner with, are we just here to make 'shareholders' rich or are we out to build a better world (with immediate purposeful actions, not just 'crypto makes the world better'). I have my preferences about these questions, but we need an ethical framework as well as an operational framework. There should be ample guidance from various for-profits and non-profits to arrive at an agreeable mix of capitalism and ethical behavior. Having said all this, I believe a governance team, like a board of trustees, is probably necessary for the appropriate focus and diligence, but strictly in an advisory role. This makes the system efficient, but retains the power at the level of the common man. Delegated representation/voting, on the other hand, sounds good, but always ends up concentrating power in too few hands, often with a lack of transparency or misrepresentation.

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