CoW DAO Governance Process

Governance Process

This document gives an overview of the CowDAO’s governance processes, and how you can get involved.
It outlines a suggested process for developing and advancing CowDAO Governance Proposals.
The purpose of this process is to garner discussion and help the community to get the needed information and sufficient time in order to review and vote on proposals.
Note: this is a living document intended to be owned, modified and enforced by the Cow Protocol community.

What is Cow DAO

CowDAO is an open organization of developers, traders, market makers and many more community members aligned with its vision. CowDAO is focused on fair and decentralized trading systems - in particular, building, maintaining and advancing the Cow Protocol. Cow Protocol technology powers a network of traders and solvers, enabling trustless and efficient peer-to-peer trading. Leveraging batch auctions as a key concept uniquely positions Cow Protocol as native trading infrastructure for discrete-time settlement layers like Ethereum and enables fair and accessible trading to its users.

Vision

We foresee a future where increasingly all kinds of assets will be tokenized on Ethereum and other decentralized blockchains, where everyone - individuals and collectives - can have full custody of their tokenized assets. CowDAO’s vision is a decentralized future where digital assets can be traded in a fair, efficient and reliable manner among people and communities around the world. Our mission is to build a protocol that becomes the most user friendly and price effective way to exchange digital assets, enabling all users to trade securely and know their trades are protected.
We are determined to make Cow Protocol the foundational liquidity hub for trading digital assets by applying continuous innovation, cultivating intellectual bravery and by expanding the CoW Protocol ecosystem - inviting the brightest minds to join the community.

Forum

CowDAO’s forum is the main venue for governance-related discussion. Signing up for the forum allows community members to post and participate in discussions.

Snapshot

CowDAO’s snapshot space is a simple voting interface that allows users to vote on proposals. Votes on snapshot are weighted by the number of vCOW held or delegated to the address used to vote.

Governance Process

The CowDAO governance process includes two steps for proposals to get approved.

Phase 1: Draft Proposal — Community Discussion (min 7 days)
The purpose of the Draft Proposal phase is to establish formal discussion around a potential proposal.
To create a Draft Proposal please follow these steps:

  • Create a new topic in the Proposals category, using the template pinned to the top of the category.
  • Engage in discussion to build support for the proposal.
  • If your proposal requires any additional on chain interaction by CowDAO, you will need to write the code for your proposal while it is in draft stage. You may wish to wait until the proposal gathers some support before doing this.

Once you are confident the proposal is in a stable state, and at least 7 days have passed since the proposal was first published, you can ask a moderator to move the proposal to phase 2.

Phase 2: Active Proposal — Forum / Snapshot

  • Request that a moderator advance your proposal to a vote by tagging @moderators in a reply.
  • If the proposal has successfully finished phase 1, a moderator will:
    • Assign the proposal a proposal number in the form CIP-###.
    • Change the topic from Draft Proposal to Active Proposal.
    • Create a snapshot vote with a duration of 7 days, and cross link the snapshot and forum post.
    • If your proposal should include an executable transactions, you will now need to provide the proposed transactions to be included in the proposal.
  • Gnosis Safe transaction builder could be used to craft transactions to be included in a proposal.

Governance Parameters

  • Final approval of proposals will be made through vCOW token voting on the cow.eth snapshot space.
  • The required quorum for a CowDAO Improvement Proposal (CIP) to pass is defined by a set limit of 35,000,000 vCOW tokens required to vote YES.
  • Additionally, in order for a proposal to be approved, YES votes should account for >50% of total participating votes. (simple majority)
19 Likes

Will the project team create a vote to unlock vCOW tokens?

3 Likes

Proposed Governance Parameters for CowDAO Launch:
:white_check_mark: CowDAO proposals will be discussed on CowDAO’s dedicated Forum, consisting of two phases: forum discussion and snapshot voting.
:white_check_mark:Final approval of proposals will be made through vCOW token voting on the cow.eth snapshot space that will be deployed upon GIP-13 successfully passing.
:white_check_mark:A maximum amount of 560M vCOW tokens will become available, out of which it is estimated that up to 350m vCOW tokens might be used for voting initially. A quorum is proposed that would require roughly 10% of this supply for approving CowDAO Improvement Proposals (CIP). This is defined by a set limit of 35m COW tokens required to vote YES in order for a proposal to pass.
Additionally, in order for a proposal to be approved, YES votes should account for >50% of total participating votes. (simple majority)

Can we start vote for CowDAO?

7 Likes

The snapshot space will be set up in the coming week

9 Likes

Thank you Chen for quick reply.
What are the voting conditions and how long does it last?

Very exited how the team is doing things and in what direction it is moving! :heart_eyes_cat:

3 Likes

Yeah. Only on ETH mainnet already claimed 270K vCOW so we are ready to the next steps.

1 Like

We have a dashboard to track claiming

We still expect much more people to claim until the end of the claiming period :slightly_smiling_face:
In total there are 560m tokens available for claiming. So we’re only about half way there

6 Likes

nice job ,looking foraward it