DAO Governance

At BanklessDAO, decisions regarding governance, treasury, projects, and proposals are made through a democratic process. BANK holders ratify decisions through off-chain votes held on the voting software, Snapshot. Any BANK holder can vote in a Snapshot. The more tokens a user has, the more voting power they possess.

While some funding decisions are formally ratified through Snapshot, most other routine decision-making happens informally in our Discord channels, our Forum posts, and our voice rooms through the following increasing levels of consensus.

Gauging Support Governance starts with soft consensus and progresses towards formal consensus through three stages. The first stage is to gauge support from the community via the Discord server. This can happen through polls in the dedicated “poll” channel. Polls should include detailed descriptions of the issue at hand and allow for varied options beyond a basic yes or no. E.g. “Like the idea but needs improvement” or "Keep things the way they are.”

Formal Proposals If the community has expressed support and interest in the previous step, the next step is to draft a formal proposal. Proposals fall into one of two categories and correspond to the following templates:

Grants Request Improvement Proposals (bDIP) As the names suggest, the Grants Request proposal template should be used to request funds and the bDIP template should be used to propose changes to the contents of this document. Approved bDIPs result in official changes to this handbook and redistribution to the community with appropriately updated semantic versioning numbering where:

Major = Changes incompatible with previous versions [X.y.z] Minor = Changes that expand but remain compatible with previous versions [x.Y.z] Patch = Clarifying or grammatical changes that don’t materially alter substance [x.y.Z]

Formal proposals should be posted on the BanklessDAO Forum under the appropriate category and feedback and comments should be responded to by proposal authors. To maximize visibility and transparency, proposal authors should also be available in Community Calls to discuss the details of the proposals under consideration.

Forum voting leverages one vote per user and is not token-weighted or gated. Forum proposals require 70% approval to pass to successive stages of governance. Proposals must be posted for one week unless the request exceeds 1M BANK. In these instances, they must be posted for two weeks. Forum quorum is the minimum number of voters that need to be present for the vote to be valid and is listed in the following table. For example, if your Forum post is asking for 50,000 BANK or less, only 25 voters need to cast their votes for the vote to be valid.

Requested Bank Forum Quorum < 50k BANK 25 50k - 250k BANK 31 250k - 500k BANK 40 500k - 1M BANK 51 /> 1M BANK 63 Governance (Major) 63 Governance (Minor) 51 Governance (Patch) 40 [See Snapshot]

Snapshot Vote The final step in the governance process is a Snapshot vote. Snapshot is an off-chain token voting tool. If a proposal has met the required quorum and approval threshold on the Forum, it will progress to a DAO-wide Snapshot vote. Snapshot proposals run for 7 days and require >66% approval. If the passing proposal is a Grants Request, DAO treasury multi-signers will be prompted to initiate the transaction in accordance with the passed proposal request. If the passing proposal is a bDIP, OpsGuild will be prompted to update the Constitution and Community Handbook source in version control and a new version of the Handbook will be made available to the community.