Hi ZK Nation,
My name is Alex, and I am a Lead Engineer at ScopeLift. We are a smart contract engineering firm with a special focus on helping DAOs roll out on-chain governance features and enhancements. Our clients include include Uniswap, Optimism, Tally, Wormhole, Compound, and others.
ZK Nation Contributions
- Governance Contracts: We developed the initial ZK token and the governance contracts for the GovOps, Token and Protocol governors.
- Capped Minters: We developed the V1 and V2 of the capped minter contract to help facilitate the TPP process.
- RSS Feed: We built a governance RSS feed to provide a unified place to follow different actions across all three governors.
Governance Design and TPPs
We believe the technical design of governance should be as simple as possible while leveraging established best practices and standards. Additional complexity increases the difficulty for non-technical delegates to understand the system and act in the best interest of the DAO. This is why ZK Nation has three separate governors—each with specific features, safe-guards and a standard flow—rather than a single non-standard, complicated governor. We applied the same philosophy to capped minters for TPPs.
The capped minter contracts are a simple contract that allows ZK tokens to be minted up to a cap, without assumptions about how minting permissions are granted or executed. Whether tokens are minted based on a metric, through a trusted committee, or via a protocol like Hats or Hedgy is entirely up to the DAO. This flexibility ensures the DAO can choose the best tools for its needs as more token-based programs are introduced. We encourage protocols to build on top of capped minters to make the necessary trade-offs regarding monitoring, decentralization, and interoperability for each program.
Project Highlights
- UniStaker: A system that allows for the distribution of Uniswap protocol rewards to UNI token holders who stake their tokens and delegate their governance voting weight. Rewards are sourced from the permissionless collection of protocol fees. Here, we briefly introduce properties of the system
- MultiGov: MultiGov is a cross-chain governance system that extends traditional DAO governance across multiple blockchain networks. By leveraging Wormhole’s interoperability infrastructure, MultiGov enables seamless voting and proposal mechanisms across various chains.
- Tally Protocol: The Tally Protocol is the liquidity layer for restaking. The protocol solves the restaking capture problem by separating economic utility of DAO tokens from governance. The system is more efficient as DAOs can return value to token holders proportional to their revenue instead of being forced to attempt to outbid restaking protocols for their own security.
- Governance Upgrades and Rollouts: We upgraded governance contracts for Compound, PoolTogether, and Gitcoin among others.