Let Marinade's on-chain governance begin!
Marinade’s new Head of Governance shares the latest in the DAO’s on-chain voting.
Marinade’s new Head of Governance shares the latest in the DAO’s on-chain voting.
Hi! I’m Ricardo, the new Head of Governance at Marinade.
I’ve been around crypto for a while, but jumped in head-first back in 2017. In 2018 I joined a venture fund as the Technical Director for Europe, where I spearheaded our efforts on decentralization.
My focus at the time was on identity, and I wrote the fund’s Digital Identity operating plan and the backbone of the Customer Empowerment Investment Thesis.
I also ran a grant program for open source and research teams working on decentralization, put together an unconference on the topic of reaching end-users with self-sovereign solutions, and spoke widely on the topics of privacy and identity.
I moved on in 2020, and have since been focused on making my own investments and advising teams. I initially joined Marinade as a pseudonymous community member, offering my help on tasks such as reviewing partnership proposals or helping with presentation decks. As the project to move governance on-chain using NFTs neared completion, the Chefs determined a new role, a Head of Governance, was crucial. The way they described the role was relevant to my interests, and after a few conversations, I was glad to see that we were aligned on how to help move things forward.
Marinade as a fundamental public utility
Why Marinade? I love how focused the team is on helping secure Solana by further decentralizing SOL stake.
It doesn’t look like proof-of-work is long for this world — it has some negative externalities and the narrative winds are strongly against it — which means proof-of-stake is where Web3 is going.
If that is the case, then we need to address the lurking danger of stake concentration on PoS networks. It makes it one of the main challenges that the crypto community should be addressing (the other one being privacy).
It’s not about Solana, or Marinade, but about getting the idea of stake decentralization being security embedded as a foundational meme. This is why one of Marinade’s key goals for 2022 is elevating Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient to 40 (currently at 22).
Why DAOs?
Look, I could go on about all the stuff you’ve already read, on how DAOs are a singular form of organization, and how tokens enable practical, remote governance.
The truth is, previous organization forms don’t lend themselves well to the realities of the decentralization space. They are not internet-native, cannot reshape themselves quickly enough, and wouldn’t allow for the community to take over a project or protocol if necessary.
I could not imagine the radical leadership and direction changes that have happened in the space (eg. The Gecko DAO transition) to occur at any traditional company structure.
I think it should be obvious to everyone that DAOs are still in their early stages. This brings challenges, and we are all figuring things out as we go, but also provides us with a unique opportunity to help shape how things will be in the future.
Marinade’s own decentralization
There has been a lot of chatter (including a recent thread by Solana Legend) on how centralized teams will outperform teams focused on decentralization.
There are situations where that can happen. There was a sensational remark I read about governance systems that said too many web3 protocols hold national elections for what should be a local topic.
While one main goal of 2022 for Marinade is to decentralize Solana, the other is the decentralization of Marinade itself. We are looking for a good mix between sustaining the team’s development speed and having the community to guide the protocol.
How are we approaching it, then?
A conversation about bounties for dashboard creation on our forum led us to an interesting conclusion: Marinators pointed out that it would be counterproductive to vote on every issue, since that could induce multiple complications including voter fatigue.
The suggestion was instead to go for a Grant Committee: the community would vote on a proposal which authorizes a small group to make grant decisions, up to a certain amount and budget. Those people can operate freely while within the parameters that Marinators have established, but need to go back to the DAO to act beyond them. The DAO can also vote to replace them at any point.
Marinade is aiming to propose a similar approach for core development: the DAO signs off on general guidelines for the Chefs, and workgroups are free to operate within these guidelines.
Through governance proposals, the DAO can choose to change these guidelines if they deem it necessary, or act as a “safety handbrake” if they feel any announced project might negatively impact Marinade in ways the Chefs hadn’t anticipated.
This is all part of our ongoing transition from having decisions made solely by the core team to a DAO. I’m looking forward to working more with the community and seeing how things develop.
Marinade’s first on-chain proposals
gm! gm!
Our first proposal was merely a live test — a gm governance meant to get Marinators used to the system. 12.6M MNDE was used to vote for it, out of about 23M locked at the time.
The only net effect was to log a gm to the chain, along with a link to the Marinade forum.
Why do this?
Well, Marinade does not believe in testing in prod, but neither do we believe that something run entirely on a dev environment would work when run against mainnet. Running the ‘gm governance’ vote allowed Marinators to test the system right along with us, to make sure that it was ready for the first formal proposal.
That would come soon after.
Proposal on the unstake incident compensation
During Solana epoch 284, a bug in Marinade led to an accidental unstake. This caused mSOL to not appreciate during that epoch.
Chef Cerba initiated a proposal around compensating mSOL price for the lost appreciation, including a detailed reasoning of why he is proposing that specific approach. Cerba detailed why Marinade should redirect its own protocol fees — which would normally go to the treasury — towards helping prop up the price of mSOL.
I knew that Marinade Chefs would initially be the ones submitting formal proposals, but I wanted the community to eventually take over and start bringing alternative implementations forward.
This happened right away.
Community members ‘Cogent_Crypto’ and ‘Socrates’ immediately came up with alternate proposals, ranging from using the money as seed for a grant program to starting an insurance fund for similar issues. Other users went in the opposite direction from our suggestion, proposing instead to actually increase the fees and direct that towards a monthly mSOL drop to holders.
Then ‘dobby’ suggested that instead of sending the original proposal for voting right away, we should ask the community to choose what should happen.
There was an on-going forum poll for Marinators to decide on whether to send the original proposal to an on-chain vote, or if we should formalize one of the alternatives. The community ultimately decided to stick with the original proposal that Cerba had formalized, which is now proposal #002.
I’m in awe of how engaged the community got on this topic, and the fact that they’re taking control of how to address this issue. One of my own personal milestones (which I didn’t share with the team ahead of time) was for our community to be so active on governance that they took over a proposal that initially came from the core team, and I’m delighted that it happened well earlier than expected.
More governance opportunities
Marinade already has a few other proposals under discussion, including a long-gestating suggestion about voting on validator stake using on-chain gauges, a community proposal on longer lock-ups leading to higher emission rewards, as well as an upcoming partnership discussion.
It’s hard to say which is the next proposal that will go to a vote — that is up to the community, given Marinade is a permissionless platform — but I expect a lot more activity in the coming weeks.
Furthermore, Marinade also has a token swap program underway, which will help further spread out the decision-making power among the community, and align Marinade financially with other Solana projects.
In only a year’s time, Marinade has grown from a concept born at the Solana x Serum Hackathon to a fully operational, on-chain DAO with a robust community making meaningful contributions to the long-term prosperity of Solana. It’s an exciting time to be a Marinator!
How to get involved in Marinade governance
Anyone is welcome to participate in the Marinade DAO. Here is how:
About Marinade
Marinade.Finance is the first non-custodial liquid staking protocol built on Solana. Stake your SOL tokens with Marinade and receive mSOL (“marinated SOL”) tokens in return that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi). mSOL is the most widely integrated collateralized version of SOL. The price of mSOL goes up relative to SOL each epoch, with rewards being accrued into your stake account.
Marinade’s delegation strategy stakes to 400+ validators that are selected automatically by an open-source, fair formula based on performance, commission, and decentralization.
