Welcome to the Flipside Governance Team recap! Here’s a weekly summary of heady governance activity, our hard-hitting research & data analysis, and key news stories across the broader governance space.

Team Highlights 🚨

• Welcome Issy: Our team is growing! Isabel, our new Co-Op, joined this week and will be focusing on Research for her six month stint.
• Fig in Paris: Fig will be in Paris for the Ethereum Community Conference 5 (EthCC) from July 19th to July 21st. If you’re around, please reach out (@francisgowen) to meet up!
• Raph the Organizooor: Raphael organized the MakerDAO Decentralized Voter Committee call which brought on Robert from the Collateral Services Engineering CU to speak on opportunities and coordination for collateral services.

Our Research and Content ✏️

• Oh, Snap! Setting up Snapshot Voting for Metagovernance: Raphael walks through our efforts to become more transparent and sophisticated through introducing a system to our governance efforts (a way to govern our governance, aka metagovernance). Learn from our experience launching a token, setting up Snapshot, and implementing voting strategies in this piece.
• The Problem With Anons: Accountability in Web3: Fig’s first Op-Ed piece outlines the problems (and some positives) to anon culture in Web3. Read his (hot) take about the negative impacts on adoption and accountability due to this trend. No offense anons!

Across the Industry: Governance News of the Week 📰

• StarkWare Confirms Launch of StarkNet Token: The token (10B tokens minted initially) is a step towards decentralizing the protocol and will allow supporters and contributors to play a role in governance. Additionally, the token will be required for payment of transaction fees on StarkNet and participation in StarkNet’s consensus mechanism.
• Gnosis Safe Raises $100M and Rebrands to Safe: The popular DAO tooling and infrastructure provider enables secure management of digital assets, data and identity across DAOs, retail and institutional investors. The strategic funding round, led by 1kx, will enable Safe to continue growing an ecosystem of applications and tools on top of its protocol.
• Marinade DAO Executes Token Exchange Program: The Token Exchange Program will allow Marinade to exchange a total of 9.835M MNDE for 483k USDC and 500k SLND (an additional 1.2M MNDE will be distributed to SOL stakers). The exchange is the next step in decentralizing the DAO by giving key builders — Raydium, Solend, Port Finance and others — a vested interest in the future of the protocol.

Flipside Governance | Analysis of the Week 📊

The team published a MakerDAO Dashboard to track changes in the demographics of MKR Holders over the last year (Jul 2021–2022). The below table shows that the number of MKR holders has increased by 8.63K.

The bar chart on the right shows that the percentage of MKR tokens held by CEXs, DEXs, and DeFi has dropped by ~5% while the percentage held by user addresses has increased by ~5%.

The below pie charts show that the voting power among top ten holders has become more distributed. Note — the largest bucket is the Maker Governance Contract.

Flipside Governance Activity 📜

The Flipside team voted in quite a few proposals this week, highlighted by another RWA vault onboarding proposal for MakerDAO. Here’s a recap of the proposals we voted on and the rationale for our votes:

If you are interested in joining the Flipside Governance team, please email us at [email protected] or ping @avimeyers on Twitter.