To participate to the CoW DAO governance it is necessary to hold or a be a delegated to anyone who holds vCOW or COW on Mainnet or Gnosis chains. Since the protocol was recently deployed on Arbitrum and Base, the token was bridged to these chains as well. In that sense, we allow the holders on these chains to also participate on the governance.
Motivation
As possible to see on that Dune Query, a small proportion of the tokens are holder on these chains, however, the holders should still have the same rights as the ones on the other chains.
Specification
Update the snapshot voting strategy to include the erc20-balance-of strategy for holders of COW on Arbitrum and Base. The address of the token on each chain a
We believe this proposal is a great step forward for CoW DAO! Including Arbitrum and Base token holders in governance ensures fairness and inclusivity, which are core principles of our community. Removing barriers like this is critical for improving the decentralization of governance as we continue to grow and evolve.
This is an excellent proposal. I can confirm that there has been growing traction for $COW on the newest networks where CoW Protocol was deployed in 2024. Cumulatively, on Arbitrum and Base, there are now over 8,000 $COW holders who could participate in governance and further enhance the decentralization of COW DAO.
Thank you all for the support and specially @middleway.eth for the instructions, here is the PR. FYI I had to change all strategies to the erc20-balance-of-with-delegation because of the limit of 8 strategies per space.
I am waiting for a review/approve on the PR, after that this update will be ready. @c3rnst mentioned that a small RFP can be created for this. I will send a message on the discord about it
Hey - thanks for following up. Indeed, so generally the problem is that Snapshot PRs are very difficult to review and a simple snapshot change is hard to validate.
In theory, it does not need the core team because anyone could propose this to the DAO, though I am doubtful how useful this is because even a simple change can break a lot. A peer review would be super helpful:
maybe someone who is good with Snapshot PRs can review this: could this be outsourced via a grant, possibly?
I think taking a stab at a RFP might be nice, it could even include wider things regarding snapshot reviews… just an idea.
Fabien here from Snapshot Labs. I looked at the PR with the settings changes and can confirm everything looks good and will work fine with the new chains added.
There is just one thing I wanted to mention: with these new settings, delegators won’t be able to “override” their delegate’s vote anymore. Right now if someone delegates to you and you vote, they can still come in later and take back their voting power by voting themselves. The new setup won’t support that.
Overriding strategies will soon be part of our Pro plan and won’t be accessible for Basic spaces, as they can get really intensive in terms of computation and require a large amount of RPC and subgraph requests. If you’d like to keep the overriding ability, I recommend moving to Snapshot Pro. You can learn more about Pro here: https://snapshot.box/#/s:cow.eth/pro
Thanks for the comment Fabien. In my opinion, the Snapshot Pro plan isn’t needed yet for CoW DAO, but would love to change this later.
@c3rnst for the PR merging, we need to get a review from someone with write access on the protocol. Can you ask for someone to review it based on the Fabien comment? Also, should I move this proposal to snapshot voting or should I wait to the approve there?
CoW Protocol was deployed on Avalanche yesterday and is expected to launch on Polygon soon.
I think it’d be a missed opportunity to not include those networks in the strategy change.
Having said that, I think the proposal is almost ready for moving into the voting phase.
One last important step is following the instructions here, uploading the new settings file to ipfs and crafting the transaction that should be executed from CoW DAO to update the ENS text records to point to this new file.
Once this transaction is available for review, the proposal will be ready for moving into the voting phase.
Thank you @yvesfracari for proposing this CIP-Draft to add new chains to DAO Snapshot Voting Strategies.
This is key to ensuring CoW governance mechanisms are as inclusive as possible for all CoW token holders. While the initial focus on Arbitrum and Base was entirely justified given the protocol’s deployments at that time, developments continue at a rapid pace within the CoW ecosystem. It has become clear that this current proposal, as drafted, is now outdated.
We agree with @middleway.eth on the inclusion of Avalanche and Polygon in the revised proposal and support moving toward a formal snapshot vote.
Avalanche doesn’t have COW token deployed, but I totally agree with adding Polygon, so I will modify the specification part of the proposal for:
Specification
Update the snapshot voting strategy to include the erc20-balance-of strategy for holders of COW on Arbitrum and Base. The address of the token on each chain is:
Note: CoW Protocol was deployed on the Avalanche as well, but the COW token was not created on the chain.
For applying these changes, a code modification has to be made on the cowprotocol/snapshot-settings. Currently, two kinds of strategies per token (erc20-balance-of and erc20-balance-of-delegation) are being used, summing a total of 8 strategies, which is the total of strategies allowed on the standard plan. To add the 3 new tokens, we would also change all the strategies to erc20-balance-of-with-delegation to accommodate all the new tokens. However, it is important to understand that the behavior of this will be slightly different, as explained by @bonustrack
There is just one thing I wanted to mention: with these new settings, delegators won’t be able to “override” their delegate’s vote anymore. Right now, if someone delegates to you and you vote, they can still come in later and take back their voting power by voting themselves. The new setup won’t support that. Overriding strategies will soon be part of our Pro plan and won’t be accessible for Basic spaces, as they can get really intensive in terms of computation and require a large amount of RPC and subgraph requests. If you’d like to keep the overriding ability, I recommend moving to Snapshot Pro. You can learn more about Pro here: https://snapshot.box/#/s:cow.eth/pro
With all that in mind, here is the PR to make the modification on the cowprotocol/snapshot-settings repository.