Community Call Governance Workshop - February 15, 2023

View the agenda for this event.

Governance Process

• A primary concern of the governance process is the backlog of pending proposals that must be reviewed by Sophons. However, as volunteers, Sophons have outside responsibilities that may delay their ability to provide timely review.
• Doge is resigning as a Sophon, and has personally suggested Wes as a replacement. As someone who has demonstrated his knowledge of the protocol and community, Wes has the support of the team.
• Wes’ background in web3 before joining Rook was primarily as an investor, but after falling down the MEV rabbit hole, he discovered Rook. He also works with Ren’s yield ops group to assist the treasury with transactions.
• Wes firmly believes in Rook’s value to the crypto ecosystem after having first-hand experience being sandwich-attacked on Etherdelta during the 2015 cycle.
• Wes shared his thoughts on improving the Rook governance process, primarily by shortening the Sophon consensus stage. [10:50]
• As a user, Wes can bring insight into the usability of the Rook product. [13:00]
• To address the backlog of pending proposals, Jason suggested triaging proposals by priority rather than chronological order. [14:40]

Proposals Currently With the Sophons

• KIP-36 - Expand Funding and Strategies of Testing Wallet: Originally $600K was allocated to the testing wallet effort. Due to the success in generating yield, an additional $400K in DAI funding is being requested.
• KIP-37 - Discretionary Swapping of Like-Kind Assets: Currently, the treasury must go through the slow governance process to swap like-kind assets. This proposal would mitigate risk by giving the treasury the discretion to swap between stablecoins, Ethereum/ETH derivatives, and Bitcoin/BTC derivatives.
• KIP-38 - Replenishing Discretionary Allocation Fund: This gives the treasury the ability to quickly react to and take advantage of market opportunities in a non-public manner. This proposal would replenish the cap to the lesser of $5M or 5% of the treasury’s notional value.
• KIP-39 - Deployment of Additional ETH for Yield Generation: The ETH yield generation experiment has been successful, so there is a desire to increase the limit to 80% of idle ETH.

Draft Administrative and Governance Proposals

• Labs Budget Request - This request would allocate USDC for Rook Labs through March 2023 in accordance with the official budget.
• Extend KIP-26 - This proposal extends KIP-12 and KIP-21, which granted leadership powers of the DAO to hazard and JZ.
• New Sophon Nomination - This proposal nominates Wes to the role of Sophon.

Treasury Proposals

• Draft: Treasury Yield Management for USDC via USV - This proposal suggests investing 20% of the Rook DAO Treasury USDC holdings in Phuture’s USDC savings vault (USV).
• Draft: The Origin team has introduced the OUSD Treasury Utilization Proposal. In order to reduce risk, Origin monitors circulating supply, redemptions, liquidity, and the borrow rates on Aave and Compound. Members of the Origin team joined this week’s Treasury Tuesday to provide more color on the proposal and answer questions (Rookbase recap).
• Passed: mStable Withdrawal - Due to the precarious future of the mStable project, Rook has terminated their position in the protocol by swapping imUSD funds to USDC as approved by Snapshot vote last week.