As OpenZeppelin’s Security Adviser to the DAO, I’d like to emphasize the importance of two mandates in this proposal.
Increase Governance Participation
- Initial: Develop and launch a campaign to encourage delegation and increase participation for current and new delegates.
- Ongoing: Updates, incentives, and metrics-based strategy adjustments to maintain and grow active governance participants.
It’s absolutely crucial that Compound maintain an active delegate community that regularly votes, participates in forum discussions, attends community calls and provides regular feedback to vendors such as OpenZeppelin, Gauntlet and Alpha Growth. OpenZeppelin has already experienced at least one of our payment proposals failing to hit quorum due to participation issues. We should ensure that protocol operations don’t suffer similar disruptions at critical moments when passing proposals to address potential security and financial risks.
Protect Against Malicious Proposals
- Initial: Ensure delegates review proposals to prevent malicious proposals from passing and maintain a quorum level that helps secure the DAO.
- Ongoing: Identify new threats and vulnerabilities while providing recommendations on improving the efficiency, resilience, and scalability of the Compound governance system.
The dangers of malicious proposals is an ever-present risk for DAOs which was made more apparent for Compound in light of the goldCOMP proposal and a large mystery delegate that OpenZeppelin has recently identified. It’s incredibly important that we have an active number of delegates that scrutinize proposals, even if OpenZeppelin has already reviewed them, to ensure that they align with the expectations of community stakeholders that have the protocol’s best long-term interests in mind.
Overall, OpenZeppelin prefers to remain neutral on the question of how these programs are funded and defers to other community members such as @arr00 and @allthecolors on any budgetary critiques. We would just emphasize that these governance challenges be addressed in a timely manner and that one early deliverable for the program be a framework to define the metrics of success for achieving long-term governance sustainability and that it receive community feedback and acceptance before any future programs are approved or additional funding is allocated.