Balancer

This proposal also appears on Balancer’s forum.

For reference, here’s the current overview of our governance process.

In an effort to further decentralize, Balancer Labs is stepping away from the process and handing it over to the community. There’s three elements to the handoff:

1. Moving snapshot admin to a community representative

2. Ceding control of the snapshot ENS

3. Passing the burden of determining when soft consensus has been reached

I will present my suggestions for how the community moves forward on this. My goal is to start a dialogue so please do not hesitate to question anything and everything or offer up alternative ideas.

1. I have experience managing snapshot admin, so I humbly put myself forward as a volunteer to take the admin. I will remove the existing addresses capable of putting a proposal to snapshot and replace them with the addresses of the five full time Ballers - me, bakamoto, andrea, xeonus, and Mike B.

2. I suggest setting the governance multisig as controller of the ENS. The only function they will perform is changing the admin, which should not happen often if ever. This multisig contains many high profile and trusted names in the ethereum community and is the safest place to put the ENS in my opinion.

3. I propose creating a “gov council” of the five full time Ballers mentioned above. A majority vote in favor would be required before a proposal can be posted to snapshot. I can create a discord channel that is public read-only where the five of us will discuss if a proposal has reached soft consensus. It is extremely important to understand that it is not a question of if any of the five personally are in favor of a proposal, but that the community has reached a soft consensus to proceed. For example, if I personally oppose something but it is clear from forum discussion that most people are in favor, I would be obligated to vote in favor of the proposal going to snapshot.

Additionally, I suggest adding a requirement that each proposal include a forum poll as another signaling device we can use. It is gameable of course, but still a valuable input to have I think.

For a snapshot proposal to be considered valid & binding, it must be open for voting for at least three full days and announcements of the vote must be posted to the official @BalancerLabs Twitter account AND in the #announcements channel of Balancer’s discord. These announcements must be made with no less than 24 hours remaining in the vote.