[Signaling proposal] Governance Community Spend Guardrails

  1. Type:
    Signaling proposal

  2. Purpose: To create a Community Spend DAO

  3. Introduction: As a community, it is important to ensure that we have a way to control community spend funds to ensure that spends are impactful, proposers are accountable, and that each funded initiative meets the stated goals and objectives. However, there are also smaller scale spends that can be made cumbersome with such processes, and thus do not require checks and balances. Our solution is to create an optional Community Spend DAO, that the community can choose to invoke when spends are high or projects are multistep and critical.

  4. We propose the following structure:

The Community DAO:

The Community DAO would comprise 7 members: 2 Phi Labs employees, 1 Foundation member, 2 validators and 2 Archway ecosystem developers. Its sole purpose would be to execute the will of the community, as agreed upon through on-chain governance.

Utilization of the DAO would be as follows:

When a Community Spend proposal requests an amount that the community decides is too high to give in one payment without monitoring, they can request the spend proposal be monitored and executed by the DAO. The requester(s) must then outline, with the community, the following:

A. How many tranches the spend amount will be put into

B. The criteria that must be met for the release of each tranche

C. The timeline of expected tranche distribution

D. What should happen if the proposers fail to meet the criteria
- Should they be given another opportunity?
- Should the funds be returned to the community pool?
- Could another group take over the project and inherit the rest of the distribution?

E. Whether or not the DAO should account for value fluctuations at the time of distribution

F. Whether or not amendment proposals should be pre-approved to be quickly put on chain in the case of discrepancies in price between the time of request and time of distribution

Once the community agrees upon the aforementioned points, and the proposal is put on chain, the proposers must input the DAO’s wallet address as the receiving wallet address.

In the case the DAO does not abide by the decisions taken by the community, the member(s) in violation of their mandate will be immediately removed, and the community will vote in replacing member(s). In the case the DAO as a whole acts against the interests of the community, all funds under custody should be sent back to the community pool and the DAO should be immediately dissolved.

The Proposal Template:

All proposals should adhere to a pattern that includes key elements in order to ensure the presentation of all necessary information and familiarity within the community.

Title: A brief and descriptive title.

Summary: Provide a brief, high-level overview of the proposal in either a single sentence or a bulleted list.

Authors: List the authors and contributors involved in writing the proposal.

Context/Motivation: This section should describe the “why” of this proposal, along with an overview of past events and the current situation related to this matter. What problem does it solve?

Abstract: The abstract is a multi-sentence (short paragraph) technical summary of the solution. It should be a concise and easily understandable version of the motivation and specification sections. Someone should be able to read only the abstract to grasp the essence of what this specification does. The abstract must include the scope of the proposal, how this solution effectively addresses the problems, and the benefits it brings to the Archway network.

Roadmap: In this section, you must set and describe the milestones, specifying how many there are. Each milestone should include a clear description, a timeline, and deliverables.

Financial: If you are seeking community funds, provide a detailed budget outlining general line items for how the money will be spent (approximately), based on the milestones mentioned in the roadmap. Depending on the number of milestones and the requested amount, ensure that the CS DAO multi-signature wallet is included.

Once the proposal has passed through the socialization, formalization, and implementation (On-chain voting) stages, the requested community funds for product development or services will not be fully granted upon approval by governance. Instead, only the first tranche will be granted, with defined exceptions. Please refer to the framing use cases for guidance.

To request the next tranche of funding, a project must publish a progress report, which the CS DAO should promptly review and either approve or deny based on established guidelines.

Approved projects that disagree with CS DAO activities may seek to override decisions by returning to the community within the next 3 days.

Proposal Type Specific Content: Any additional information that can be useful to address specifics, such as links to relevant documents, links to code repositories or examples, lists of multisig accounts, sponsors, etc.

Forum Discussion: Link to the forum discussion of the socialization process.

  1. Conclusions: The idea behind this DAO is to keep governance flexible, simple, and effective. Please leave feedback to see how this can be best achieved.
10 Likes

In full support of this proposal!

2 Likes

Since there are not any changes, suggestions or feedback in the last 6 days… We should talk about updating this proposal in governance in the next governance call.

3 Likes

I am in support of the proposal overall!

However, I would be interested to know what the community thinks about setting a general threshold for price fluctuations on all spend props rather than requiring the requester to determine that.

For example, If the price fluctuation is below 5% from submission to distribution, the original amount will be paid out. If it fluctuates more than that, an amendment would need to be made and submitted on-chain to adjust for the change.

3 Likes

We have to check the technical requirements to see in case of a +5% drop happens if we could get more funds directly from the community pool or if we’d have to submit another proposal as a “rebalance” of older props. Nevertheless, this would be a mechanism highly needed in the ecosystem and as far as a know it’s never been seen before in other chains.

1 Like

I see a lot of value in getting this established. Creating a consistent, structured procedure to create a proposal will make this process easier for all applicants.

3 Likes

Agreed! Let’s pick this up during the governance call tomorrow?

3 Likes

I’m glad to see this passed. I wish a lot of other communities implemented some community spend guardrails early in the L1 development.

Good move architects

2 Likes