Editorial
This newsletter is named after a colloquial American phrase defined best as “an event, typically a sports contest, that is very exciting or intense.” While you won’t see the core team suiting up for a dunk contest any time soon, we did find ourselves in quite a barnburner last week with the Bancor whitelisting process. The process requires a 40% quorum of vBNT holders to participate, so despite the overwhelming support for the governance proposal, the decision came down to the final minutes as we squeaked by with a 40.29% turnout. With this outcome, the Bancor community is effectively subsidizing $BOND liquidity on the Bancor single-sided AMM with up to 1,000,000 BNT - the equivalent of ~$7.7M at the time of writing.
Over the past week, we’ve had the opportunity to reflect a bit more on the lessons learned from this experience. The following points are ones we’ve discussed internally, as well as on last Saturday’s open forum call in the BarnBridge Discord with Bancor’s Mark Richardson.
Business development and lobbying are one and the same for crypto networks: In traditional Web2.0 social networks and two-side marketplaces, not only are a platform’s users and its investors two distinct stakeholder groups, but its competitive moat is also largely decided by the former. That is not the case in crypto, where the nature of protocol and application tokens is such that investors wind up being some of a given platform’s most significant users. The implications of this in a world where there are hundreds of meaningful crypto networks and applications is that your growth strategy needs to account for the existing investments, grudges, and alliances that exist throughout this universe. We saw the two sides of this reality as we were lobbying for votes over the course of the previous week.
Successful DAO treasuries will lean into political realities:This experience showed us that needing to rely entirely on third parties to push our community’s agenda on exogenous governance votes is a weakness worth addressing. It is now clear to us that as DeFi grows increasingly complex and intertwined, it will obligate protocol communities to amass strategic voting power in their key dependencies. We’re currently exploring the best ways to go about this, as DAO resources could be used for any combination of liquidity mining participation, quid pro quo token swaps, or even vote-duration loans. As for which governance arenas are most relevant to BarnBridge, a barbell approach seems to be the most likely: amass voting power in the apps we plug into today, and preemptively identify the nascent apps we want to have a say in, in the future. I would say this will be a top priority going forward and I’m excited to see our community’s discussions on the topic.
There is significant room for growth when it comes to the crypto governance UX: Coordinating governance between a community Discord, a community forum, a DAO user interface, and a Snapshot Signal page is tough (that’s part of the reason BarnBurner exists!). Doing so between all of those venues for different projects is pretty much untenable. As the value of metaprotocol governance only increases from here on out, I’m very bullish on governance aggregation at the user experience level. We’ve been really impressed with what the team at boardroom.info are building and think their vision of the future of crypto governance is right on the mark: voter profiles, cross-protocol governance views, and chain-committed records of governance discussions are all going to be critical building blocks.
All of this is to say, the lines between governance and protocol growth are growing increasingly blurred, and we’re excited to hammer out a more formalized strategy going forward.
Cheers,
Governance Update
The community is currently voting on whether to fund the creation of a pilot governance initiative entitled the Integrations Team. The three-person team, composed of Pavlo and two vetted members of the Discord community, would be tasked with acting as a liaison between the community and the core team, as well as implementing successful governance proposals related to items not on the core BarnBridge roadmap. We view this as an opportunity to battle test specific process flows, standards, and norms that’ll come to inform the eventual end state of BarnBridge governance, in which the DAO delegates responsibilities and funds to a variety of thematic councils and ad hoc teams. You can find the SnapShot vote here and the previous forum discussion here; voting ends this weekend.
With the Integration Team in place, expect future editions of BarnBurner to have deeper updates on this front.
Key Metrics
This week was an exciting one with the launch of $BOND incentives for junior SMART Yield holders, and the ever-trusty 0xBoxer didn’t disappoint with their updated BarnBridge Dune Analytics dashboard to cover the action.
On SMART Yield:
On $BOND:
Disclaimer: BarnBurner is not an official BarnBridge publication and is not meant to reflect the shared views of its core team or BOND token holders. BarnBurner is an educational weekly newsletter meant to share updates on technical and governance-related happenings that occur within the BarnBridge ecosystem. The content herein is not financial advice and readers should not base any investment decisions off of it.