Future-Proof Governance: Building Modular Organizations of the Future | Samantha Marin - Aragon

[Music] hey hello um hi everyone I'm Samantha I am the content editor at Aragon where we build modular Dow tools for protocols and organizations to govern their assets on chain so today I'm going to be talking about future proof governance and how that can enable future proof protocols so to kick us off I'm going to talk a bit about the state of governance today and in order to do that I have to ceue up my burning room so Dows today are undeniably having some struggles there are a lot of people out there who say that Dows don't work uh members don't care enough to participate voter apathy is off the charts and Dows are just facing a lot of headwinds in the current discourse today and I believe that the reason that Dows um are running into these struggles and that there are a lot of doubters out there is that um honestly they just have a lack of reliable and secure governance options that fit their needs and the same thing goes for members as well like the members realize when the Dow is using a generic structure that doesn't work for their organization's unique and custom needs I see most Dow structures today as the generic no-name coffee brand on the Shelf it's mostly just token voting with maybe a little bit of Delegation sprinkled on top but other than that Dows are pretty much using the same generic structure copy pasted over and over again and so that leaves down members to be sipping their generic coffee sitting in the burning room and using this type of cookie cutter governance can cause a lot of problems especially for large defi protocols when they're thinking about their governance so some of these problems include holding back from decentralizing properly because when you have the wrong onchain governance there's a ton of risk associated with that so instead protocols might stick with a trusted structure or just occasionally throughout a signaling vote but um actually decentralizing onchain is risky and another problem that they run into with cookie cutter governance is that they end up using the same model throughout their life cycle and that's a problem when you have different levels of protocol adoption because um when you start your protocol life cycle maybe you have a small group five people 10 people you can govern that with a multi Sig pretty easily but say you're 2 years down the line and you have thousands of users that want to participate in governance you're going to need a totally different model and using the same cookie cutter structure is just not going to work so why does every Dow out there not have a completely custom build you might be wondering but that's because custom governance builds have their fair share of problems as well if you want to throw a ton of time right the incinerator you can go for that um spend a lot of Dev resources on building that custom structure um take on a lot of risk because it's untested uh maybe it hasn't been audited yet all sorts of things like that and a lot of custom governance builds are very experimental and theoretical rather than being grounded in the real needs of real di protocols so how can we make custom govern safer easier and faster to build our answer is to build on a modular Dow stack so this makes customizing governments much much easier so this is one of the few things Bitcoin might not fix but Aragon OSX actually does so Aragon OSX is Aragon's new Dow framework which we launched in 2023 actually about the this time last year so eth Denver coming around for us um and here's how it works so at the center of OSX you have your Dow contract that contract is built to be extremely lean and simple and that makes it more secure and much easier to work with then within that down contract you have a permission manager and what the permission manager does is it manages permissions to external smart cont contracts and those external smart contracts which we call plugins the light blue boxes below those are the contracts that change the governance logic of your Dow so most of your Dow's governance logic is actually customized through these plugins rather than inside of the contract itself so plugins are really what will help Dows build custom designs for their precise needs so you can think of them kind of like apps that you install and uninstall on your computer because when you want to use a new one you grant it permission through your governance process to perform certain actions and then when you don't want to use that governance plug-in anymore you just uninstall it via your governance process so maybe that's passing a vote or if you have a multisig setup it could be just approving a transaction and the plug-in model is safer because you're making changes to the plugins not to the Dow Vault itself everything is happening externally and the Vault where you keep your assets is untouched and on top of that you can also manage access control with extreme Precision using the plugins because say you have a um treasury management subd and you want them to be able to manage your Dow's assets so you can grow your Treasury but you really don't want them to have full access to the treasury and to be able to perform any action you can use OSX to give them granular permissions rather than a complete blanket do whatever you want permission plugins are also easy to work with because you track permissions via plugins rather than having to track them scattered across an entire Delp deployment so if you want to make changes everything that you need to be aware of is front and center rather than than Tangled Up in a lot of other things and the plug-in model is also fast because you can just take advantage of the fact that they're open source you can Fork reuse plugins they're plugins built by the Aragon team plugins built by open source developers um and you can use these projects rather than starting over from scratch every time so now that you have an idea of what OSX is and how plugins work I'm going to share a few examples of how you can put plugins together to create completely unique and Powerful custom governance designs so the first one is multi-chain governance so we live in a multi-chain world tons of l2s uh I feel like it is L2 season these days um and so we created multi-chain governance so that you could govern assets and permissions for a protocol um across cross evm chains from a single main net ethereum Dow smart contract so imagine you have a protocol that has um that is deployed on arbitrum on base on polygon you can use multi-chain governance to govern all of those parameters or govern all of those assets deployed across those chains so how it works is you create a custom census with tokens across chains you using layer Zero's Omni chain fungible token standard so you have those polygon governance tokens those arbitrum governance tokens just wrap them in an oft and then you can bring all of that voting power into one census then those members can cast votes for a low cost on ZK sync save a ton of money there and then if that vote passes that action that you programmed into the proposal can be executed across chains simultaneously using the Aragon OSX permission management system so here's why multi-chain governance works so well on Aragon OSX uh to start the permission management system is flexible enough to add the cross chain condition using layer zero also it's we have an unopinionated protocol Design This is extremely important in a world where there are tons of chains and we don't know what next year is going to look like when it comes to uh where most of defi action Dow action is going to be happening so the unopinionated protocol design means that our protocol can be deployed across chains very easily then the replicable plug-in system means that you don't have to rebuild your plugins every time you want to deploy on a new chain you just reuse the one that you already ex have and finally the strong Bas plug-in contracts make it so that most of the logic is already handled inside of those plug-in contracts when you're building your new custom plugin another example optimistic dual governance so this is when Dows create two separate stakeholder groups with different governance permissions and then execute proposals optimistically so I'll walk you through it it starts by a address on a proposal allow list uh creating a proposal to the main Dow so you can imagine these down here these pink boxes like subd Dows or maybe Dow members wallets or multisig that represent a service provider that for example is maybe trying to provide a service to your D so they're on the proposal allow list they create a proposal to the main Dow which then enters the plugin and that begins the time lock period during the time lock period the main Dow can veto The Proposal so the main Dow can be an allow list of a different group a different group of addresses it can be token holders it can be nft holders whatever you want if the proposal is not vetoed during that time lock period Then it automatically can be executed so um that means you don't have to pass a vote there that's the optimistic piece of it and the cool thing about this model that I really like is that you don't even need you don't need token based governance to use this model you can have one allow list on the proposed end and then another allow list on the veto end and no token is required so why optimistic dual governance works on Aragon OSX well it comes back to the granular permission management that I've been talking about so here we use it to separate groups give them different governance permissions but allow those groups to still exist in the same umbrella Dow so you don't have to be deploying a million different Dows you have one organization with suborganizations inside of it all completely on chain so what is this all up up to and for me it's really making governance future prooof and adaptable so futureproof governance is governance that can withstand whatever the world throws at it we live in a time when we don't know what's going to happen 6 months from now one month from now one week from now everything is changing all the time and I think if you've made it in crypto this long you probably agree so if we don't decentralize your governance now protocols will be fragile they'll be fragile to attack and censor ership especially as more and more people enter the space and more and more large nation states become aware of crypto like to be entirely honest so we need future proof governance and we need it now future prooof governance is what will underpin truly resilient Dows and it's what enables them to adapt and change when the world around them does so that's what we're doing here at Aragon if um any of this is interesting to you if you would like to build a custom Dow scan that QR code it leads to a form where you can um input some interest share about your project your protocol and we'll be be we'll be back in touch about how um we can build a customed out for you so thank you