Introduction
Transitioning to a decentralized governance model is a necessary step for any mature DeFi protocol. Oikos' journey started two years ago and has taken us on an incredible ride. We are very grateful to the crypto industry as a whole and to our vibrant community: without you, we would not exist.
The path to decentralization started last year, with the integration of Chainlink data feed and Keepers, fundamental pieces of infrastructure for a truly trustless platform. The time has come to fully relinquish control of the protocol to a decentralized body, comprised of stakeholders in the system. This post will outline our strategy to achieve this goal.
Councils
The first step is the establishment of two separate councils, each one tasked with a distinct set of responsibilities:
- Achaean Council
- Treasury Council
The former will be responsible for protocol upgrades, emergency shutdowns, and any other strategic task. The latter will engage with handling rewards from the inflationary supply, liquidity mining programs, and everything that involves the management of financial resources. The Achaean Council consists of 5 seats, occupied by team members and key contributors, while the Treasury council will amount to 9 seats, with members elected from the community. The nomination and election process for the vacant seats will be outlined in a future post.
Each council will be responsible for a multi-signature wallet holding the authority to execute the tasks described above. The Achaean Council controls the protocol multi-sig, which is a 3 of 5 signatures Gnosis Safe, while the Treasury Council will rely on 5 of 9 signatures to enact decisions.
Information about the ceremony event for the creation of the safes and delegation of protocol ownership (phasing out admin key) will be released soon, as well as details about the councils, e.g. salary perceived by members, obligations, etc.
Off-chain voting & ODS
An important step toward composability is the addition of Oikos Debt Shares (ODS), an ERC20 compatible representation of the global debt pool percentage of ownership. ODS makes it easy to integrate with existing tools such as Snapshot. Snapshot is an off-chain voting system where stakers can create and submit proposals (which must be accompanied by an OIP), or vote on existing ones based on their ODS balance. It does not require stakers to pay gas fees and it is completely free and open-source. In order to create a proposal, a staker will need a balance of at least 0.001 ODS. The ENS domain name associated with our official space is Oikos.eth.
Oikos Improvement Proposal (OIP & OCCP)
The recent launch of our OIP portal is a considerable step toward establishing a collaborative framework that is both efficient and streamlined. As an active member of the community, all you have to do is stay informed and remember to vote on active proposals. Of course, it does help to understand how these are submitted and processed. Here is how it works:
1) A member of the community presents their ideas in the Discord governance channel and gauges community interest.
2) If the community is receptive, the author will submit a new OIP via Github. The draft OIP then moves through the process of review by the Council.
3) The author is then interviewed by the Council (a transcript will be made available) and if approved at this stage, the OIP is assigned a core contributor to assist with a feasibility study and gauge the impact on the system.
4) If the outcome is positive, the OIP is voted on by the Council in the Oikos Snapshot Space. If approved, the OIP is implemented and deployed to production.
Key contributors and OIP editors will be eligible for councils nomination and will receive generous rewards. OCCP stands for Oikos Configuration Change Proposal, a standard to make a case for modifying a protocol configuration variable. The bodies involved in avn OCCP are typically the OIP editors and the Oikos team. We invite the community to familiarize themselves with the process here.
Join our Discord community if you have any questions or want to submit a new idea. Follow us on Twitter!
