Hello Marinade DAO,
In a recent governance proposal, we voted to initiate the migration of our governance setup to Realms. This first vote brought all the contracts’ authorities (except the main liquid staking contract) to be handled transparently on Realms by the Council and clarified the DAO structure.
This proposal is the follow-up that suggests migrating the rest of our governance infrastructure to Realms. These changes would include:
- Deprecating the Chef NFTs and Tribeca and offering a way to migrate your locked MNDE to Realms, conserving your voting power. The unlock time would stay the same.
- Locking MNDE to Realms would become the only way to benefit from MNDE’s utility.
- The option to vote with MNDE on liquidity gauges would disappear for now.
- The option to vote with MNDE on validators would still exist, but would happen through the Marinade app.
- Giving full control to MNDE holders over Marinade’s treasury
What is the rationale behind the proposal?
Moving to Realms is a task that Marinade DAO started quite a long time ago. Most of the reasoning can be found in this thread and in this article.
To summarize, while Tribeca appeared to be the best governance system for Marinade’s needs at the time, the ecosystem converged and evolved around Realms (SPL-governance). Moving to Realms to benefit from this tooling, innovation, and shared ownership of the governance system instead of continuing with Tribeca is the most reasonable and future-proof decision.
Chef NFTs: Moving from Tribeca to Realms is already a complex migration, but conserving the Chef NFTs would mean that Marinade cannot, once again, benefit from the existing tooling and plugins used by all the other DAOs on Solana. Marinade would have to re-write and copy existing tooling just to make it work with NFTs, instead of plain locked MNDE. This would be a waste of time and resources that would harm Marinade in the long run.
While the NFTs were an interesting experiment to drive governance participation and interest, the conclusion today would be that their existence brings an added complexity to governance, both in terms of code and in terms of user experience. Marketplaces and dashboards have also struggled to properly display the locked tokens component sufficiently.
As of today, it is hard to believe that the Chef NFTs bring additional value to Marinade governance, and this is why I would like the DAO to part with them during this final phase of the migration.
Moving to Realms also prevents us from keeping the gauges mechanic existing on Tribeca. Nonetheless, directing stake with MNDE can now easily be done through the same mechanism as Directed stake. This means that this MNDE utility can be fully conserved during the migration, and MNDE will still allow holders to direct the same % of the stakepool (20%).
What is the expected positive impact of this change?
After this final phase of the migration, Marinade’s governance will be fully migrated to Realms:
- MNDE holders will have real ownership of the Marinade treasury. They’ll be responsible to unlock budgets to be used to grow the protocol.
- Thanks to Realms, MNDE holders will be able to directly create instructions that impact the treasury, or later in the future, the different Marinade programs. We believe that a DAO must strive towards token holders having true ownership over the funds and the contracts.
- Realms will also bring additional transparency and clarity to what’s happening at the governance level. You can already see this in action on the Realms DAO wallet page.
- Marinade will be able to fully benefit from all the tooling built on top of Realms (alerts, new plugins, delegation system, xNFTs/Saga dApps, etc.)
- This also means that Marinade will be able to benefit from the veMNDE locking system, and add support for variable lock times, such as giving more voting power to those who lock longer in the future.
- Marinade will be able to distribute funds transparently, both externally and to contributors. Realms comes with tooling to handle grants that the grant committee can use.
- Tribeca can be fully deprecated.
Any other considerations?
- Marinade’s council has plans regarding the liquidity incentives which will be communicated separately. The absence of a gauge system in Realms will not be a blocker regarding this topic.
- Chef NFTs will be burnt at migration. We’d encourage people to save their favorite as an image, but this migration would mark a clear cut towards the new system.
- The migration would stay available long enough to not lock out any Chef NFT holder from accessing his MNDE, even in a distant future.
- Moving to Realms will allow Marinade’s governance to evolve and improve and is a necessary step toward becoming a decentralized autonomous organization.
I know that parting with NFTs is a big decision but I truly believe that it’s the best one for Marinade DAO going forward, and shouldn’t impact Marinade’s ability to provide value to the Solana NFT protocols and community. Please share your opinion and/or questions before we can put this proposal to an on-chain vote and decide together!
