HIP: 52
title: Change POH Governance
author: fnanni
status: Phase 1
created: 2022-07-05
conflicts with: None
Simple Summary
Turn governance into a board of DAOs with skin in the game. This HIP has 3 goals:
- get funding
- get important players in the Ethereum ecosystem more involved in the project
- make governance stronger
Abstract
Funding
Getting funds for the DAO has been difficult so far. The DAO currently holds 3.8M UBI and 46.48 WETH, which was sent during the initial UBI distribution and by Kleros in exchange for UBIs, respectively. It looks like Gitcoin grants have provided 72k USD at the time of writing. Although we will likely see more funds coming from gitcoin grants in the future, it is still a single, small source of funding that doesn’t directly increase adoption nor technical involvement in the project.
This HIP is intended to open a new channel for yearly funds, as each DAO member of the board will have to contribute 50k USD per year to POH. The hypothesis is that DAOs may be willing to join the board and contribute, given that they will participate in the governance to make POH successful according to their vision while their governance token will have an additional utility and could become more valuable.
Adoption
By including other DAOs in the POH governance and requiring funding, it’s expected that these DAO’s communities and dev teams will get more involved in the project and potentially build and promote ways of increasing adoption.
Governance
Although governance has been virtuous and good so far, it will likely weaken as POH grows. Sooner or later, a bigger democratic POH will give place to malicious or negligent, popular leaders who won’t have anything to lose by corrupting or weakening POH. This lack of skin in the game and alignment in incentives to make POH succeed is a threat to the DAO in the long term.
By diversifying governance decisions among multiple DAOs which have both strong interests in POH and skin in the game, the long term governance will have better chances of remaining solid. Moreover, I believe that it will get stronger as the board grows.
Motivation
Attract projects which have an interest in POH in order to get more funding and a stronger governance system with better incentives towards making POH succeed.
It seems that the community is currently focusing too much on UBI vs Kleros, but I believe we shouldn’t get into defensive and protectionist positions. Quite the opposite, we should try to cooperate and open the POH doors to the whole ecosystem.
Specification
Requirements for DAOs to join the board:
- Get registered in a curated list that ensures that the DAO governance is decentralized, not a scam and aligned with POH.
- Get the current board approval by simple majority vote.
- Contribute 50k USD to the POH governor per year. If the DAO provides valuable resources through other channels, they can be discounted from the 50k USD. If this is intended, it should be specified before the board approval vote.
- Make a one time contribution of 50k USD to UBI, either by buying and burning it, hodling it or sending it to the UBI governor.
Special considerations:
- UBI DAO. The UBI project has had great importance in the initial growth and adoption of POH. It was the first dapp integrated to POH and currently there is a dev team working on UBI v2. As UBI depends on a solid sybil resistant human registry to succeed, its interests are aligned with those of POH. For these reasons, the UBI DAO will join the board automatically without any of the above mentioned requirements.
- Kleros DAO. The Kleros cooperative and the DAO have also contributed tremendously to POH. Kleros has been working non stop for almost 3 years on the development of POH and POH v2. It has also provided technical support, paid for bots which subsidize submissions, provided funding to the POH DAO, incubated POH/UBI related projects, helped to submit HIPs to the governor, etc. Needless to say, PNK holders have an incentive to make POH a global success, as it would showcase the virtues of Kleros services. For these reasons, the Kleros DAO will join the board automatically without any of the above mentioned requirements.
- POH DAO. The members of the POH DAO have shown huge interest in improving and promoting the system as can be seen in social media, governance forums, github contributions, the HIPs proposed and voted so far, etc. It seems natural that it should have a place on the board without having to contribute anything to itself and therefore it will join the board automatically without any of the above mentioned requirements.
Each DAO will have 1 vote on the board. If the board has an even number of DAOs, then the POH DAO’s vote will count double.
All decisions will be decided by simple majority except for manual additions and removals to the registry, which should be decided by unanimous vote.
Implementation
(To be further defined for Phase 3)
- Change the snapshot strategy according to this HIP.
- Create a list in Curate to whitelist DAOs candidates to the board and define the policy of the list.