Report contains balance sheet, income statement, endowment assets under management, profit and loss.
The report assumes that all forms of Ether are the same as staked Ether.
Q [Katherine]: Where are you getting the data from?
A: It all comes from Dune, which tracks events occuring on the Ethereum network. It is gathered by using a complex, custom-built query. In the future, we will simplify the structure of the query. We will also have a simpler output available on Dune.
Q: Are figures denominated in USD?
A: The figures are denominated in USDC for stablecoin section, and denominated in Ether for ETH section. The prices we use are at the end of every day.
Following through with regular ETH swaps until the target composition of 40% stablecoins and 60% Ether is reached.
Q: Does the Shanghai update effect the endowment? [withdrawals enabled for staked ETH deposits]
A: We expect that fees may go down and are monitoring the market. We think this will bring more liquidity to the staking positions.
Was mentioned that Karpatkey are building out general balance sheet reporting for ENS, and not just endowment.
Santinomics mentioned that they wish to move compound strategy from v2 to v3. To do this would require tally vote and a larger process of engagement. Suggesting that they have 8-9 other items that they could bundle into proposal to whitelist actions for future.
This approach was supported, with a draft that will go to nick before they put it forward formally.
Further noted that if something is controversial or urgent it is better that it be separated from the bundle.
katherine wu, nick johnson, simona pop, alisha.eth, 184.eth, greg, tomas, 5pence, cornelia weinzierl, lyt.eth, elbagococina, santinomics, coltron, rafael solari, yungsb
1. General DAO Updates
No major DAO updates
Foundation director onboarding still in progress. KYC checks in proress.
2. Endowment updates + Presentations
@santinomics.eth is drafting bundle of ten whitelist actions. Draft will be sent to @nick.eth & @alisha.eth for review. Then made public in a forum post, followed by discussion and then voting.
Delegation week is an ecosystem wide initiative organised by tally + other DAOs + DAO tools. We want delegation week to be an event that takes place periodically, where people check on their delegation, and delagates share campaign for delegation.
Delegates encouraged to update their delegate profiles e.g:
- Who you are
- What you are doing in ENS
- What do you care about / what do you stand for
- What plans you might have
This open inititaive is an opportunity:
to remind other delegates of what is happening
for governance token holders to check on their delegate
for new delegates to share themselves
Metagov has sponsored 5k towards gasless delegation.
If you hold 10 or more $ENS Goverance tokens you are eligible for gasless (i.e. free) delegation on tally.xyz during delegation week (May 22 - May 26). Tally | ENS (Reminder that gasless redelegation continues on https://delegate.ens.domains/ for 50+ Governance token holders.)
4. Open Discussion
ENSify won $2,500 for the ‘Kind Reminder’ bounty for the Aragon DAO Global Hackathon 2023.
“Kind Reminder Bounty: Notifying interested parties about governance proposals or working group meetings can be a tedious task. With the governance community spread across Twitter, email, and Telegram it would be great to give people the option to get reminders where they prefer. Not everyone hangs out in governance forums to stay up to date with notifications”
Alisha will look to implement ENSify IRL with Greg over the next few weeks.
Discussion around stream contracts (e.g. sablier.finance) for use in working groups, to stream steward payments, which are set at the start of the Term in the funding request.
Rules for Steward elections are set out in rules 4 and 5 of the Working Group Rules.
To successfully get onto the ballot for a working group steward election, nominees need to receive 10k votes in support of their nomination between June 6 - 9.
Election period is June 10 -15.
Based on feedback from last term; alisha will create the nomination threads in the forum a week earlier to increase awareness around nominations. This will give more lead time for community members to get involved and campaign for votes with Delegates.
Weekly reports are shared in this same thread, where you can also engage and discuss with the karpatkey team
There was further discussion around a recent enquiry about runway & interest (read here)
@santinomics, @alisha & @nick discussed the intention of the endowment to grow over time. When the endowment was first discussed, the intention was a target of $2m/year in interest to cover basic costs. Endowment revenues are intended as survival mechanism rather than a replacement of all operating expenses from all dao activities.
Proposal for whitelist items related to the endowment.ens.eth wallet has been reviewed and will be posted in coming days. An executable vote on Tally will follow, and if passed, the proposal will be deployed and executed.
Ben shared about ScopeLift - dev shop/engineering team, that has been building on ethereum for 7 years. This includes work with contract development, building for projects, as well as additional Public Goods Works (incl those funded by Ethereum Foundation, MolochDAO)
Has been focused on DAO governance for last year and a half
Developing ‘flexible voting’ integrations for DAOs and working to make this part of key tooling. Already had several merges in openzeppelin repo.
Recently has worked with openzeppelin, gitcoindao, pool together, tally, aave, and more
Joshua shared about DAOstar - who are focused on standards and public goods for DAOs and DAO tooling; developing basic infrastructure for reporting that is both public & interoperable.
Finding ways DAOs can announce they own something, with common schema, and more
Nominations open June 6 -9 | Election period is June 10 -15.:
To successfully get onto the ballot for a working group steward election, nominees need to receive 10k votes in support of their nomination between June 6 - 9
Before creating your nomination Snapshot vote, please watch the video walkthrough of the process - found in the links below
Aura have a planned migration that will affect the pool used by endowment. While a simple migration, it require updating preset and prompts two community votes.
To avoid doubling efforts, Karpatkey will wait two weeks to combine into a single community vote.
General question about review periods & changing of strategy was asked.
Any change is a joint exercise, with proposed changes to strategy being initiated by either karpatkey or from DAO community. Karpatkey keep to the long term vision of the endowment and continue to monitor market conditions, new trends, etc,
Weekly reports are shared in the same forum thread, where you can also engage and discuss with the karpatkey team
3. Open Discussion
Refunding Gas for Delegations & Governance Votes
MetaGov will be reimbursing gas costs for governance proposals dating back to the beginning of the DAO.
This includes any onchain executable proposal where deelgates have paid gas to vote.
ethback.xyz, a tool created by @gregskril, will be used to distribute reimbursements
Gasless delegation continues
MetaGov will keep up gasless delegation for another month on Tally.xyz for anyone holding 10 or more $ENS Goverance tokens
Gasless redelegation also continues on delegate.ens.domains for 50 or more Governance token holders.
Further discusion occured around trends in diversification into real world assets by web3 treasuries
@karpatkey & @steakhouse are working on the new opportunities offered by tokenized tbills onchain. These (some) can be tracked on a dashboard they maintain.
Karpatkey continue working on whitelist strategies while waiting on Aura technical updates
Community discussion included topics of diversification, decentralization, staking, yields, and how the 2nd tranche of endowment funds will be allocated
2nd tranche is expected ~ September after whitelist strategies vote
Santinomics will share the status of endowment and future plans during the town hall
katherine, 5pence.eth, alisha.eth, 184.eth, 5pence, cap.eth, coltron.eth, greg skriloff, katherine wu, limes.eth, maintainer.eth, marcus (estmcmxci), santinomics, tomas, tomas, vincent (zadok7.eth)
1. Townhall Q2 2023
ENS Town Hall Q2 2023 was held last week - it was the longest Town Hall yet, and clocked in at just over 2 hours. Watch the stream on Youtube HERE (MetaGov from 30:44). Catch up on all the highlights with THIS tweet thread.
tomas & santinomics shared about transitioning to monthly reports.
Where e.g. July results are presented in August.
Reports will bring more information,
Karpatkey remains accessible via forum
Read the [Draft Executable] Approve further actions and strategies for the EndowmentHERE
This is in final stages, and will be synced up for voting alongside other proposals (including [TEMP CHECK] ENS invalid name refund proposal), additionally reducing unnecessary load on delegates.
This joint project between ENS and Gitcoin, funded by the DAO Tooling pod, which is funded by the Meta-Governance Working Group.
It is intended that this could be something other Governance Forums can implement and become a Public Good to experiment with.
The intention is to deliver this term.
Delegate Feed
There’s’s ongoing work to implement a delegate feed (e.g. announcements of proposals to a telegram channel). This tooling comes from a recent winner of the Aragon DAO hackathon, which ENS sponsored.
Grants
Working groups are exploring other tools to change up eligibility & voting for various grants.
From Paris with Limes.eth
Register for the upcoming ENS Social Event at ETHCC Paris
Read the forum thread for information on proposals/Votes
Intention is for voting windows to take place in the last week of each month, enabling delegates to check in in the last week of the month for votes.
Ultimately, anyone with 100k $ENS delegated can post an executable proposal whenever they want. To the extent a proposal moves through the governance forum, MetaGov WG stewards and alisha.eth will coordinate timing for the last week of the month.
4. Reserved for Open Discussion
Small Grants voting was discussed
Are Ecosystem and Public Goods Working groups exploring other requirements beyond token weighted voting for small grants?
Minimising delegating voting events at a DAO-wide level isn’t impactful if Delegates are required to vote monthly on small grants rounds.
Telegram Proposal Feed was discussed
There’s ongoing work to implement a proposal feed (e.g. announcements of proposals to a telegram channel). This tool comes from a recent winner of the Aragon DAO hackathon, which ENS sponsored.
Alisha.eth will sync with nick.eth and gregskril.eth about hosting for this tool.
Multi-Delegate Token contract was discussed
Recently Nick shared about Muhammed/mdt.eth’s work on a Multi-Delegate Token contract in the Q2 Town Hall HERE
The work is close to being ready for audit, and is on track to be completed and ready this quarter.
ENS is pioneering this development, which will enable any token and be useful in other DAOs.
Next Week’s call Postponed
Next week’s call is postponed due to events of ETHCC & the ENS ETHCC Paris Event on that evening.
MetaGov WG calls will resume Tuesday 25th July 2023.
Further discussion will happen in the next Ecosystem WG call on Thursday 27 July.
Distribution logic for either option is yet to be determined and still requires further work if the distribution method is for a claim rather than an airdrop. There is a potential to save gas and ETH with the claim option.
An executable vote will be pushed to the August or September voting window to allow time to confirm amount and distribution method.
2. Endowment Update
Tomas | @karpatkey gave updates on Endowment & Executable Proposal.
In the coming weeks a new dashboard will be shared to the forum. This dashboard is related to endowment web report and replaces the PDF previously being shared.
The information presented should be relevant for decision making, tracking metrics, etc and the Karpatkey team will be available for feedback and questions.
Reminder: Endowment-specific reports will be posted on a monthly cadence in this new thread
Karpatkey are available in MetaGov calls & forum to answer further questions on endowment strategies, context, progress etc.
Gregskril has developed a tool, inspired by Aragon DAO hackathon, to automatically pull in executable proposals, and possibly snapshot proposals & more. This enable a feed for delegates and other interested parties.
Follow ENS_DAO on twitter for upcoming announcement.
All working groups are making the most of existing balances in wallets. The MetaGov WG will not request additional funds from the treasury to fund this term.
‘MetaGov WG Discretionary’ is the amount left over and has been assigned for unexpected expenses and experiments that may arise.
‘Endowment Management Fees’ is an extrapolation, and if Assets Under Management (AUM) increase, this amount will also go up.
The ‘$ENS Governance Token Distribution’ section of the budget includes token distributions from the last term [to Tally, Parcel & Metropolis].
The MG philosophy is to issue Governance Tokens to partners and stakeholders, and increase participation from key DAO-related projects that build DAO infrastructure and have a deep understanding of the space.
MG Sponsorship & Events
Q1/Q2 initiatives included sponsoring DAO-specific hackathons, such as Aragon and DAOTokyo.
If you know of a hackathon or events that you think are important for ENS to have a presence at, please raise this with stewards.
We are always happy to sponsor initiatives that result in building better tools for DAOs and making the governance process easier.
Suggestions for sponsoring events or attendance can also be made on the ENS feedback platform at ens.canny.io
These submissions have visibility from ENS Labs and stewards.
The vote is live, has reached quorum, and is expected to pass, with the voting window closing late on 2nd August (UTC).
@Nick, @avsa, & @ricmoo all reviewed the transactions of the executable proposal.
Ricmoo raised questions about the deployers of contracts.
These can be found in the relevant documentation of protocols. Karpatkey identified each contract called out and provided a description & relevant links here.
Endowment funds are unaffacted by current Curve situation
The Endowment removed liquidity from Curve a while ago and had no exposure during this event
In lending markets in general, there is, however, a large CRV position in Aave & Frax, and it’s possible this could have an unwinding effect. The Endowment is monitoring the situation closely and being extremely cautious.
@katherine.eth asked about Karpatkey’s strategy to monitor during these events.
Karpatkey shared about their system which monitors relevant metrics: they track protocols, financial aspects, governance, and exploits or hacks. They receive alerts on abnormal situations and promptly meet to evaluate the situation.
They take the conservative measure to withdraw liquidity if they have any doubts - considering that the upside of this is avoiding a problem, while the downside is limited to gas fees + opportunity cost in interest. This framework is used to evaluate every situation.
Karpatkey’s Dune Governance Dashboard
Keep an eye on the Forum for a post with links to the dashboard.
The main objective of the dashboard is to be a central source of truth. It is designed mainly for the ENS DAO.
It contains data on general stats, delegation stats, non-delegated wallets, and many other variations.
Includes charts displaying the current number of delegates, delegation percentage over circulating supply, and more.
Presents information about delegates, delegation power changes, voting age, and identifies and categorises tokens that are not delegated.
The intention is to make this the go-to place for any question related to delegates, voting power, concentration changes in delegation, and more.
Previously, information was scattered, and they have now combined and added new elements to keep it simple and useful.
While this is perhaps beyond the scope of a treasury manager, Karpatkey thought they could add value by doing this, as they were exploring this themselves and found it useful.
Karpatkey will move forward with the forum post. Reach out to them if you are interested in providing feedback.
@alisha asked about any developments with other DAO communties in the recent months?
Flexible voting contracts were audited again as part of Frax DAO Governance system being audited. This is expected to go live in coming weeks.
Gitcoin has a snapshot vote up to approve the upgrade proposal, and the onchain proposal is expected in the coming days.
PoolTogether DAO is following a similar process; having completed the engineering they are now going through internal review.
Internal review involves audit by an engineers who was not involved in product.
Upon completion they will deploy the candidate governor, and go through the process of (temp check, etc).
There are others DAOs they’re also working with through these earlier stages.
Ben shared two use case categories:
Integrations: where token holders are enabled to participate in governance while using their tokens for other purposes. Examples:
Yield Farming and Voting: Token holders can deposit their tokens in yield farming protocols like Aave or Compound and still participate in governance using their share of the pool that remains deposited.
Layer 2 Voting: Token holders can vote on L2s, by recoridng votes using bridge tokens, and then message pass down to L1 the roll up of votes on L2.
This MVP is currently being built with a grant from the Ethereum Foundation (EF).
Experiments around Voting: where you can trial different voting schemes and features to enhance governance. Examples:
Shielded Voting: Voters can deposit their tokens into a pool using zero-knowledge proofs and submit their votes anonymously, ensuring privacy.
Chained Delegation: Delegates can represent other delegates, enabling multi-level delegation structures. E.g. Person A delegates to Person B, who delegates to person C - If A&B dont vote and Person C does, Person C represents the sum of votes in that chained delegation.
Incentivized Voting: Providing rewards or incentives for active participation in governance.
Quadratic Matching Voting: Using quadratic matching algorithms to give more power to smaller voters based on additional delegated power.
Additionally, there’s the possibility of building governance dashboards for exchanges to use flexible voting as infrastructure to allow their customers to participate in governance.
Scopelift are actively seeking funding and grants to build out some of these use cases, and expect more adoption of flexible voting in the near future.
PSA Telegram channel for Proposals is live
Telegram group has been setup to send out a notifications anytime there is an executable proposal.
The channel is notificaton only and does not show who joins.
Read up on the minutes from prior calls above. :::
Twitter Space
Next week’s MG call will be cancelled ahead of the Town Hall.
Watch the stream on Youtube 
Read the [Draft Executable] Approve further actions and strategies for the Endowment