One year in: Decentralising Gro

Get the latest from the decentralising Gro DAO in our community forum at https://community.gro.xyz

It’s been one year since Gro DAO launched itself with a mission to empower people to get more from DeFi. As the milestone sets in, this article summarises decentralisation efforts thus far and provides more clarity on the steps to come. Don’t forget to check out the last section for some pointers on how you can get more involved!

Governance

Gro DAO had 19 Snapshot votes in the past year, including the first two milestones votes which approved the tokenomics and then the initial protocol users launched the DAO themselves (covered in “The Chicken or the Egg? How Gro DAO is Launching Governance’’ article). While participation rate ebbs and flows, most garnered support from votes representing over 200k GRO with recent ones surging to close to 800k GRO. So far votes have been decided solely by the community and the original building team have abstained all votes using their allocated vesting tokens.

The votes covered a broad range of topics. Protocol decisions such as whitelisting strategies (Vote 15, 18, 19) implementing risk management measures, and changing product features have been a mainstay for Gro DAO governance. Other key votes include DAO treasury resource allocation (more details on docs) and setting up structure to decentralise DAO contribution (Vote 12).

Votes have so far been implemented through a combination of Snapshot, SafeSnap and a 3-out-of-6 Gnosis multi-sig (list here).

Next steps

To further decentralise, on-chain governance will be introduced to put the end-to-end decision making and implementation process directly in tokenholders’ hands. Governor Bravo, a governance module that was built and used by Compound, will be implemented. To make sure all details are ironed out, most tranching protocol parameters will come directly under Governor Bravo initially and an emergency multi-sig will be established to step in for a narrow set of remaining functions. As the process matures, more functions and DAO treasury allocation will be moved over to the Governor Bravo module as well.

To avoid governance fatigue, a “minimised governance” approach was introduced when building out the G-squared architecture. This means that the contract suite’s number of functions was reduced when compared to the first version of the protocol. By doing so, there are less changes possible to the smart contracts, which in turn narrows down the input required from DAO governance to what is critical for the protocol.

Operations

Gro protocol has continuously decentralised its day-to-day operations. Starting from the dApp, Gro decentralised harvests through Gelato in April (details here) and switched to a decentralised frontend via IPFS and Fleek in August. These removed the protocol’s need to rely on infrastructure built or chosen by the initial contributors, such as AWS servers for hosting the front end or custom-built harvesting bots. A frontend implementation that uses The Graph is currently in testing which will mean that data feeds will also be decentralised. As the protocol becomes increasingly independent from centralised architecture, future contributors will less likely come across centralised services with gated access.

But there is more than the protocol to Gro DAO. In the past year, the DAO benefited from a group of dedicated OGs who volunteered to help new community members to learn more about Gro, created a decentralised marketing team (“G-Force”) to spread the word in crypto community, and established a treasury committee to manage the DAO’s treasury. Full-time contributors have also branched out from Grwth Lbs and its contractors to 7 different individuals and entities who fill the important roles of Product, Engineering, and Operations. Taken together, these efforts sought to establish the foundation to how interested parties could directly contribute to the DAO with or without the initial contributors.

Next steps

With the architecture upgrade of Gro protocol completed and further decentralisation in the cards, all contributors are now contributing directly to the DAO. Grwth Lbs as a company is no longer directly involved in Gro DAO efforts.

With this step, Gro DAO will open doors for more contributors — especially those who were not part of the early development efforts — to participate in a self-organised manner. Together with opening the github, future development is open to all who are interested in building upon the current infrastructure: taking tranching mechanism cross-chain, building vaults beyond stablecoins, integrating with other protocols, or even creating something entirely new as long as it services the mission of Gro DAO in improving DeFi accessibility and empowering people to get more out of this new paradigm.

How can I get more involved?

There is no menu that dictates how one can get involved, but this organisation strawman should give you a good sense of where you can plug in!

Given the strawman above, there are some prioritised open roles below for anyone to signal your interest:

• People pod — facilitator: All the good stuff above requires governance and contributor facilitation to make things work. Look no further if you’ve been seeking a chance to help coordinate a DAO — signal your interest here latest by Sunday 6th November 2022!
• Treasury — committee member: Want to help Gro DAO manage its $12mn treasury to support its mission? Throw your hat in to join the Treasury Committee for the next 6 months! Share more about your experience by replying to this post for your fellow DAO members to get to know you. You can reference this post here 2 for more information on this role, but don’t let it confine your imagination — feel free to suggest improvement and updates as well!
• Emergency multi-sig member: Are you a trusted Gro community member that wants to join Gro DAO’s emergency multi-sig and ensure proper actions are taken when the situation demands it? Signal your interest by replying to this post!

There are also current proposals for feedback and governance votes:

• Groda Product Pod: check out the vote proposal for creating Groda Product Pod here. It’ll go into voting on Friday 28th October 2022 unless there are substantial changes required based on feedback.
• Risk Pod: check out the vote proposal for creating Risk Pod here. It’ll go into voting on Monday 31st October 2022 unless there are substantial changes required based on feedback

See anything you’d like to give it a go? Check out our forum post to learn more and introduce yourself! Don’t forget to share more about your skills, interest, and experience while doing so :-)

As Gro DAO continues to decentralize, the best way to keep tabs on Gro’s development will be through the community forum where anyone can sign up and post suggestions & proposals. Unlike Medium, the community forum encourages discussion with fellow DAO members without losing the ability to flesh out ideas in long-form articles. You can also pick and choose which categories to spend time based on your very own interests!

Hop over and check out the latest discussion on governance and operations. Getting an account is easy — you can login through email, Apple, or even Discord. Try it out: https://community.gro.xyz/categories

One year in: Decentralising Gro was originally published in Gro Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.