Hello fellow Chefs,
as the Marinade DAO enters the final stage of the DAO infrastructure migration to Realms, it felt like the DAO could benefit from a set of guiding principles for governance.
Having a Constitution laying down the shared goals for the DAO will create alignment between Marinade holders, governors, and the team.
I propose this version below for starters and would like your feedback. It touches on product focus, delegation strategy, control separation, fee usage, and MNDE distribution goals.
Marinade DAO constitution
The Marinade DAO constitution is a set of binding rules that determine what governance actions are legitimate for the DAO.
1. The Marinade DAO builds a censorship-resistant layer of Solana
The DAO builds the risk-management infrastructure to provide improved security and capital efficiency for the Solana network and the users through SOL liquid staking. Marinade governance will support development connected to the censorship resistance and liveness topic. It will support the ecosystem to build on top of Marinade but will not pursue building its second-layer DeFi primitives such as lending protocols, stablecoin, DEX, options, etc.
Examples
Permissible: Marinade governance may decide to fund the research to implement slashing on Solana.
Not Permissible: Marinade governance should not fund building its lending protocol since that does not directly support the goal of building a censorship-resistant layer of Solana.
2. Transparent and principled delegation strategy
To maintain Solana robust and censorship-resistant, the DAO understands the risks and responsibilities of governing the stake and securing the network. Marinade aims to delegate to validators that demonstrate good long-term performance and are decentralized from multiple factors. Marinade governance should support initiatives to make the delegation strategy accessible and predictable and allow the ecosystem to form a consensus on how to delegate staked SOL responsibly
Examples
Permissible: Marinade governance may decrease the control of the algorithmic strategy at the expense of the mSOL voting strategy to counter-balance the rigid data-driven strategy with the human factor—and invite the factual liquidity owners for collective risk management.
Not Permissible: Marinade governance must not remove the performance-based algorithmic strategy as it goes against the network decentralization goals.
3. Separation of powers
To allow flexibility and predictability, the critical system parts are owned by the Marinade governance, and the operational control and funding are granted to the core team.
- Marinade Governance (MNDE token holders + ecosystem council): main program upgrade, MNDE treasury
- Marinade Core Team (team council): main program params, DAO program, fees
Examples
Permissible: Marinade governance may grant and transfer part of the MNDE treasury to the Marinade Core Team to further develop the protocol and achieve the goals set and communicated by the team.
Not Permissible: Marinade governance must not transfer the MNDE treasury ownership to the Marinade Core Team.
4. Fees usage
The primary usage of fees is to fund the team operations and further protocol development. The excess of fees accumulated is governed and decided by the DAO.
Examples
Permissible: Marinade governance may decide on excess profit accumulated by the protocol.
Not Permissible: Marinade governance must not direct all protocol fees for non-protocol development purposes unless there is a reasonable reserve to fund the operations.
5. MNDE distribution goals
The incentives should be aligned with the objectives of the DAO. Starting with the fair launch, the Marinade governance plans to keep continuity in its objective for the DAO ownership to be well-spread in the ecosystem to benefit all the actors powered by secure Solana.
Examples
Permissible: Marinade governance may decide to launch MNDE grant program that would reward all Solana projects based on their contribution to the new staked SOL in Marinade.
Not Permissible: Marinade governance must refrain from using the funds to support projects that conflict with the goals of Marinade.
6. Amendments to this constitution by majority vote
Any change may be made to this constitution only by a two-thirds majority and at least 1% of all tokens participating.