Governance, in its purest and advanced forms, has never had a strong basis on the internet. Today’s governance is mainly shaped by four key layers: discussion, off-chain governance (also known as consensus check), on-chain governance, and delegation. Products such as Snapshot have mastered off-chain governance, frameworks such as OpenZeppelin’s Bravo and Moloch v3 have increased widespread adoption of on-chain governance, and interfaces such as Sybil have served as a source of truth for delegation.

These were outstanding contributions to the ecosystem, but governance still feels like a chore. Protocols such as Uniswap are still relying on multiple platforms (Discourse, Snapshot, Voting Portal, and Sybil) to facilitate governance, delegates such as Linda Xie are spending hundreds of hours to participate in governance cross-platform, and participants are taking precious time out of their day, constantly making uninformed votes in the red ocean of proposals and delegates, while receiving zero incentives. We’re missing something fundamental here - the ecosystem lacks an accessibility layer, making participation less efficient, informed, and incentivized. 

Today, my team and I are contributing to this growing ecosystem with a product that makes participating in governance easier than ever.

Introducing Mainstream: a modular & end-to-end platform for governance participation

From auto-advancing proposals across chains and tokens to building your on-chain reputation with an informed participation history, Mainstream will take your governance experience to the next level:

First, let’s start with the basics–communities.

• Communities can use their tokens to fine-tune access control over discussions, proposals, and more. We've also partnered with Guild.xyz to integrate Guilds and roles, all in one click.

Second, let’s talk about governance.

• Discussions and proposals under a single topic are merged into a single governance “record” that fully lives on-chain. Every single edit, advancement, etc is stored on-chain as an IPFS record.
• DAOs can select and participate in various off- and on-chain governance frameworks that fit the purpose of the DAO. 

• Users can auto-advance their governance stakes between off-chain and on-chain governance via Governance Autopilot. They can also create on-chain executable actions without a single line of code with the drag-and-drop Actions Builder.

Next, let’s talk about reputation and incentives.

We've enabled some ways for users to build on-chain reputation (more coming soon):

• Reasoning Method: User A could provide reasoning behind their off- and/or on-chain vote; the reasoning is now inputted into a peer-to-peer reasoning review framework where User B (with the same stance on the vote) could review the reasoning (with various mechanisms, such as points/stars/etc, decided by the author of the proposal). 

Why would users take time out of their day to provide reasoning? That’s why we're also introducing incentivization:

• DAOs can allocate a portion of their treasury (e.g. governance tokens, stablecoins, or a mix!) and pledge it towards a specific group/topic/proposal. The tokens will be distributed proportionally via the reputation score that is generated from the reasoning method.

All these features work together to make governance more seamless than ever. DAOs can mix and match different modules (e.g., governance, incentivization, reputation categories) and increase their users’ participation rate. Users save so much time on participation, inform themselves on delegate and governance activity, and earn tokens for their time and participation–all while being notified of activities at the platform of their choice, so that they can fully immerse themselves in the community and the governance process.

And this is just the beginning. Mainstream is now available as a closed beta to select DAOs starting today, and to other DAOs and users very soon. By the end of 2022, we’ll be announcing the Mainstream API, which would allow ecosystem developers and community members to start building on top of Mainstream.

Sign up for the waitlist at mainstream.so.