Author(s): Push DAO Council

Simple Summary

This proposal seeks to make changes to Push DAO’s governance in order to improve sybil resistance and the threat of potential governance attacks. The changes that will be included in this proposal include the ability of the DAO Council to veto any votes they deem to be detrimental to the DAO and the implementation of a dynamic quorum mechanism that will allow the governance of the DAO to proceed even when DAO participants lack sufficient voting power.

Abstract

The first Push Governance Upgrade will give the current Push DAO Council the ability to veto any votes they deem as malicious or detrimental to the DAO. The veto function will work as a non-participation clause. This means that the DAO Council can veto any vote that they do not participate in. The threshold for non-participation will be ⅘, meaning that if 4 of the 5 DAO Council members do not participate in any given vote, it is considered non-binding.

The second function of this proposal is to introduce a dynamic quorum to Push Governance. Dynamic quorum will assist us all in ensuring that votes can go through, even when there is less than sufficient voting power amongst DAO participants. The dynamic quorum mechanism will kick in whenever a vote does not meet the current quorum of 600,000 PUSH. When this condition is not met, we will use participation as a metric to determine a successful vote. The participation threshold will be 10 unique voting wallets with at least 1,000 PUSH tokens.

Motivation

The DAO Council veto power will serve as a security function for the DAO, ensuring that the governance and the integrity of the DAO can be safeguarded at all times. As we have seen in the recent Compound governance attack, there is always the possibility of a malicious attack on governance by whales with outsized voting power. The veto function effectively allows the DAO Council to serve as a security council similar to other large DAOs like Arbitrum DAO. As Push governance is not yet on-chain, this will serve as an intermediate solution to be updated as the DAO and its capabilities grow.

Dynamic quorum will allow Push governance to proceed even when the community does not have sufficient voting power. The current quorum for Push Governance is set at 1% of the circulating supply, or ~ 600,000+ PUSH tokens. Given that Push DAO is still in its nascent stages, many community members do not have sufficient voting power to consistently allow votes to reach quorum. This leads to a lot of wasted time and votes due to not reaching quorum (The Grants Council election, for example, had to be re-run 3 times). This can lead to a lot of delays in a DAO, which, by its decentralized nature, is already slow-moving. Dynamic Quorum will allow for participation as a quorum metric to kick in whenever a vote does not reach a quorum. The participation threshold will be set at 10 unique voting wallets with at least 1,000 PUSH tokens in voting power.

Specification

This proposal is completely non-technical, and the changes proposed will take place after this proposal has passed. There is also no financial cost to this proposal, and it is purely a change to the current Push DAO governance system.

The DAO Council will be given the ability to veto any votes they deem malicious or detrimental to the DAO via non-participation. This includes if a quorum is reached through one or more whales engineering it to be so and the DAO Council believes that the direction of the vote is detrimental to the well-being of Push DAO and its community. And the dynamic quorum mechanism will begin being observed as soon as this proposal passes.