[mDAO proposal] Migrate to SPL-governance and ratify the Constitution and Code of Conduct

Governance
#1

Hello Marinade DAO,

As some of you already know, Marinade has planned to move its on-chain governance from Tribeca to SPL-Governance, which uses Realms. This forum proposal aims at obtaining community consensus to move our on-chain governance to this new setup, as well as ratifying together the Marinade’s Constitution as well as Marinade’s Code of Conduct, as they are stated in their respective forum posts.

What do you propose?

This proposal suggests:

  • Deprecating Tribeca in favor of Realms, effectively moving Marinade’s on-chain governance to an updated setup.
  • Ratifying Marinade’s Constitution, which would imply:
    • Moving the DAO treasury into the hands of MNDE holders, with Realms as a means of controlling the funds.
    • Allowing the Marinade’s contributors team to act on behalf of the DAO regarding the parameters of the pool and DAO programs, as well as the fees applied to Marinade’s products.
  • Ratifying Marinade’s Code of Conduct

What is the rationale behind the proposal?

For the last year, Marinade has been the sole DAO using Tribeca to manage its on-chain governance.

While choosing Tribeca initially made sense to benefit from a finalized governance system and the presence of gauges, continuing to use Tribeca makes less and less sense as Marinade would bury itself into being the only maintainer of this system, and would bear all the costs of improving it.

On the other hand, SPL-governance, a DAO system created and led by Solana, is becoming widely used by Solana DAOs and benefits from regular updates, as well as new plug-ins created either by Solana or teams using it.

Replicating this innovation and those updates on Tribeca, only for Marinade to be able to benefit from it would be a waste of time and resources. For this reason, we believe that Marinade should deprecate Tribeca and move to SPL governance, where any additional DAO tooling development (coming from Marinade or other teams) would benefit the wide Solana ecosystem.

Moving Marinade’s on-chain governance to SPL governance would also allow some interesting development in the tooling available for Marinade:

  • Along with a migration to SPL Governance, Marinade would introduce a new plugin allowing the delegation of voting power. This update would allow any MNDE holders to delegate their voting power to someone they trust or want to support.
  • One of the main factors in initially choosing Tribeca over SPL governance was the presence of gauges. Along with the migration, Marinade would bring a gauge mechanism to SPL governance to be able to conserve the MNDE utilities currently in place.
  • Moving to SPL governance will allow Marinade to give ownership of the MNDE treasury to MNDE holders, as treasury management is natively supported by Realms.
  • SPL governance should also bring more visibility and transparency to Marinade’s governance system overall.

I believe that this transition is also the perfect time for our entire community to agree on its constitution, and the code of conduct to respect when interacting with Marinade governance. For this reason, I suggest that the on-chain vote confirming our migration to SPL governance would also ratify both those documents, on-chain. The rules stated by those documents would be fixed and enforced going forward.

Following this change, and according to the Constitution, this is how the powers would be split in the Marinade DAO:

Marinade DAO (MNDE holders):

  • Control over the MNDE treasury
  • Control over the MNDE incentives through gauges
  • Control over a percentage of the stake through gauges

Marinade Council (4/7 multisig):

  • Control over Marinade’s contracts parameters and Delegation strategy parameters
  • Adding/removing liquidity incentives and validator gauges
  • Control over the protocol fees
  • Control over the Marketing budget

The grant committee would still conserve control over grant-related topics. Funds would be unlocked by Marinade’s Council on the committee’s requests.

The upgrade authority over Marinade’s main smart contract would still be held by the ecosystem multisig (6/13 multisig).

Over time, the goal will be to gradually delegate the powers held by Marinade’s Council to the mDAO.

What is the expected positive impact of this change?

This change would impact positively Marinade by:

  • Bringing transparency to its governance system
  • Allowing MNDE holders to have control over the treasury
  • Allowing Marinade to leverage an ever-growing DAO tooling ecosystem and benefit from its latest updates and innovations
  • Bringing delegation of voting power, allowing people to hold MNDE even if they don’t plan on participating in governance. Delegation of voting power also opens the room for a bribing system to be built on top, where MNDE holders could get rewarded in exchange of their voting power.
  • Conserving all of the current utilities of MNDE despite the migration.

This migration is also a net benefit for the Solana ecosystem as a whole, as Marinade would be able to build DAO tooling on top of SPL governance in an open-source fashion, which would benefit all the DAOs operating on Solana.

Any other considerations?

There are important considerations linked to this proposal. I’ll list them below:

  • Due to technical reasons, the gauges system would move from a “Set & Forget” approach to an approach where users need to revote every week.

    • We can see this change as an experiment on gauges participation.
    • It’s important to note that in this new governance system, you will be able to delegate your voting power to a “Crew Leader.” We may end up with increased participation in gauges, as voting power could be mostly delegated to a subset of MNDE holders actively participating in governance.
    • This change would not be definitive and depending on the results, Marinade’s team can decide to commit time and effort and/or offer a grant to make those new gauges evolve towards a “Set & Forget” approach

  • This proposal would give Marinade the green light to proceed with the migration, but the migration would only happen once Marinade’s contributors have finalized all the technical work needed to proceed with the migration.

  • This proposal would both green-light the migration to SPL governance and ratify the Constitution and the Code of Conduct. If you see amendments necessary in either of these documents, please raise them up on their respective Forum posts and try to obtain consensus on the needed modifications before this proposal is set to an on-chain vote.

  • As mentioned above, the delegation of voting power also opens the door for a bribing system to be built on top. This is nonetheless out of scope for the migration.

Thanks for reading, I’m keen on hearing your thoughts on this proposal :slight_smile:

3 Likes
[mDAO proposal] Final phase of the migration to Realms
#2

this seems very bad, maybe even blocking

2 Likes
#3

Agree with nope here. Not having Set & Forget seems like it should be a blocker.

2 Likes
#4

Fully support the migration from Tribeca to Realms.

I don’t feel as strongly as the others about the Set & Forget functionality of the gauges being an absolute blocker (particularly the LM gauges), but there’s no denying that this would increase friction for governance participants, so I understand the concern.

Before making a decision, I think it would be useful to know:

  1. Is there a reason why Marinade’s core contributors do not want to fully commit to building out the Set & Forget functionality from the onset? Also, should the core contributors decide to build this, what would the tentative timeline to completion look like?
  2. Is it to be assumed that creation of validator gauges would no longer be permissionless (ie would all new gauges - LM and validator - have to be greenlighted by the Marinade Council?)
2 Likes
#5

It would be the highest level of DAO, because one of the main principles is sharing the entity ownership. Great benefit for the MNDE stakers as well, as they could reward from voting on the initial decision-making process

2 Likes
#6

Hello mDAO,

As mentioned above by some people, the plan contained some details that wouldn’t have been for the best, like losing the “long-lasting” property of gauges. The team decided to take another look at the plan and modify it to reach a better final state. This updated plan will consist of two big steps:

Step 1: Marinade will move its multisigs to Realms (Operational & Treasury). All the voting for MNDE holders (gauges & proposals) will stay on Tribeca for the time being and all activities related to the treasury or the smart contracts parameters will be performed by the team and transparently visible on Realms.

Step 2: Voting on proposals and gauges will be ported to Realms and control over the treasury will be handed to MNDE holders. Tribeca will be deprecated when this is complete. This step will happen later as Marinade works on making it possible.

I’d like to modify the initial proposal above and reduce its scope. Here are the new suggested terms for this proposal:

  • This proposal is about ratifying the Code of Conduct and the Constitution together as a DAO.

  • This proposal would confirm Step 1 of the plan and invite Marinade to move its multisigs setup to Realms (Operational & Treasury). The treasury would also stay in the team’s control until Step 2. The upgrade authority of the main contract would stay on the ecosystem multisig for now.

    • After this first step, everyone will be able to see on Realms:
      • Any fund transfer signed by the Marinade Council
      • Any update to the parameters of our contracts (Stake pool, Unstake pool, etc.)
      • Addition/removal of Liquidity Mining gauges

  • The transfer of the treasury to MNDE holders would come at a later time. The rest of the migration, including deprecating Tribeca and moving the gauges and proposals to Realms, would also be done at a later time, as Marinade perfects the work needed for us to migrate there.

Following this change, and according to the Constitution, this is how the powers would be split in the Marinade DAO moving forward:

Marinade DAO (MNDE holders):

  • Power over the MNDE treasury (Still under the control of the team on Realms in this first step, to be moved to MNDE holders on Realms in the next step of the migration)
  • Power over the MNDE incentives through gauges (Done through Tribeca gauges for now, to be ported to Realms when possible)
  • Power over a percentage of the stake through gauges (Done through Tribeca gauges for now, to be ported to Realms when possible)

Marinade Council (4/7 multisig):

  • Control over Marinade’s contracts parameters (currently held by the operational multisig) and Delegation strategy parameters
  • Adding/removing liquidity incentives gauges and validator gauges (Validator gauges would stay permissionless on Realms for now)
  • Control over the protocol fees
  • Control over the Marketing budget

The grant committee would still conserve control over grant-related topics. Marinade’s Council would unlock funds based on the committee’s requests.
The upgrade authority over Marinade’s main smart contract would still be held by the ecosystem multisig (6/13 multisig).

This updated proposal would be the first step in our migration to Realms, with a second part to come later and bring every aspect of the mDAO governance to Realms. For now, we would simply ratify the constitution and code of conduct, and bring the team’s multisigs and powers to Realms for transparency.

The migration for MNDE holders to use Realms would come with Step 2, and more details will be communicated here before this second step is done.

2 Likes
#7

This updated proposal will be put to an on-chain vote tomorrow. Please share your comments if you have some left

2 Likes
#8

You can now vote on-chain for this proposal here: Tribeca - Solana Governance By DAOs, For DAOs

Thanks for the discussion :pray:

1 Like
#9

Hello everyone,

As you might have noticed, the on-chain proposal failed as it didn’t reach Quorum. The points and the steps weren’t formulated clearly enough, and the overall proposal lacked clarity. We also failed to properly communicate and share this proposal with the community, leading to an overall lack of participation. The sentiment over the proposal seemed mostly positive, though we observed some people voting no and opposing the proposal as it stood.

For those reasons, I’d like to suggest rewritten and updated proposals around those topics, hopefully, laid out more clearly.

For clarity, I’ll suggest creating two separate on-chain proposals that I’ll detail here:

Proposal 1 - Ratify the Constitution and the Code of Conduct.

As mentioned in the posts above, those two documents would clarify the structure and the bounds of Marinade DAO, as well as the ownership distribution in Marinade.

Ratifying it collectively as a DAO, through its own on-chain vote sounds like the best thing to do.

As a summary, following the success of this proposal, here is how Marinade DAO powers would be distributed:

Marinade DAO (MNDE holders)

  • Power over the MNDE treasury
  • Control over a percentage of Marinade’s stake via the MNDE gauges.

Marinade Council (4/7 multisig)

  • Control over Marinade’s contracts parameters (currently held by the operational multisig) and Delegation strategy parameters
  • Control over the liquidity incentives of Marinade (within a budget approved by the Marinade DAO)
  • Control over the protocol fees
  • Control over the Marketing budget

The grant committee would still conserve control over grant-related topics. Marinade’s Council would unlock funds based on the committee’s requests.

Note: As the Marinade DAO (MNDE holders) will fund from the treasury all the budgets requested by the Council, MNDE holders effectively have the possibility to veto any budget request coming from the existing Council, and act as the effective control over Marinade’s Council.

—> The vision, in the future, will be to move the upgrade authority over the Marinade contract to the Marinade DAO. For now, the upgrade authority over Marinade’s main smart contract would still be held by the ecosystem multisig (6/13 multisig).

In a second time, I want to suggest a second proposal regarding the migration of our on-chain infrastructure to Realms instead of Tribeca.

Proposal 2: Launch phase one of the migration to Realms

As mentioned in the post above, the migration plan changed quite a bit recently in order to achieve the best end setup as possible for Marinade’s governance. In this proposal, we would confirm that:

  • Marinade will move its multisigs to Realms (Operational & Treasury).
  • All the voting for MNDE holders (gauges & proposals) will stay on Tribeca for the time being and all activities related to the treasury or the smart contracts parameters will be performed by the team and transparently visible on Realms.

The treasury control would be owned by the Marinade Council until the second phase of the migration. Nonetheless, all treasury transfers will become visible on Realms.

After this first step, everyone will be able to see on Realms:

  • Any fund transfer signed by the Marinade Council
  • Any update to the parameters of our contracts (Stake pool, Unstake pool, etc.)
  • Actions related to the Liquidity Mining program

The details of Phase two of the migration, including deprecating Tribeca, and moving all of Marinade’s governance to Realms, will be described in a separate Forum post and voted on-chain separately.

I’ll put those 2 proposals up for a vote on-chain soon and will hopefully see Marinade’s DAO sentiment on those two topics!

1 Like
#10

if this proposal was excepted, the rate of transperancy of MarinadeDAO would go unreachable. i would say that updated version is much more useful for MRND stakers and to be agreed on implementing

#11

The two proposals are now live on Tribeca: Tribeca - Solana Governance By DAOs, For DAOs

Thanks for your participation :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#12

appreciate reading such useful and meaningful proposals! wish they gonna be accepted this time

1 Like
#13

The two on-chain votes have passed!

Ratify the Constitution and the Code of Conduct: Tribeca - Solana Governance By DAOs, For DAOs
Launch phase one of the migration to Realms: Tribeca - Solana Governance By DAOs, For DAOs

Now moving forward!

1 Like