Update on CoW DAO Recognized Delegates Program

Governance Delegates
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Dear CoW DAO Community,

We’re pleased to provide an update on the nomination process for what we previously called the CoW DAO Delegate Council. Based on our review process and community feedback, we’ve made some important changes and decisions.

Program Name Change
The grants committee has reviewed all applications. We’re pleased to announce that all applicants have met our criteria and will be welcomed as Recognized Delegates. This inclusive approach aligns with our goal of fostering diverse representation within our governance structure.

Application Update
We received 11 applications for the delegate program, demonstrating strong interest from our community in shaping the future of CoW DAO.

Grants Committee Insights
The grants committee has reviewed all applications. We’re pleased to announce that all applicants have met our criteria and will be welcomed as Recognized Delegates. This inclusive approach aligns with our goal of fostering diverse representation within our governance structure.

List of Recognized Delegates
We are excited to introduce our initial cohort of Recognized Delegates:

  1. Bigpapa
  2. Dean Eigenmann
  3. Eylon
  4. Joel
  5. Curia Lab
  6. kubesqrt
  7. Chim9
  8. Karpatkey
  9. MasterMojo
  10. Blockworks Research
  11. middleway.eth
  12. yvesfracari

Please note that submissions for Recognized Delegates will remain open after the launch, allowing for continued community participation and representation.

Governance Working Group
In addition to their delegate responsibilities, the initial cohort of Recognized Delegates will be invited to participate in a governance working group. The goal of this group is to continuously iterate and improve CoW DAO governance, ensuring our processes remain effective and aligned with community needs.

Next Steps

  1. We invite each delegate to introduce themselves in the comments below, sharing their vision and approach to representation.
  2. Each delegate will create their delegate profile on the Snapshot delegate dashboard, (Detailed instructions will be provided soon), and receive a dedicate “Recognized Delegate” badge.
  3. Update to CoW DAO’s snapshot settings is being worked on in this repository, intended to introduce split delegation strategy, update CoW DAO’s snapshot space with the new branded icon, and update the oSnap plugin to the newest version adding tenderly simulations.
  4. Once the update is ready, a proposal will be posted to implement the new changeds to CoW DAO’s Snapshot settings.
  5. In parallel, a delegation campaign is being worked on to launch after the new registry is implemented and Recognized Delegates have introduced themselves.

Community Engagement
We encourage all community members to engage with our Recognized Delegates. Read their introductions in the comments, ask questions, and consider their perspectives as you make delegation decisions.

Thank you for your continued support and participation in shaping the future of our community.

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Curia Delegate Platform

Contact & Delegation Address Information

Introduction

Curia Lab is a team of seasoned DAO governance researchers, data analysts, blockchain engineers, and developers, dedicated to strengthening the DAO ecosystem through specialized tools, insights, and delegate services.

Delegate Motivation

We are excited about the prospect of joining CoW DAO and contributing to its mission of creating a fairer, more protective financial system. Curia Lab is committed to active governance participation within the CoW DAO community. Our engagement is centered on fostering meaningful involvement to support the growth and evolution of CoW DAO and its innovative trading products like CoW Swap, CoW Protocol, and MEV Blocker.

Areas of Expertise

Curia Lab seeks to support CoW DAO’s vision of a decentralized future where digital assets can be traded fairly, efficiently, and securely. We are committed to contributing our expertise in governance and data analysis by leveraging our hands-on experience in protocol governance to enhance decision-making processes, promoting transparency within CoW DAO, and providing data-driven insights to inform strategies and improve the user experience on CoW DAO.

Conflicts of Interest

As a team deeply involved in governance research and DAO operations, we collaborate with various projects and DAOs including Optimism, Safe, Arbitrum, Zksync, etc. to improve their governance. We pledge to maintain transparency and manage any potential conflicts of interest responsibly, ensuring our dealings with CoW DAO remain unbiased and in the best interest of the community.

Waiver of Liability

By delegating to Curia for CoW DAO governance, delegates acknowledge that Curia will participate on a best-effort basis and will not be liable for any damages related to this participation.

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middleway.eth

  • Wallet Address: 0xA11DA8B2D9A7883eb636d7de426025e5fD9fda1A
  • Point of contact: TG: @Che_gev, Discord: middleway.eth, Twitter: middleway_eth
  • Amount of COW Tokens intended for Self-Delegation: 10,000 COW tokens

Experience

Extensive experience in blockchain ecosystems, particularly in decentralized governance and community engagement. Expertise spans across DeFi protocols, token economics, and ecosystem development.

Involvement in the CoW ecosystem

Deeply involved in the CoW ecosystem since its launch in 2022, building on prior experiences with dxDAO and Gnosis DAO. As a core contributor to CoW Swap, played a key role in ecosystem development and partnerships. Notable contributions include:

  • Helping establish CoW DAO’s grants program
  • Contributing to ecosystem growth through partnerships and community initiatives
  • Active participation in governance discussions and proposal development

Delegate motivation

Long-standing commitment to the CoW ecosystem. Believes experience and deep understanding of the protocol’s goals can contribute significantly to informed decision-making and community representation. Passionate about fostering a vibrant, decentralized ecosystem. Aims to represent the core team working on CoW Protocol and CoW DAO.

Conflicts of interest

Currently part of the CoW grants committee, which is involved in evaluating Recognized Delegate applications. Commits to excluding self from the decision process regarding own application.

Additional information

To demonstrate commitment to decentralization and fair representation:

  • Will self-delegate 10,000 COW tokens bought from the open market
  • Will delegate any airdrop and team allocations to other delegates to help with delegate voting power distribution
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Hiya - I posted another succession of this as a new CIP: CIP-Draft: Delegation Program Initiation & Snapshot Settings Update

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karpatkey Delegate Platform

Expertise and Experience:

  1. Relevant Expertise: karpatkey is a DeFi-native organisation specialising in professional DAO finance through industry-leading research and tooling since 2020. We’ve been working with GnosisDAO, Balancer, ENS, AAVE and Lido on financial planning, operations, and strategy, diversifying their treasuries into sustainable portfolios of DeFi investments designed to support DAOs in executing their missions.
  2. Previous Involvement in the CoW Ecosystem: Under CIP-19 , karpatkey created, trained, supported, and audited a Core Treasury Team within CoW DAO that works jointly with us to develop CoW DAO’s treasury, allowing CowSwap to efficiently provide its own liquidity, fund its operations, development, and evolution while optimising yield for idle funds. Besides that, we are an active governance member within CoWDAO.

Motivation:

We’ve been advocates of delegated voting in DAO governance as a viable solution to improve the legitimacy, inclusivity, and effectiveness of decision-making processes. However, the efficacy of this system is highly dependent on having domain experts actively involved as delegates. It fosters a symbiotic relationship between all stakeholders, optimising the quality of collective decisions and reinforcing the democratic underpinnings of DAOs.karpatkey’s governance team taps our network of engineers, DeFi strategists, data/financial/quant analysts, and accountants for subject matter expertise.

As DAO treasury developers and contributors to some of the most reputable DeFi protocols in our industry, we believe that our team has the knowledge, trust, and alignment to meaningfully contribute to CoWDAO’s growth moving forward. Check out our values to understand a bit more about our guiding and decision-making principles. We differentiate ourselves by being a hands-on delegate, actively leveraging our unique position in assembling a DeFi block of DAOs with similar values.

Conflict of Interest:

We currently work with CoWDAO’s Core Treasury Team and, if any conflict of interest regarding this arises, we will communicate in advance.

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Tané Delegate Platform

Delegate Address: tanegov.eth / 0xB79294D00848a3A4C00c22D9367F19B4280689D7
Twitter: x.com
Website: https://tanelabs.com
Discord: tksohishi
Telegram: takeshi55555

Introduction

Tané is formed with a group of crypto-native product builders, based in Tokyo, Dubai and New York. We are backed by SoftBank, and Japanese tech giants like DeNA, GREE, MIXI.

Our investment arm has invested in and supported various innovating projects that contribute to the decentralized society enabled by the new blockchain technology. Our network operation entity started directly contributing to the ecosystem by being node operators for the core infrastructures and protocols that make Web3 move forward and contributors to the DAOs that manage them. We have been active as delegates in Arbitrum, Optimism, Lido and more.

Takeshi, Head of Network Operations, who worked for Twitter as a senior software engineer and for SmartNews, a Japanese unicorn startup that provides a news aggregation mobile app with 30M MAU as a product manager, is the main representative of the account.

Motivation

We believe we can contribute to the CoW DAO in unique and meaningful ways, and help Cow DAO achieve its mission of helping users to trade securely by protecting the exchange of digital assets from MEV and providing user-friendly experience.

Tech-savvy delegate

Our unique experience and expertises in the tech industries as product builders (entrepreneurs, software engineers, and product managers) should be able to contribute to critical feedback and comments on technical upgrades and issues to be discussed and implemented by collaborating with CoW contributors and external parties.

Japan representative

There are many users and traders using crypto products in Japan, but there are no prominent delegates who actively participate in and contribute to DAO governance from Japan yet. We are aiming to be the one who represents the Japanese users and token holders by being active in the governance, leveraging the partnership with Japanese enterprises and making meaningful impacts on the protocols and the ecosystem.

Values and Decision-Making Approach

We have established our Delegate Core Values as below and demonstrated our delegate activities and decision makings based on them.

Integrity

We value integrity a lot. We believe integrity is the most important virtue even in the industry that values trustless and permissionless. In fact, even though we should aim for governance minimization in the end, the protocols should still need governance and it requires capable and sincere participants. We should be the one of them.

Diversity

Diversity is one of the most important values to achieve decentralization. We are very unique in various perspectives including the geographical diversity (Japan and Asia). We also value diversities provided by other actors and are willing to appreciate them and collaborations with them.

Practicality

We believe in the progressive decentralization. While considering the decentralization is the ultimate goal for crypto/blockchain projects to achieve, we sometimes value practicality and approaches that get things done rather than getting stuck in pursuing the “decentralization” too much from the start.

Transparency

We believe transparency is the vital trait in the decentralized systems. We communicate our findings, feedback, opinions, disagreements and praises in a clear and constructive manner. We believe transparent communications should lead to better discussions and decisions to thrive.

Disclosures

Our investment arm, as a separate entity, has invested in a number of crypto startups but as of the time of writing this profile, we don’t believe there are clear COIs in terms of contributing to CoW DAO. We are also active in the other DAOs, Arbitrum, Optimism (S6 Grants Council member), Uniswap, Lido and more in the future.

We will update our voting activities and rationales behind them in this thread. Please reach out to us anytime when you have any opinions/comments/feedback.

You can also check out our voting activities related to CoW DAO from our internal tracker.

Waiver of Liability

By delegating to Tané, you acknowledge and agree that Tané will participate on a best-efforts basis and will not be liable for any damages related to participation in CoW DAO or its products.

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