As mentioned in our Key Objectives & 2019 Plans, one of the main imperatives of Kyber moving forward is creating a community and corresponding decentralized governance structure that can facilitate the goal of Kyber becoming a key infrastructure of the decentralized economy and financial landscape.
When it comes to decentralized governance in the crypto space, there remains a large number of questions and challenges. These include questions around encouraging participation growth, determining voting power distribution, allocating resources, and decision-making between DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and the maintainers.
There have been a few good examples, such as Dash, Decred and others. But overall, no project has figured out all the answers yet, and it is our hope that the Kyber community can collaborate to create a system that works for Kyber’s unique situation. As such, it is necessary that we learn together as a community to figure out how to gain clarity on these questions, grow overall participation, and ensure that more and more talented people get educated about the system.
As part of this collaborative learning journey, we have set up a new Telegram group to discuss feedback and learnings from the incremental development of the KyberDAO. Over the course of the year, we will also initiate several experimental voting activities in order to gauge community participation and interest, as well as evaluate suitable voting platforms.
Today, as a community, we take the first step towards our objectives by kickstarting the first KyberDAO voting exercise. In this post we will explain the objectives of this voting exercise, how to participate, and what are the next steps involved.
Objectives of the KyberDAO Experiment
The KyberDAO will be holding the first public poll for the community on Friday, 8th March 21:00 (GMT+8). This question will be open for 16 days, ending on 24th March, 21:00 (GMT+8).
The primary objectives of the KyberDAO voting activities are as follows:
- To gauge community interest and collect feedback on KyberDAO activities.
- To collect participation metrics, such as voting quorum/thresholds, participation incentivization methods, voting time frames, and other relevant statistics.
- To evaluate platforms such as Aragon and DAOstack, and to see which platform is best suited for the needs of the KyberDAO.
The results from these polls and voting activities will be summarized and shared with the community. They will also be used as a reference to inform our future decisions and help us decide on a suitable voting system and process. In the future, we plan for the KyberDAO to be used to obtain decisive decisions based on consensus within our community.
As part of our Kyber community, you play an important role in shaping the development of the KyberDAO, and we strongly encourage you to participate in these voting activities.
Poll #1: KNC Community Grant
Should Kyber set up a Community Grant (in KNC), to be governed by the KyberDAO? Yes / No
The Community Grant / KNC (Kyber Network Crystal)-based Treasury aims to fund contributions made by the Kyber community to the protocol and ecosystem (e.g. new product or improvement proposals, developer grants, marketing and outreach activities). This will allow the most important contributors — those who understand Kyber well, drive adoption, and build the core platform — to be rewarded, giving them an economic interest in Kyber’s success.
As a representation of the community’s interests and stake in the project, we expect that KNC will be utilized for DAO governance. The KyberDAO is meant to eventually govern this Treasury / Community Grant, along with any initiative proposed by the community. Through this initial poll, we hope to understand the community’s opinion on such a funding system.
Participation Incentive
As an added incentive, 10 random participants who vote in this poll will be given 10 Promo Tokens (PT) each.
PT are promotional tokens issued by KyberSwap, each redeemable for $1 worth of KNC (or any other tokens) on KyberSwap.com. You can learn more about Promo Tokens and how to redeem them here.
How Voting Works on Aragon
The first voting activity will take place using the Aragon platform. You can find out more about Aragon from their official website.
On Aragon, community members can perform an on-chain transaction to vote on questions or issues related to the Kyber ecosystem or protocol, posted by either the Kyber development team or the community. For these experimental polls that you vote in, you will automatically be granted some ‘voting tokens’ based on your current KNC balance.
These voting tokens are immediately granted after you access your wallet (MetaMask, Ledger, or Trezor) and enter the poll on Aragon. The weight of your vote is determined by the amount of voting tokens you hold — a representation of your stake in Kyber during this experiment.
How To Cast Your Vote
You will need KNC in order to vote, but participating in the poll will NOT transfer any KNC from your wallet. The only funds that will be sent are the ETH used to pay for gas for the vote transaction. Voting only requires interacting with the correct Voting app address.
In this initial voting exercise on Aragon, anyone can view past and open votes, but there are some requirements that have to be met in order to participate and vote:
- You can only vote using one of the following Ethereum wallets: MetaMask, Ledger, or Trezor.
- Make sure your KNC is not stored by an exchange or an account that won’t be able to sign the vote transaction using the method described below. Please use a suitable wallet that you hold the private keys to.
- KNC needs to be stored in an Ethereum address you fully control before the start of the poll. You will be granted voting tokens based on your current KNC balance.
- You also need a little ETH (about 0.0015 ETH, depending on network conditions) to pay for gas for the vote transaction.
- As people submit their votes, you can see the live results displayed, along with a list of all votes and their public wallet addresses.
Please refer to the instructions below on how to cast your vote:
- Visit this url
- You will see the following screen below in the main pane:
3. Select the poll by clicking “View vote”. A new pane on the right will appear, which should give you the option to vote “Yes” or “No” on the poll.
NOTE: You are not sending any of your KNC tokens to the platform when you cast your vote.
4. Choose either “Yes” or “No”, and the right pane should allow you to create, sign, and broadcast a transaction using MetaMask to indicate your vote.
Voting with Ledger or Trezor hardware wallets
Currently, the only way to vote with a Ledger or Trezor wallet is by using MetaMask as the Ethereum provider. The instructions are much the same as the above instructions except that the final signing step will be performed by confirming the transaction on your Ledger or Trezor wallet.
See the instructions MetaMask has published for using Ledger here and for Trezor here. If you encounter issues using Google Chrome, there is also the option of Brave or Opera browser.
Beware of scams
Please stay vigilant, as there could be scammers. Note that you DO NOT need to send KNCs out of your wallet when voting. The only place where you should vote is on the link provided. Please double check that the domain is aragon.org
Next Steps After The Experiment
We seek to establish a healthy cadence in experimenting, discussing and learning about decentralized governance. Governance decisions are some of the most important decisions that can be made, so we will seek to formalize structural decisions one step at a time.
Once the experimental poll has concluded, we will review the results and publish our learnings with the community in the form of a blog post. As part of that exercise, we will also collate all the different feedback and questions from the community as well. This should serve as a good starting point for further discussions on how to grow participation, community education, and DAO processes.
Moving forward, there will be a series of voting experiments planned to help everyone gain a better understanding of how to create an effective and functional KyberDAO that can best serve the needs of the entire community.
We encourage anyone who is interested in DAO discussions to join the KyberDAO Telegram group.
Note that this group is strictly for discussing and brainstorming on the DAO. We will invite more industry experts and leaders to join us and provide different perspectives, and address some of the key concerns and existing friction points with regards to decentralized governance.
We hope that more community members will participate in these voting activities and discussions. Let’s build a strong community that has the passion, expertise, and incentive to grow and govern Kyber together.
