Governance compendium
Contents
- Sources
- Against on chain governance
- Projects working in blockchain governance
- Mechanism design
- Liberal Radicalism
Legalese: this is not necessarily an endorsement of any of the sources in this compendium.
- blog post from Vlad. Snippets: "On-chain governance makes node operator participation in governance completely unnecessary." However, node operator participation is necessary for the current protocol. Thus, changing to on-chain governance is very risky. "Unless there are governance processes that get Sybil-resistant input from node operators, on-chain governance therefore always has the potential to disenfranchise node operators (and users) of the blockchain." Vlad's reply to a comment to this post.
- Vitalik's post on plutocracy
- Democracy Earth: it is "an open source and decentralized democratic governance protocol for any kind of organization. It "uses proof of identity for sybil resistance via blockchain birth certificates, proof of attention, quadratic voting and liquid democracy; governance platform for an organization of any size).
- DAOStack: DAOStack is a community merit-based governance system and a new form of human association: the DAO. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are open, self-organized networks coordinated by crypto-economic incentives and self-executing code. We believe that DAOs will impact every territory of life and will jumpstart the evolution of society toward a more cooperative and sustainable future.
- Aragon:
Aragon is a project that aims to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of organizational structures by using blockchain technology. We want to empower people across the world to easily and securely manage their organizations. We provide the tools for anyone to become an entrepreneur and run their own organization, to take control of their own lives
By making it possible for everyone in the world to organize, we are enabling a borderless, permissionless and more efficient creation of value
- EthSignals.org – Working group on improving Ethereum Governance with better signalling. Support the tennagraph.com – dapp for stances collection around EIPs.
While the following projects do not have blockchain governance as a mission, they do relate to governance or deliberately use or plan to use governance mechanisms:
- Maker DAO a stablecoin that uses a utility and governance volatile MKR token, for holders to use in governing the DAI stable coin
- Havven: another stablecoin that involves issuing tokens against a distributed collateral pool. James Ray's opinion: this seems simpler than DAI, while also intuitively seeming to be more desirable. See e.g. this Twitter thread for a related proposal to issue a token against a distributed pool of ethical assets, which should result in less downside volatility and more upside volatility or potential for growth.
- Pocket Network. A decentralized blockchain which incentivizes running a full node and relaying transactions, supporting connecting to blockchains. See also https://ethresear.ch/t/incentivizing-full-state-nodes-as-an-api-service/2835/1, which has a link to their white paper.
Infographic: https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/1014882947781087233
It's important to try to match rewards in protocol as closely as possible with the true utility provided, which isn't done well with a volatile cryptocurrency. Protocol participants have external incentives such as capital costs.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656
An alternative societal funding mechanism to capitalism and representative democracy that provides (near) optimal funding provision of public goods. Related to governance because governance is often concerned with allocating a budget.