Announcement: Aave Snapshot Space

Governance
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Hello fellow Aavengers :)

I have exciting news to share with the community: Aave now has a Snapshot space!

You can access the new Snapshot and take a look around here. I’ll share some of the features and potential use cases below.

What is Snapshot?

Snapshot is a gasless, off chain voting mechanism. Token holders can cast votes with only a signed message from their wallet, which removes the need to pay transaction fees to participate in governance.

Snapshot also allows for counting multiple tokens and wrappers in an aggregate measure of voting power. In addition to stkAAVE and AAVE (which are included in Aave’s current on chain governance voting system), the new Snapshot also counts voting power of aAAVE (tokens supplied as collateral to Aave money market), AAVE and aAAVE on the Polygon network, and AAVE held in stkBPT (Balancer pool token staked in safety module). And the system offers lots of flexibility, allowing for additional tokens or networks to be added to the voting score at the discretion of governance.

With less friction and a wider group of eligible voters, we hope that this Snapshot space can further enhance Aave governance participation.

Check out the Snapshot docs for more information, and join their Discord for support if needed.

Snapshot Limitations

While it’s a powerful tool for governance coordination, Snapshot has some key limitations.

Votes are recorded off chain, and it’s not currently possible to trigger on chain effects or protocol changes with the vote results. Because of this, Snapshot votes are most useful for “soft governance” - the process of gauging community support or opposition to a protocol change before putting it up for an on chain vote. The Uniswap community offers an example of this in action with their temperature check / consensus check polls.

Use Cases

I envision Snapshot being particularly helpful for the initial asset listing process. The current forum polling mechanisms are easy to influence with newly created accounts or external users who have no stake in the Aave ecosystem. Using Snapshot gives a more objective view of community support for asset onboarding.

More broadly, Snapshot can be used for governance matters or decisions that don’t require accessing the protocol’s funds or admin functions. For example, the Aave Grants DAO could use Snapshot to get community buy-in on larger grants, and then pay grantees directly from the grants multisig.

Metagovernance and Moderation

Ultimate authority over the Snapshot page rests with the owner of the Aave.eth ENS name. These powers can be delegated to designated admins, who then have the power to change settings and remove spam proposals from the front end interface. Currently state and I are admins, but the ENS owner can add new admins or revoke these powers at their discretion.

Any user with at least 1 AAVE worth of total voting power (counting all of the types of Aave token included in voting) can create a vote on Snapshot. This allows for maximum openness to the community, but if spam proposals become an issue this threshold can be raised to a higher amount. Admins can also submit a proposal regardless of their personal voting power, allowing for a more guarded approach to governance if the community wishes.

Suggested Proposal Standards

Here are some initial ground rules I’d recommend for submitting Snapshot votes:

  • Voting period should start at least 24 hours in the future
  • Voting period should last at least 3 days
  • Poll question and choices should use neutral phrasing (avoid introducing bias)
  • Poll should include an abstain option (allows for participation without influencing vote)
  • Poll text should link to a discussion on the Aave forum to allow for feedback and suggestions

I expect we’ll develop additional best practices as this tool sees more use in the Aave governance process. If anyone has questions or suggestions around Snapshot, please share below!

Last but not least, many thanks are in order for the Aave genesis team and state for setting this up on our behalf!

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nice temperature check polling option!

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Thanks @monet-supply. When considering smaller risk parameter changes (e.g. LTV from 75% to 80%), do you think the dual Uniswap Snapshot at temperature and consensus check is helpful or redundant? I suspect a riskAdmin checkpoint, via multi-sig, may suffice if paired with a single Snapshot vote.

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Am I understanding correctly that MATIC can be used to vote 1:1? The other extensions for voting power make sense, like aAAVE, but I’m not following the logic on this one.

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@state What about something like this to help increase turnout? Snapshot

Screen Shot 2021-08-25 at 1.25.01 PM

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Could be cool. It’s a plug-in for snapshot right?

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Indeed, POAP - Snapshot

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I added the option for vote proposers to add a POAP, should be cool!

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Is it working for anyone else?

Screen Shot 2021-09-02 at 11.58.41 AM
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I think it’s suppoed to be an option when creating the snapshot but yeah can’t see one when creating, i’ll ask around

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We just announced a contest to design a POAP that authors will be able to add to future Snapshot votes. Please share with any of your design-savy friends!

cc @inkyamze @state

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@0xbilll thanks for the update. POAPs are a great way to incentivize more voter participation.

And they are fun! Will keep my eyes peeled for qualified designers.

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The contest is over, congrats to Discord user omahs#0192!

Any future Snapshot author can duplicate the file on Figma, change the text, and add it to their vote.

Thanks to everyone who participated by submitting designs and voting in the final poll. It will be interesting to watch how this impacts Snapshot participation (currently 4.96k members, and a wide range of total address and AAVE per vote).

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I see a few recent posts on Snapshot that don’t seem to be fully fledged polls or proposals. Other posts refer to general ecosystem info unrelated to Aave - eg Paraswap or Opensea. (see examples below)

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This is somewhat negative for Aave governance, as it creates distraction for voters and makes it more difficult for people to see when a real poll is active.

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Asking open ended questions is fine, but it’s better if this starts as a discussion in the Aave discord or forums before progressing to a Snapshot poll (+ the Snapshot poll should include a link to the relevant forum post :slight_smile:). Questions and potential response options should use neutral phrasing.

All this being said, I’m going to proactively clean up a few of the off topic snapshot polls from the Aave space.

Removing today 11/18/21:

The following polls IMO are also worthy to be removed because although they’re generally on topic, there is no link to forum discussions or other ways for the community to get involved. I’ll plan to remove them next week unless there are any objections.

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It looks like the POAP plugin has been removed, is someone able to add it back bls? cc @monet-supply @state
/Edit: done, ty sers

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Can we please revisit these? I feel like Snapshot votes are getting out-of-hand lately. In the past couple weeks, we have seen two proposals go through snapshot with <48 Hours allowed for voting. If Snapshot is intended for community temp checks, there should be at least three days to vote on them as mentioned here. The goal of Snapshot should be to increase community discourse on the subject, and making sure we as a community are moving in the right direction in sending this proposal to an on-chain vote! 33 hours (Stasis) is simply not enough time to research the proposal at hand and express concerns accordingly. Additionally, more and more votes are not allowing for 24 hours in the future (pending votes posted 24 hours in the future).

I am requesting that a ‘Snapshot Proposal Etiquette’ be formed that outlines the standard procedures that proposers follow when posting a proposal for temp-check on Snapshot. Lately it feels like this step is being expedited which takes away from its intended purpose.

If the community would like, I am willing to write up a small doc or a forum post outlining a solution to the current Snapshot disorganization we are seeing. However, I think simply emphasizing the ‘Proposal Standards’ set forth above would suffice.

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I agree with you,

Did a few governance standards for snapshot votes recently, asset onboarding multichain is still missing a standard that is needed as v3 in the context of isolation mode will likely onboard many assets.

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