ENS has successfully introduced four working groups to better coordinate and delegate DAO efforts focused on the following:
- Meta-Governance: related to DAO governance and management
- ENS Ecosystem: related to the continuing development and improvement of the ENS protocol and ecosystem, with a focus on all technical matters related to ENS
- Community: related to the people and organizations that are users of ENS, with a focus on non-technical matters
- Public Goods: related to the amplification of ENS as a Public Good and funding Public Goods within the ENS ecosystem and more broadly in web3
Steward elections finished and individuals were successfully elevated into their working groups. Elections below:
Each working group then created a budget to fuel their required work/responsibilities within the DAO. Working groups will have full autonomy to use these budgets as they see fit, without requiring a full DAO proposal and approval process. Passed budget proposals below:
The Orca Protocol Team has been working and communicating closely with ENS stewards to ensure the successful implementation of ENS working groups. Now that individual stewards have been elected and budgets have been decided, it’s time to podify!
What Are Pods?
Pods are Orca Protocol’s lightweight solution for building governance around people based on their expertise, instead of their token holdings.
Under the hood, a pod uses a lightweight permissions layer around a Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet to create more flexible and composable working units. Through pods’ lightweight governance wrapper, pods can be flexibly attached or detached from each other, forming efficient sub-structuring in a lego-like build.
You can read more about our specific implementation here but I’ll call attention to a few key features.
Pod Membership NFTs
Access to a pod is authorized through membership NFTs (ERC 1155s). You can think of this NFT like a keycard: a replaceable key with the ability to introduce permission parameters on the backend. You can mint a new key card, or burn it based on member needs in a pod.
This feature enables membership in working groups to be more flexible and modular.
Pod ENS
When you create a pod, you determine its name (e.g., ens-community). This will be appended with the subdomain “.pod.xyz” and registered with ENS. As your pod interacts with various web3 apps, you will be the beneficiary of seeing the human-readable pod name.
We’re excited to work more closely with the ENS team to build out additional subdomain functionality.
Pod URL
Your full pod ENS name (e.g., ens-community.pod.xyz) will also serve as your pod URL. This can serve as a publicly visible page for your pod and provide community members and partners visibility into who the pod members are. See the Orcanauts pod page as an example.
Podarchy
All ecosystem pods will be viewed in the podarchy UI for greater organization visibility and transparency. You can view members of pods from this page, as well as pod relationships (ie. adminship, pod as pod member, etc). See an example here of the Orcanaut pod ecosystem.
Benefits For ENS
- Transparency and Visibility: around subgroups, contributors and their access to funds and permissions.
- Modular Org Design: pods are a flexible primitive that can click together and integrate with other governance primitives. Pods are modular enough to support an organization as it evolves, matures, and decentralizes.
- Sub-Treasuries: the workstream pods act as committees with full autonomy over fund disbursements.
- Agility: as small and nimble committees, workstream pods can make quick decisions, accelerating innovation within the ENS ecosystem.
- Added use of ENS: not only does every working group get their own ‘.pod.xyz’ subdomain, it also becomes the url for a public pod page.
- Composability: pods use Gnosis Safe on the back end, so they can leverage any compatible DAO tooling for things like payment, treasury management, and reputation.
Proposed Pod Structure for ENS
In this solution the workstream pods’ admin keys (red) are delegated to $ENS holders through the $ENS governor contract. This means that $ENS holders retain ultimate and direct control over pod membership and are able to hold contributors accountable by directly managing who sits on workstream pods.
In the future, as ENS grows, the need for subcommittees may arise. A workstream pod can create new subpods (while still following formal ENS governance process) to sit under them as subcommittees to delegate workload.
Next Steps for onboarding
- Gather steward addresses. Orca will spin up a pod for each workstream with ENS governor contract as admin and the elected stewards added as members.
- The following names have been selected for the four pods subdomains:
- ens-metagov.pod.xyz
- ens-ecosystem.pod.xyz
- ens-community.pod.xyz
- ens-pg.pod.xyz
- ENS stewards can sybil themselves to get verified in the pod.xyz UI.
- ENS will distribute workstream budgets to each of the pods.
- ENS can vote to remove/replace stewards from pods at any time in the future.
(and other positive emojis) in support of Orca.
