GM everyone,
We had quite the close vote last week. Since then, I have spoken to many who voted for and many who voted against and happy to say that I have learned a lot about proposing and working with this amazing community.
Some of the most common misconceptions were:
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Many thought we were suggesting this replace the existing proposal threshold. It won’t. It will be an additional mechanism.
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Many didn’t like the 1,000 ENS bond amount. That amount was discussed in the forum post and at many MetaGov weekly calls, but this amount, like most gov params can be set and readjusted. If 1,000 ENS isn’t the right amount, governance can change it. However, the closer it gets to the proposal threshold, the less impactful this change will be.
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Many thought that there were other ways to solve this problem, and weren’t sure why we settled on this one. There was a post about this back in the summer but I understand that when it came time to vote, I could have done a better job explaining the alternatives or pointing to prior discussions.
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Many thought this was an Agora only feature. Not true. See below, re: open source
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People were confused about who was paying for audit
The goal of this post is to outline the next steps to bring this work to life as soon as possible with the most alignment possible.
First, some core principles. I am the co-founder of Agora, and can speak for its team and founders. Agora is an open source company and app that believes in the power of decentralization at the client and governor level. Our mission is to make onchain governance great, and to bring the next 100,000 builders into the Web3 space.
Second core principle: first do no harm. The goal of this upgrade is and was to solve a fundamental problem: ENS has a healthy treasury, built up thanks to a powerful protocol, and backed by an incredible community of builders looking to expand the commons. However, the truth is that many builders feel ENS is inaccessible. The goal: build ways for governance to enable more ideas and more builders to access the treasury, to build great things on top of ENS and to make the community better. If at any time you feel as though our work is preventing that, please let me know here publicly so that we can have this conversation. If you don’t believe that ENS wants to bring in more builders, expand the commons and build a 100 year protocol… re read the constitution, article III.
Next steps for this proposal
Even though it passed, it passed with such a close margin that we want to make sure that those that voted no, get a chance to tell us why they voted no, and let us know what we could do to bring it to a yes when it comes time to an onchain vote. To that end I am committed to:
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Circle back with all delegates who voted no to make sure their concerns are addressed before posting onchain
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Connect with our friends at Tally to make sure that they are excited about bringing these changes to their ENS governance client
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Work with OpenZepplin to see if this work can be pulled into OZ core via the governance working group that Tally, Agora and ScopeLift are founding members of. This will make it easier for future clients and teams to support ENS.
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Post a roadmap for these changes and set budgets for audits so it’s clear who is paying for what and when.
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Setup a test environment for everyone to play around in to test the feature before production.
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Ship the feature and measure the impact for the ENS community.
I want to thank everyone that has spoken to me over the past week and for your kind words of encouragement as we work through this beautiful process of decentralized governance. Wouldn’t want to do it any other way.
Excited to keep the momentum going on this project.