Aave Guardian Update

[HelloShreyas]

Update (Sept 24)

We have an amazing set of candidates for the Aave Guardian. We want to move the process faster to deploy Aave Protocol on Avalanche. Interested candidates should respond to this post by 10 am UTC on Saturday, Sept 25. After this, we will put up a Snapshot vote for the community to elect 10 Guardian members.

Summary

• Allow the Guardian to temporarily hold keys of new deployments of the Aave Protocol on L2 (or otherwise) while the technical implementations for Aave Governance to control such deployment on those networks is finalized (i.e., a protocol governance bridge).
• Rel-elect 10 members of the Aave Guardian. If you are interested in being a member of Aave Guardian, please respond to this post with your background, involvement in Aave, and interest in the role.

Proposer

@HelloShreyas and Aave Grants DAO

Rationale

What Is the Guardian:

As discussed here, the Guardian was established as a community multisig to protect against potential governance takeovers by centralized actors.

It was always intended that Aave governance would replace the current members through a vote, but no such proposal for this replacement vote has been made to date. Given the community’s interest in ensuring deployments of the Aave Protocol on various other networks (e.g., Polygon) and that bridges must be built from bridges to Aave governance, we believe it is an ideal time for governance to elect new Guardian members to be part of the Guardian multisig.

Enhanced responsibilities of the Guardian:

Currently, the Guardian only is intended to act as a “veto” on malicious attacks on the Aave Protocol through governance votes by centralized actors.

However, the Guardian — comprised of community members — also should have the ability to hold the admin keys to any new deployment of the Aave Protocol on other networks while technical solutions are being built to ensure that Aave Governance can control all deployments of the protocol, regardless of the network on which they’re running.

This additional responsibility is necessary because governance bridge infrastructure (i.e., cross-chain governance smart contracts) to control the Aave Protocol on other networks may not be ready at deployment time. Any deployment of the requires an Ethereum address to hold certain permissions on the pool, to later on be transferred to the Aave Governance on Ethereum. Considering that the Aave community actively supports expansion of the protocol to other networks, it will be useful for all future deployments to have a community multi-sig composed by reputable members of the Aave community as holders of the different permissions of the deployment.

New Members:

There are currently 10 members of the Guardian multisig, but we would like to re-elect all 10 positions from among the community. If existing members want to be part of the multisig, they need to re-apply.

We believe community members should come forward to express their interest in being a member of the Guardian multisig and should make a case for why they are well-situated to take on this role.

Any community member can respond publicly to this forum post to express interest in taking on this role. Please share your background, your involvement with Aave, and why you would be a fit for this responsibility. The community member should also provide a proposal regarding their ability and interest in being a member of the Guardian multisig.

To encourage censorship resistance we recommend the community to not have more than 3 key holders from the same jurisdiction.

Process for voting in New Guardian Members:

Once all proposals for new Guardian members have been submitted, the Grants DAO will publish a Snapshot highlighting interested members and providing background on the proposal submitted by those individuals.

Governance can then vote to elect the next members of the Guardian through the Snapshot.

[fcmartinelli]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to offer my help here. I’m Fernando, co-founder of Balancer Protocol and CEO of Balancer Labs.

Balancer and AAVE have been close partners for a long time and I’m excited with all the cool stuff we will still build together. I’ll always be available to help the Aave community as much as I can.

My jurisdiction is Portugal so you can take that into account.

Cheers,
Fernando

[itamar]

Hi everyone,

I’d love to help. I’m Itamar, co-founder of Argent. Aave is an important partner of ours both on L1 and for our upcoming L2 launch. I’ve taken on similar roles with other protocols and have strong Opsec.
I’m UK based.

Cheers,
Itamar

[bneiluj]

Hi Aave community,

I’m Julien Bouteloup, I’ve been in this space for quite some time. My background is in quantitative finance and I specialize in audits, market makers, liquidation (I run them on aave as well), flash loans etc in the DeFi space. I’m part of Curve.fi core team and founder of www.rekt.news, www.blackpool.finance and www.stakedao.org.

I am a long time servant and supporter of Aave world which I’ve joined during ETHlend time and been participating and helping as much as I can since then.

I’ve also created a few proposals which got executed: one on v1 (Aave - Open Source Liquidity Protocol) and the first one ever on Aave v2: Aave - Open Source Liquidity Protocol

My twitter: https://twitter.com/bneiluj

I’m based in Switzerland.

Best,

Julien

[decanus]

Hey,

I am Dean Eigenmann. I’ve been working full-time in crypto since ~2017 starting as a security auditor for ZK Labs. I’ve worn a couple of hats since then and am now the co-founder of a fund called Dialectic.

I’ve personally been a user of Aave and know the project since the ETHLend days. At the fund we are also heavy users of Aave.

I am based out of Switzerland.

Thanks,
Dean

[loiluu]

This is an awesome initiative. We have been leveraging AAVE DAO framework for our KyberDAO too, and certainly think that having a diversed set of people/ community members in this Guardian key is utterly important.

Happy to be one of the key signers. Kyber and Aave have been working together since we both started in 2017, and will continue collaborating more on many other initiatives.

I’m based in Singapore.

Thanks,
Loi

[hilmarx]

Let’s do this!

I am more than happy to help out as an Aave Guardian. Since my first hackathon using EthLend back in 2018, I following the protocols growth with a lot of excitement. We at Gelato have been integrating Aave for a variety of use cases, including automated debt refinancing, liquidation protection and most recently our governance proposal to add G-UNI tokens as collateral.

Would love to support Aave even more pro-active in the upcoming future

[coderdan]

Hi Aave fam! I’m coderdan, one of the lead developers of Aavegotchi. Aavegotchi builds on the Aave ecosystem by depositing aTokens inside of NFTs, effectively creating “interest-bearing NFTs”.

Personally, I’m very familiar with contract upgradeability and multisigs. At Aavegotchi we leverage the Diamond standard to deploy regular upgrades to our contract, all which require multisigs.

Aavegotchi has also been working on getting GHST token listed on the Polygon Aave market, so I’m particularly excited about helping out with Aave on L2.

I’m located in the UTC+8 timezone and have high availability – if I’m not sleeping, I’m usually within feet of my laptop xD.

Thanks for your consideration
coderdan

[dhadrien]

Hi everyone,

I’m Hadrien Charlanes, I’ve worked for a year within the Aave Genesis team, as smart contract developer focused on Governance and core protocol. I am still part of the Aave fam as a community member and would love to remain involved as guardian.

I am knowledgable of the governance contracts and AIP process, offered several times my technical help for community members to submit their onchain AIP.

I’d be more than happy to help increase the resilience of the protocol.

I am based out of France.
https://twitter.com/HCharlanes
Cheers!

[babi]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to offer my help as an Aave Guardian. I’m Rafaella (Babi), cofounder of Pods protocol and CEO at Pods Finance Inc.

Pods uses Aave as a building block since the beginning and we don’t see a path forward without it. We also share the multichain vision. I’d be happy to contribute however I can to the community and ecosystem.

I’m based in Uruguay, one of the most crypto-friendly countries in Latin America.

Best,
Rafaella

[isakivlighan]

Hey Aave Fam!

I’m Isa, I was part of the Aave Genesis team (prev. Head of Marketing) for almost 2 years, since before the launch of the Aave Protocol! I am now working on another project, but will always be an active part of the Aave community and would love to be able to contribute as an Aave Guardian.

Not a technical person, but very knowledgeable about Aave governance and the AIP process.

Based in Berlin

My twitter: https://twitter.com/isakivlighan

Thank you for reading this and for your consideration <3

Cheers,
Isa

[corbpage]

Hi frens,
I’m Corbin, and I’ve been an Aave user since the ETHLend days and DeFi user since before it was “DeFi”. I left TradFi for crypto in early 2017 and consider it my life’s work to build a native financial system for the internet, which Aave is already doing.

I’m currently a reviewer in the Aave Grants DAO, maintain the Request for Proposals page, and am helping put together the Aave Developers DAO. I’m also Head of Product at ConsenSys Codefi where we’ve launched products like MetaMask Swaps and MetaMask Institutional.

I’d love to contribute and protect Aave as a Guardian in an increasingly complex and Byzantine world.

My jurisdiction is the US on the east coast.

Cheers,
Corbin

[calchulus]

Hey everyone! I’m Calvin from Impossible.finance and would love to be a part of this in addition to my existing role on avve grants dao. I am based in Asia timezone to help with the geographic distribution of this to ensure that people are alert around the clock on this! Cheers

[lea]

Hi all,

I’d love to support as well. I’m Lea, part of the Centrifuge genesis team and responsible for partnerships there. I’m community governance battle tested as I have been heavily involved in Maker governance over the past 2+ years in order to onboard real world assets (RWA) next to crypto native assets to (now) MCD.

We’re currently working with the Aave team to launch a permissioned RWA Market on Aave and would love to get more involved beyond this initiative to make the protocol / the whole space more resilient.

I am based out of Berlin
https://twitter.com/_schmitted

Cheers!

[tomwaltonpocock]

Hello folks,

Tom Walton-Pocock here. Currently founder at Geometry DAO, a deep research venture based in Geneva. Previously cofounder and CEO at Aztec Protocol in London.

Aave user with a background in debt / bond finance; received my CFA charter in 2016. I have a strong working knowledge of commercial bank balance sheets, including liquidity and risk measures.

We would like to participate as Geometry DAO via our own multisig, and I will be the principal point of contact.

I’m resident in the UK. Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/tomwaltonpocock

Thanks,

Tom

[imrankhan]

Hi All,

I’d like to support and be one of the key holders, I’m Imran Khan, Lead at the DeFi Alliance.

I’m one of the key holders for the Aave Grant’s DAO and have worked closely with Shreyas and Genesis team (Irene/Stani) to expand Aave’s developer ecosystem globally.

I am based in the US.
https://twitter.com/lmrankhan

[meltdem]

Hello Aave community! It’s Meltem here, I run strategy at CoinShares and have been an active investor in the crypto ecosystem since 2015. CoinShares has been active on Aave for the last few months, and is one of the first institutional players to be involved in the launch of Aave Arc. We’re very excited about opening up access to the DeFi space to players across the financial landscape, while also helping preserve and extend the culture and values of the decentralized finance movement.

I have extensive experience participating in multi-sig schemes and governance, and am currently a key holder for several DeFi protocols and DAOs. I’m based in the US, and I have team members based in London and in Jersey, Channel Islands. I’d love to personally be an Aave guardian, or CoinShares would be happy to be an “institutional” guardian. We have 24/7/365 coverage and a dedicated team who lives and breathes crypto markets.

As a publicly listed and traded company, we believe CoinShares can bring more visibility and awareness to the Aave ecosystem, and be a pioneer in helping other corporates and publicly listed companies become more active participants and value-add contributors (instead of value-extracting predators) to the DeFi and broader Web3 ecosystem.

Bisous - and can’t wait to rAave with all of you in Portugal!

[meltdem]

YESSS Babi! Would be an amazing addition <3

[CallamIngram]

Blockchain@Berkeley:
Hi, I am Callam speaking on behalf of Blockchain at Berkeley!
Blockchain at Berkeley (B@B) has been a leading blockchain student organization in the space since 2017, and B@B has been active in Aave governance since earlier this year. We believe that we would be a great addition to the Aave Guardian Program, with our strong beliefs surrounding decentralization and the importance of effective, community-driven governance.

We have experience running our governance initiative across multiple protocols and are pursuing projects across education, consulting, and research within the blockchain space. Since beginning our DeFi governance initiative, we have shown a strong voting record based on principles and ethics in the governance system. This track record is in accordance with our votes and comments on Aave governance as well as our votes throughout all the protocols we are involved in.

As one of the most well-established blockchain university organizations in the world, we bring an unbiased, non-profit motivated viewpoint to DeFi governance that we echo through our actions. We’re looking forward to continuing to contribute to both the Aave and the greater DeFi ecosystems by creating, voting, and posting with the conviction of DeFi’s founding ideals.

[0xMaki]

Aavengers,

I’d like to propose myself as an Aave guardian, I’ve been mostly involved with Sushiswap but contributed to Aave via AIP-10 already helping on a few multisig including:

• seen.haus ($SEEN)
• alchemist ($MIST)
• Sushiswap treasury ($SUSHI)

I’d love to be more involved and help Aave community in any way I can.

My jurisdiction hasn’t been mentioned by the other community members and would disclose it to the 9 other guardians/Aave Grants DAO if selected.

Arigato

0xMaki