Governor DAO Litepaper v2.1
Governor DAO Litepaper
April 3rd, 2022
Foreword
This document has been revised to reflect the state of Governor DAO today. The original Litepaper was written in December 2020, and much has evolved in and around the Governor DAO ecosystem. Original inspiration, thesis, and deployment mechanics may be found in the Appendix, where the original Litepaper resides in full.
Governor DAO Summary
Decentralization done right is difficult. Working governance, fair launches, and equitable incentives are the marks of a well tuned, properly decentralized project. But those principles are hard to conceive on paper and even hard to achieve in practice. Governor DAO acts as a B2B organization in the web3 space: offering best practices, community engagement, and first-in-class technology to those looking to build a better decentralized future.
Every project that interacts with Governor through the offerings outlined below share their ownership with Governor and onboard their users into our ecosystem. Each project and their users are enrolled into the ever-growing “DAO of DAOs” Governor collective.
GDAO token holders earn revenue share from integrations and manage the treasury that holds ownership of these projects. Governor offerings are centered around the strength of the community, enabling a strong network effect where new users make the ecosystem and services provided increasingly powerful.
Ultimately, Governor DAO aspires to be the global standard that every decentralized project leverages to ensure more efficient, equitable, and trustless production.
Governor DAO Offerings
Proof-of-Existence
Proof-of-Existence is Governor DAO’s best-in-class defense against sybil attacks. Since the beginning of blockchain, the permissionless, anonymous nature of the space leads to mechanisms that are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation by users taking on numerous accounts/wallets/identities.
Sybil attacks require developers to build projects that are either KYC-only or designed on an unlimited weight basis (meaning the more $$ one has, the bigger influence they have). This leads to unfair or vulnerable mechanisms surrounding activities like:
Token Launches/NFT Mints
Governance Voting
Airdrops
Play-to-Earn
Yield Farming
And much more..
Proof-of-Existence is a “human gate” that enables the above to take place within per-person limits designed by the project. NFT launches and token sales can limit the number of mints or size of contributions per person. DAOs can practice democratic or logarithmically-weighted voting modules. Airdrops can be provably assigned equally to each person participating. Play-to-earn games can offer quests that are bot-proof on many accounts. Yield farms can introduce whale caps or taxes.
POE offers sybil resistance in a way that is…
100% Effective
100% Anonymous
Universal (wherever EVM exists)
30-second sign up
One line of code integration
NFT Launchpad
Proof-of-Existence is immediately applicable to improving the global standard for NFT minting. Our NFT Launchpad is an incubated, powered by POE experience where clients can self-select the level of engagement/support from Governor DAO and execute a provably fair NFT mint.
NFT collections incubated through the Governor Launchpad award some percentage of initial sales to Governor DAO as well as some percentage of resales.
Liquidity Generation Event
Governor DAO’s unique, fair launch as an unrug required immense creativity to operate in a way to maximize confidence of participants as well as value of their inputs. This culminated in the LGE model.
User contributions are leased, not exchanged, and paired with new tokens for liquidity. Over time, users can reclaim their initial contribution AND new token from the LP. Additional mechanics like decaying fees, reflections, and initial contribution taxes enable a better, working launch out-of-the-box for every participant.
One Voice One Vote
Governance was never supposed to be whale-catered. One Voice One Vote reflects better token governance standards, unlocked by Proof-of-Existence. Those standards include:
Democratic (one vote per person)
Capped (weight-based voting with a minimum and maximum)
Logarithmic (Diminishing weight gains from additional token holdings)
Smart Contract Standards
Governor DAO’s unique launch required optimized mechanics for the project to succeed. We launched GDAO smarter, and we use those best practices for others to launch smarter, too.
Projects can engage Governor DAO for assistance and deployment of token, NFT, sale, loyalty rewards, and vault contracts that are custom-built, battle-tested, and proven better than market alternatives.
DAO Consulting
Governor’s team and community have undergone a unique trial-by-fire that uniquely positions the project as a whole as experts in working DAO governance. Engage the team and community to ensure your DAO works right - the first time around.
Governor DAO Offerings - Future
POE Passport
As more and more projects leverage Proof-of-Existence for their various web3 needs, a central hub of content and management will be necessary to ensure that existing users are always aware of new opportunities.
The POE Passport will be a a comprehensive dashboard where users can view token sales, NFT mints, giveaways, governance votes, and more by projects protecting their mechanisms with POE. The dashboard intends to build out on-chain statistics and reputational scores based on ownership of a Proof of Existence token.
Token Factory
A Permissionless, rug-proof, no-code templated token launch using our LGE model and better smart contract standards. Anyone can launch their own token in a 100% safe manner. Taxes from every token created and sold through the factory go back to Governor DAO.
Metagovernance
Governor DAO is situated as a collective of highly engaged Governors with ownership in numerous projects that leverage GDAO. Our holders vote on these other projects as well as others that contract us for the express purpose of bootstrapping their governance with a mature, engaged, seasoned community.
Governance-as-a-Service
Decentralization and DAO principles are very good when done right, but incredibly hard to achieve. Failure can lead to disastrous consequences.
All of the above reflect Governor DAO’s toolkit to offer Governance-as-a-Service. GaaS refers to Governor’s ability to act as the “DAO of DAOs”, incubating and supercharging other projects of all spurts under our ever-growing Governor DAO umbrella.
GaaS is conceived with network effects in mind: Every time a new project enrolls in GaaS, Governor’s scope grows. Our ecosystem of friendlies increases, and more individuals enter our project. The bigger the Governor DAO ecosystem is, the more powerful our offerings are. The more powerful our offerings, the more projects are interested in engaging with us. Ideally, it’s an irreversible flywheel that never stops once it kicks into gear.
GDAO Mechanics
GDAO Overview
GDAO is the governance and ownership token of Governor DAO. GDAO holders have control over the treasury (acted on via governance) as well as ownership of revenue share.
The total GDAO supply is 2,921,625. There is no mint function and no possibility to create more tokens. The entire supply is circulating.
GDAO Vault Mechanics
GDAO holders can stake their GDAO to receive xGDAO. xGDAO is the revenue share wrapped for GDAO. Revenue generated is delivered on-chain to a BuyBack Agent smart contract. The BuyBack Agent buys back GDAO, adds liquidity, and sends coins to the treasury. It also employs a small “caller’s fee” for the individual who activates the BuyBack - as the execution is permissionless.
Appendix - Original Litepaper (12/2020)
Abstract
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations have the potential to represent massively diverse and profitable organizations. This potential is a legitimate disruptor to the traditional framework of businesses and legacy enterprises. However, existing DAOs across the spectrum, primarily due to errors in design and implementation, have predominantly failed to realize this massive potential. From inception, Governor DAO is designed to overcome these obstacles and, in doing so, behave as the quintessential governance model for other DAOs and institutions to emulate.
This cooperation is recognized as the basis to Governance-as-a-Service.
Background
The open-source nature of smart contracts enable trustless interactions between two or more independent parties. These interactions are enforced by code and verified by miners in a manner that protects the trustless, peer-to-peer qualities of said interactions.
This technology is the lifeblood of our new age of information and has only just begun to disrupt the infrastructure of legacy enterprises across a multitude of industries; it is set on a trajectory to create disruptions unquantifiable by any perceivable metrics. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is the most immediate example of the real-world impact of this tech. Automated Market Makers like Uniswap and Balancer allow anyone to create their own decentralized exchange pairing and trade any ERC20 token with minimal barrier to entry. Peer-to-peer lending protocols like Maker, Compound, and Aave are responsible for billions of dollars in trustless crypto loans, where depositors consistently earn significant yield at a rate far superior to anything possible under the traditional banking framework.
The 2017 bull run was dominated by (largely overvalued) ventures that sought to apply blockchain technology in new and exciting ways. For the most part, these ventures materialized as either vacuous endeavors or tedious solutions to non-existent problems, creating numerous redundancies within the space. But as much of the excess or “fluff” projects died out, the past year has marked a key shift towards powerful application of this blockchain technology, towards redundant or inefficient industries where smart contracts are immediately applicable for direct impact. Asset exchanges and lending, as mentioned above, are two striking examples. Areas like virtual assets and artwork, insurance, Venture Capital, and data exchange are additionally on the cusp of major transformations.
However, the immutable set-and-forget nature of the smart contract building blocks is at odds with the iterative business models they seek to disrupt. And while it’s possible that these contracts can be deployed as perfection on day-zero, reality suggests that these highly experimental projects require some framework for continued maintenance and improvement to be truly sustainable and successful in the long run.
Understanding DAOs
In order to protect the decentralized, trustless nature of applications and protocols, projects that are intended to be upgradable require some hard coded governance framework. In other words, said projects must hardcode some mechanism of ownership to the participants in the project itself.
In many cases, this is most effectively done by situating the project as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). At a high level, a DAO-type project is one that is entirely owned and operated by its participants via tokenized ownership. In order to contribute as an owner of the project, individuals must acquire the project’s token, which grants them access to voting. In a true DAO, all actions are carried out as the result of a majority approval vote. These votes can reflect modifications or upgrades to the project’s underlying smart contracts, mechanisms for revenue sharing, changes to the voting metrics itself, and so on.
When implemented as intended, the DAO framework has radical implications. By connecting ownership and activity as a single-interest participant body, business can be conducted at a level of efficiency not possible under the traditional framework. By automating certain aspects of the business via smart contracts, such as the management and underlying service, marginal costs for said operations reach zero. This cannot be replicated by traditional counterparts.
Today’s DAO Shortcomings
Unfortunately, the aspirational superiorities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations have largely failed to manifest to date. There are several recurring themes that DAOs or otherwise community governed protocols tend to experience:
Apathetic participants
Poorly designed governance
Irreversible day-zero blunders
These themes largely play hand-in-hand, and they are seen almost universally throughout the DAO space and more broadly via decentralized governance. Token ownership guarantees participation, but many token holders never intend to participate. Governance rules and frameworks are often designed on the assumption that holders want to participate. As a result, some immediate assumptions baked into the original contract deployments because launch day errors embedded in the protocol can’t be reversed.
When a DAO is deployed in a proper manner, that does not make it susceptible to the above shortcomings, its superiority against traditional competitors will be irrefutable. Though as of today, that “perfect” DAO has yet to surface.
Governor DAO
Overview
Governor DAO is designed from inception with three primary objectives in mind to:
Incentivize and maximize engagement of all active participants within the Governor ecosystem and attributed projects, partnerships, and networks.
Provide Governance-as-a-Service and every exhaustible extenuating applicable variant to positively benefit and benevolently service the seamless integration of GaaS into the universally underperforming, exponentially developing DAO space; and
Strategically pursue and decisively execute consequential revenue generation throughout every critical stage of project development and reward all attributing benefactors proportionately to contribution.
Incentivized Participation
Perhaps the greatest dilemma DAOs face – almost unilaterally – is a higher barrier to entry for participation. In many cases, the capital required or technical knowhow prices out most of the community. In some organizations, huge capital and keen technical knowledge are the minimum ticket of entry.
Governor’s approach to community governance emphasizes incentivized participation that is accessible to all – ensuring ease of access for all participants.
Of course, there will ultimately be different levels of participation in Governor: the developer team building out various components of the project, passionate community members drafting proposals and participating in competitions, auxiliary support, in way of marketing, business development, and so on.
Additionally, casual community members are equally emphasized through an engagement program for incentivized microtasks. Long-term this will come as an individual Governor App or dApp for your devices to collect micro-data and provide you with direct Ease of Access to all Governor interfaces, products, and services. Immediately, this looks like a buildout on Wix, a lightweight social application, where we can allocate assignments, micro-tasks and quests. Participation in these tasks yields points, which contributes to a level/tier system. Ultimately, these points earned, and levels achieved translate to prizes: GDAO tokens, NFTs, platform privileges, and so on.
Wix is a powerful tool for building out an engaged community with tasks as simple as tweeting about the project, inviting friends, participating in the forums, and so on. Beyond that, assignments and quests can be leveraged for data collection: short surveys reflecting market sentiment, background in crypto, trading tendencies, and so on. All data collection is opt-in and 100% voluntary. The data collected from community members will be compiled into data packages/reports that can be sold via Ocean’s Data Marketplace (and can be additionally leveraged in other capacities).
Ocean has not yet built out a robust library of data sets, which puts Governor DAO in a uniquely desirable position to play an authoritative role in the marketplace. Similar data packages to our project’s capabilities are currently priced on Ocean in the range of thousands of dollars per purchase. Ultimately, this is the power of leveraging the contributions of the entire community: through data collection or otherwise, achieving significant revenue generation through the help of everyone involved which would open up the potential roles of authoritative data aggregators and trusted Data pools. Whereas the integrity of mass data hosts, as of now, is predominately contentious at best. Leveraging an incentivized ecosystem enables long-term growth and maturity for a project, meanwhile providing an avenue through which members may engage in collaborative and meaningful ways -- benefitting the entire community.
Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS)
The aforementioned inherent complications within the infrastructure of DAOs positions Governor DAO as a pioneer in the unfilled niche of Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS).
At the highest level, GaaS refers to the process of leveraging our own merits and technology to bootstrap third party projects. Immediately, this materializes in the form of consulting ‐ working with new projects to port some of our techniques (airdrops, LGE, taxed farms, etc.) so they can position themselves for success at launch.
Additionally, this can evolve and take on the form of an even more comprehensive Unrug-as-a-Service package: working with communities that underwent similar exit scams as our own and helping them to pick up the pieces following the same or similar steps in which Governor DAO has taken. Ultimately, Governance-as-a-Service is a full-fledged governance bootstrap program: utilizing our own highly engaged community to guarantee fair and active participation into governance of third-party DAOs on launch day. This takes the form of an allocation to the Governor treasury and/or an airdrop to GDAO holders (perhaps filtered by addresses recognized as “active voters). Initially, the buildout of Governor DAO will prove the enthusiasm of our immediate community that may be desired by other projects. Beyond that, governance tokens accumulated to the treasury by the GDAO farm taxes (YFI, UNI, SNX, and AAVE) serve as a proof-of-concept for the ability to govern other projects. These tokens were chosen as a test group to utilize for voting and proposal creation directly from the Governor treasury, as dictated by GDAO holders. Upon the successful utilization of these tokens as active participants in governance of their respective platforms, Governor DAO shall provide the same service for other platforms as part of the Governance-as-a-Service package.
In addition to the problems facing virtually all DAOs today, there is precedent to suggest a market to remedy those issues. For example, DeFi Money Market (DMM) DAO allocated 3.75M DMG, to DXdao for help with the DMG crowdsale and governance model. This sum of tokens is valued anywhere from $1M USD at the time of writing and $5M at historical all-time high. The payment was made on July 2nd to the DXdao treasury, but as of time of writing, roughly five months later, DXdao has failed to build out infrastructure for their voters to interact with the DMG tokens that sit stagnant. This highlights that a major market for GaaS exists, despite a lack of service providers.
Internal Governance
Of course, Governor DAO is not immune to the problems outlined that other DAOs have faced. The governance of Governor will be an iterative deployment, from the initial launch as fully centralized to a near future of totally decentralized, 100% DAO ownership.
Ultimately, the GDAO token holders will have complete ownership of treasury and full control of voting. All capital raised and revenue generated by Governor DAO is allocated in full to the treasury. This directly aligns the incentives of GDAO holders with the overarching emphasis of the project to operate as a revenue-generating organization.
However, total control is unrealistic in the initial stages of the project, where much of the supply remains out of circulation. An additional document wholly focused on governance will outline the steps required to go from “now to DAO”, alongside different risks and understandings to make that process as effective and seamless as humanly possible.
GDAO Token
Overview and Token Distribution
The GDAO token grants voting rights in the DAO and ownership of the treasury. There are no limitations to how GDAO holders allocate treasury funds beyond the required consensus. Voting privileges extend through all matters of internal governance. Additionally, GDAO token holders may leverage their tokens as proxy voters on governance issues across any of the third-party governance tokens held by the Governor treasury, including AAVE, SNX, UNI, and YFI. GDAO is a fixed supply, burnable ERC20 token. The total supply of 3,000,000 GDAO was minted at contract deployment, and there is no mechanism to mint additional tokens. There is an internal burn function which may be called to permanently destroy tokens, making GDAO deflationary.
Liquidity Generation Event (LGE)
300 ETH was raised and posted as liquidity alongside 150,000 GDAO tokens (500 GDAO:1 ETH). Participants received a synthetic LP (sLP) token that reflects 1:1 ownership of genuine Uniswap GDAO-ETH LP tokens. When the farms go live, sLP holders will be able to send their sLP to a swap contract to receive the real LP tokens 1:1.
The LGE was enacted in such a way as to reward participants (didn’t swap ETH for GDAO) and lock sufficient initial liquidity until liquidity providers are further incentivized by the farms. The event commenced on November 16th, 2020 and filled out in roughly thirty minutes.
Airdrop
A token snapshot of BREE and SBREE was taken when the developer exit-scammed the project at block 11016190. All stakeholders in the CBDAO ecosystem were accounted for and are entitled to an airdrop claim of GDAO tokens with the following associated rates:
BREE Holder: 1x
BREE Staker: 1.2x
BREE Liquidity Provider: 2x
BREE LP Staker: 2.2x
SBREE Holder: 0.8x
The total airdrop allocation of 1,233,156 GDAO is vested, with a penalty imposed to those who claim before the vesting is complete and a bonus to those who wait the full duration of the vesting period. The process is as follows:
All airdrop recipients are entitled to claim only once - zero exceptions.
Airdrop vesting period begins in early December, 2020.
Day One: 10% of each recipient’s GDAO airdrop is claimable.
For 90 Days: an additional 1% is claimable each day, until the full 100% is realized.
Claiming early forfeits the unclaimed portion of their airdrop.
Unclaimed tokens are treated as follows:
50% is burned
50% is sent to a rewards pool
After 90 days, the rewards pool from early claimers is distributed to airdrop claimants in addition to 100% of their token allocation.
The distribution of the rewards pool is proportionate to each user’s stake.
This airdrop model was designed to incentivize long term supporters, protect interests of those looking to claim their airdrop early, and institute a deflationary mechanism to the GDAO supply.
Airdrop Example
Users A, B, C each have a 1,000 GDAO airdrop claim.
User D has a 2,000 GDAO airdrop claim.
User A claims on Day 1. They receive 100 GDAO (10%) and forfeit the other 900 GDAO.
450 --> burned | 450 --> rewards pool
User B claims on Day 40. They receive 500 GDAO (50%) and forfeit the other 500 GDAO.
250 --> burned | 250 --> rewards pool
User C and D wait the full 90 days to claim. Of the 5,000 GDAO airdrop total, 700 GDAO was burned and 700 was sent to the rewards pool. Not counting the rewards pool, a total of 3,000 GDAO are available for the recipients, representing 100% of their original claim.
User C claims their airdrop and receives all 1,000 GDAO plus 233 GDAO from the rewards pool | (rewards pool) x (share of original airdrop) = (700) x (1,000 ÷ 3,000) ≈ 233.
User D claims their airdrop and receives all 2,000 GDAO plus 467 GDAO from the rewards pool | (rewards pool) x (share of original airdrop) = (700) x (2,000 ÷ 3,000) ≈ 467.
The final distribution is then as follows:
4,300 | GDAO Distributed: 100, 500, 1,233 and 2,467 GDAO, respectively.
700 | Burned: tokens permanently destroyed.
GDAO Farms
A total of 1,200,000 GDAO tokens are allocated to 9 slow, constant drip pools with a 4x boost on those farming the GDAO-ETH LP token in addition to the following single asset staking options: ETH, WBTC, USDC, LINK, YFI, UNI, SNX, and AAVE. All farms carry a 2% fee on deposit which is delivered directly to the Governor DAO treasury. The farms are designed to bootstrap capital to the treasury in a manner that doesn’t require an outright token sale. This approach alleviates legal uncertainty and also allows the free market to determine the fair value of GDAO tokens allocated to the farms. Starting December 22nd, tokens will be rewarded at a rate of roughly 1 GDAO per block, which amounts to just over 6,500 GDAO daily until all 1,200,000 GDAO tokens are rewarded - roughly 180 days after inception.
DAO Reserves
The remaining 416,844 GDAO is allocated to the treasury as DAO reserves to be deployed by GDAO holders. These tokens may be used however the GDAO holders intend: to pay workers, as awards for community competitions, or to incentivize participation for microtasks.
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