Hello everyone from daoApe!

For those who are wondering what daoApe is, we can call it a newsletter containing extremely personal comments where we evaluate the latest developments around the DAOsphere and discuss remarkable proposals. These extremely personal remarks can be offensive, frustrating or provocative for the reader. There’s nothing we can do about it. Grow up. We can take a political stance sometimes. Also, sometimes we can be progressive and other times we can be naturalists. The comments you will see here may vary depending on our approach to the content. There’s no publication schedule. In time, the spirit of the newsletter and the feedback from the readers will define the flow and when we want to publish new issues.

What can you find in the newsletter?

In this first issue of daoApe, we will be covering a few interesting incidents that have happened recently in the DAOsphere. We also prepared a few small snacks for the followers. To list these:

• Thematic DAOs
• Significant DAO proposals
• Game Changing Ideas and Projects
• Controversial Events, Gossip and Drama
• DAO Tools

A quick reminder before we begin

🚨This bulletin is not suitable for DAO 101🚨

Let’s get started.

What’s Cooking?

FreeRossDAO

Ross Ulbricht Genesis Collection NFTs created by the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, brought a brilliant idea to life. FreeRoss DAO was established to support Ulbricht and to protest his disproportionate punishment. Seeded by the PleasrDAO with an initial deposit of 240 ETH, FreeRossDAO was able to pool approximately 2800 ETH, and won the auction with a bid of 1446 ETH.

FreeAssangeDAO

In light of news about Assange’s health was deteriorating, cypherpunks left their caves in the wild jungle we call internet. Defining themselves as “a group of cypherpunks dedicated to aiding Julian Assange’s Liberation against his extradition to the United States”, FreeAssangeDAO was formed. Just like FreeRossDAO, they are also planning to pool funds to bid on an NFT auction. At the moment of writing this newsletter, the DAO is still taking its baby steps to specify an action plan.

Now let’s get to this controversial incident!

Gitcoin Deactivated a Grant for Farsi Speakers

In round 12 of its Grants, Gitcoin deactivated a grant called Free Smart Contract Development Course for Farsi Speaking Communities.

In response to criticism from the Ethereum community, Gitcoin stated the following:

We are a US-based organization that complies with OFAC and US law. US sanctions laws apply to all US persons, wherever located.

No doubt, this incident resulted in a big controversy and raised questions with regards to decentralization and inclusion in the Ethereum community in general. It may also be argued to have brought some criticism to Gitcoin as a whole in their journey to become a truly decentralized DAO.

While Gitcoin deactivated the grant, Giveth came to the rescue by allowing Women in Blockchain Farsi to receive donations on their platform.

PS: Woman in Blockchain Farsi is trying to raise $7500 to release a free Solidity course in Farsi on Giveth.

Let’s take a look at the other developments:

Giveth’s $GIV is live

You can find a detailed info about Giveth under Game Changer

Gardens was launched.

Deployed on Polygon and Gnosis Chain, Gardens provide a DAO foundation allowing communities to establish their own DAOs and manage the entire process with ease. Details in link

xDai merged with Gnosis

Now the chain is called Gnosis Chain. We are excited to see what Gnosis Chain will be doing as the beacon-chain as we know that the treasury of Gnosis is full of ETH.

The DAO tool maker Colony finally conducted a token sale.

Details:

Anything else?

Summary of remarkable DAO proposals

Aave Business License:

Aave held a DAO vote for the Business License just as Uniswap did for its v3. Hence, Aave v3 will not be possible to be cloned for some time.

Uniswap 🤝 Polygon

Uniswap was deployed on Polygon as a result of a DAO vote. It’ll be amazing if they also announce an incentive program for the UNI token as it has literally no utility at this point.

Uniswap Layer 2 Incentives

Regarding this, litocoen really deserves applause for demonstrating the Degen skills.

Rari-Fei Merger

Scandal DAO

All kinds of drama, rekt stories and shitshow under Scandal DAO!

Badger DAO Suffered a Frontend Attack

Badger DAO, with a promise to provide yield over people’s Bitcoin holdings on Ethereum, suffered a frontend attack on December 1, 2021. You can check the boring post-mortem here: https://badger.com/technical-post-mortem

What’s actually interesting was the BIP 77 proposal voted on after the incident. As a result of the vote held on Snapshot, it was decided to unpause the contracts which were paused after the attack. Alright, cool. But this proposal granted the multisig that controls the contracts the right to pause these contracts in the future without any BIP.

Thought we were building trustless and decentralized systems, right?

Sushi Bullshit at its Peak

A real shitshow at Sushi. You can find the details in the article of rekt

Tools

Here, we review DAO tools and infrastructure.

Conviction Voting

Voting on proposals in DAOs have a rather difficult process where the degree of representation of all the stakeholders is always a question mark. We need to use tools designed to give voice to all the people in order to support the proposals and ideas of relatively weak stakeholders against “stronger” ones in a system where all stakeholders are represented proportional to their amount of stake. The way to make accurate decisions based entirely on the community is to give small token holders an opportunity to contribute. Only in this way can we lay the foundations of a committed community gathered around common values.

Conviction Voting enables people to consistently share their preferences instead of forcing them to “make a decision”. For a community member, this method makes it easy for them to demonstrate what they care about and support it.

For more details, you can check this article.

Gamer Changer

In this section, we will discuss game changing and remarkable ideas and projects.

Giveth

Giveth, whose contributors include crypto OGs like Griff Green and Jordi Baylina, announced their $GIV token and GIVeconomy program. Giveth has actually been in development for a long time, and in its history they saved 210 million dollars from the Parity multisig attack, held the first Ethereum conference focused on scaling, created free donation applications, developing on-ramp applications that runs smoothly in order to enable nonprofit organizations to get integrated into the space, and allowing all these to be funded only through donations. Considering all these, we can easily argue that they have already made an extraordinary contribution to the entire ecosystem.

The purpose of Giveth is to support and reward funding of public goods by providing open, transparent and free access to funding opportunities in the Ethereum ecosystem. Unlike Gitcoin, it has an understanding that prioritizes to include projects and ideas that would contribute to social development and create equal opportunity. Giveth works closely with Commons Stack, TEC, DAppNode, 1Hive, Panvala, Gitcoin, and Metagame.

Giveth team launched their GIVgarden for governance. Powered by 1Hive, GIVgarden can be defined as an environment where GIV holders can create and vote on proposals to fund value-driven initiatives.

GIVgarden has four main components

• For funding management, Conviction Voting
• For the enforcement of on-chain decisions, Tao Voting
• To define on-chain and off-chain community structure and standards, Community Covenant
• Decentralized dispute resolution platform, Celeste

To view and donate to the projects on Giveth, you can visit the website here.

Thematic DAOs

In this section, we discuss thematic, exotic and occasionally cringe DAOs.

PleasrDAO

PleasrDAO is a collective of DeFi leaders, early NFT collectors and digital artists to acquire culturally significant pieces with a philanthropic twist. What this collective, consisting of almost all the well-known crypto OGs, did recently was rather sensational. They seeded FreeRossDAO, formed for Ross Ulbricht, with 240 ETH from their treasury. The collective previously bought Edward Snowdens’s NFT for $5.4M and Wu Tang Clan’s album for $4M.

Reading Corner

In this section, we will share articles, publications or books that we think are worth reading.

Fei is trying something before Rari merger

https://medium.com/fei-protocol/decentralized-governance-structures-9c4eb8a3e452
https://twitter.com/SebVentures/status/1434870115628113933

Nathan Schneider’s Cryptoeconomics as a Limitation to Governance

and Vitalik’s response to Schneider:

and a great response from Kleros

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