What worked, what didn't – Best (DAO) practices

General
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Hoping to continue the Discussion from the ZKsync Delegate Call today (October 29)

What worked, what didn’t

In our latest Delegate call, @rafa invited us to share our experiences with other DAOs specifically by sharing notable governance practices and proposals that could be applied to ZKsync. This initiative aims to uncover and highlight strategies we might adopt—or avoid—to strengthen our governance model and enhance the ZKsync chain and the ecosystem as a whole.

I’ve started this thread to serve as a growing resource and a shared knowledge base of DAO strategies. We should share both successful and unsuccessful strategies from other DAOs, that can help guide our own governance efforts. By pooling our collective knowledge, we can explore innovative ideas, proposals, governance mechanics, and best practices that have proven beneficial in other DAOs, while also identifying bad ones and avoiding them.

To kick off the discussion I’ll share the proposal Rafa mentioned during our call and add two of my own that I find particularly interesting.

1. Metadata with daoURI (Arbitrum)

The first interesting proposal mentioned on the call was Arbitrum’s proposal for controlling the Metadata with daoURI.

[An EIP-4824 powered daoURI for Arbitrum DAO]: We propose that the Arbitrum DAO takes control of its metadata by publishing a daoURI onchain. The daoURI, following EIP-4824, will create a single source of truth on the DAO, that cannot be altered by external agencies, is fully manageable via governance, bringing helpful context on the DAO onchain. This will be helpful for newcomers, tooling providers, and experienced governooors alike.

2. Delegate participation (ENS)

I’m an active Delegate at ENS DAO. It’s worth mentioning that even though ENS is a protocol and not an L2 chain, it still managed to create one of the most vibrant ecosystem of builders and the strongest community of ENS advocates. Therefore, there’s a lot to learn from ENS.

One area worth mentioning is the ongoing effort within ENS DAO to improve decentralization and increase delegate participation. Here are two proposals from ENS DAO that I find particularly promising:

  1. [Governance Distribution Pilot program]: This proposal introduces a pilot program to grant ENS governance tokens to eligible DAO contributors who received payments like grants or bounties from official ENS DAO wallets for their work and/or contributions.

  2. [Multi-Delegate Contract]: The multi-delegate token contract is an innovative solution that enables token holders to manage their voting power within DAOs more effectively. It allows token holders to assign and reallocate their voting rights to various (more than one) delegates at any time, creating a more dynamic and distributed voting system.

Since they haven’t been activated yet, it’s too soon to assess the full impact of these proposals, but I believe they are noteworthy and worth watching.

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Call to Action

Let’s build a valuable resource for ZKsync DAO together! Share your insights, experiences, and successful governance strategies and proposals from other DAOs in this thread.

I look forward to the ideas, suggestions, and insights that other delegates will share here, and I’m optimistic that this thread will host valuable discussions for ZKsync’s growth.

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Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and ideas @cap ! A few follow up questions to the items you mention - just trying to provoke thoughts, don’t feel pressure to answer / have the answer.

I didn’t see any possible downsides/trade-offs mentioned in the proposal. Curious if there are any you have thouhgt about/heard discussed in other circles?

Thoughts on how to turn this into a token mechanic?

Also known as “partial delegation” - is a hot topic in the governance space. As delegation happens at the token level (impacts token contract), this would involve upgrading the ZK token contract.

Given the clear improvement to the general governance experience, the Gov Team is already thinking about how this could be enabled for ZKsync Governance. Curious if folks have thoughts or feelings to share on this initiative.

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This was the proposal that @rafa mentioned during the last Delegate call. I haven’t read it myself yet and I’m not sure the benefits it could bring ZKsync.

This is the one I want to keep my eye on and see what kind of results it brings for ENS. Not sure how it could work in an automated way, if that’s what you mean by ‘token mechanic’. As it currently is, it’s more of an initiative that retroactively rewards public goods and other builders that did something for ENS and have received funding/compensation from the DAO. Keeping an eye on this too.

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For the daoURI, what I found interesting was the adoption of metadata standards, facilitating composability across web3 applications. I think the main downside is: Is this something that should be done and governed at a global level? My gut reaction is that maybe the proposal could have gone farther into wider standards, not just the daoURI, but maybe extension and implementation of standards for other components. Maybe there is a part of proposal data that would benefit from extension and standardization – the conversations around differentiating between author and proposal sponsor come to mind in the template.

For the governance distribution pilot program, this reminds me Protocol Guild and token-curated registries of ecosystem participants. It’s a complex problem to solve: what rewards best support honest and thoughtful participation. Often incentives are used with a finite objective: bootstrap engagement (e.g. how TikTok paid top creators for a period during launch), deepen engagement (e.g. how Twitter/X is rewarding creators), or term-limited payments (e.g. elected officials). For Protocol Guild it’s distribution of donations, and, if we are to approach this question holistically, the question to me is: what exactly are ecosystems trying to incentivize?

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