☎️ MetaGov Working Group – Weekly Meeting: Tuesdays at 2pm UTC (Currently 9:00 am ET)

don.nie · April 16, 2024, 1:40pm

Agenda and Minutes for Meta-Gov Meeting, April 16th, 2024

Time: Tuesdays at 9am ET (1pm UTC).
Google Meet Link: meet.google.com/ihz-hdvb-bbq

Stewards: @5pence.eth (ENS | Twitter), @avsa.eth (ENS | Twitter), @estmcmxci.eth (ENS | Twitter),

14 Participants in Meeting (See list of participants at end of notes)

Working on new roles modifier, tool to manage endownment in non-custodial way
- Ability to audit what’s changing will be more straight forward (code doing what says is doing) through UI
  - Testing going great
  - Tentatively bring to vote 1 May
Working on analysis to show how growing endownment so the endownment is self-sustainable and covering all costs for the DAO
- From an ops perspective the executable votes would be the same, but funds would come from the Endowment instead of the DAO Wallet

Research Into Governance Risks (@avsa)

Over time amount of delegated power has been decreasing despite same number of delegates, need to increase amount of delegated tokens
Anyone who closely watches Agora or Tally will have noticed a new ‘delegate’ shooting to the top of the delegate list, veto.ensdao.eth, presently holding over 3.8M delegated tokens. Please don’t be alarmed - this isn’t a governance attack, in fact it’s quite the reverse
@avsa recently disclosed to a small group of delegates the existence and practicality of highly concerning governance attacks that could be used to target DAOs including the ENS DAO. Given the viability of these attacks (has happened before!) and the urgency with which they need to be addressed, @nick.eth devised a simple contract that makes it possible for a small group of trusted DAO participants to exercise a large number of “no” votes to veto proposals that risk the integrity of the ENS DAO. To put some weight behind this, ENS Labs has delegated all of its ENS tokens - most of which are being held on behalf of Labs staff - to this account
This contract only permits individuals who have been granted permission to use it, it only allows them to vote “no”, and before exercising this power, individuals must agree to a pledge to only use this power to veto proposals that constitute a governance attack on the DAO, or would violate the ENS constitution

Next Steps

Need to make sure safer in the mid-term: [Temp Check] Enable CANCEL role on the DAO
Proposal for an executable that would grant the role of Canceller to a multisig, controlled by the same people that currently hold the Veto power. This would be a multisig of at least 2 accounts. We take this very seriously and understand that once this multisig has such power it’s hard to reverse it since they can veto any attempt to remove it. In order to have a balance of power the members would sign a pledge to only use the cancel power in an event of an attack or to protect the spirit of the constitution and we are open to discussion on any other measures that can be enacted

Other preventive measures to protect from the attack

The profitability of such attack is simply calculated by the amount of total assets in the DAO / (amount of delegated tokens * price of ENS tokens). So any attempt to improve the situation would have to change one of the factors:
- Assets: The DAO should consider ways to protect the Endowment from any single transaction that takes over. This isn’t as simple as it appears.
- Delegated tokens: the Metagovernance group has been considering ways to improve the amount of active delegates and will continue to propose new methods of both direct ENS distribution and ENS delegation.
- Token price: while the DAO’s responsibility is to the ENS system and not the token, it would be healthy if there were ways in which the value of ENS was more tied to the amount of values in it’s management and the present and future revenue of the name system

Discussion around upgrading the governance contract, will bring to the agenda next week
Next week will have spending report for all the Working Groups

Notes by @don.nie