Last Week in Governance: Crypto balks at US Infrastructure Bill, ETH gets a London upgrade with EIP-1559, PartyBid launches, AAVE founder sends ETH to blockchain student orgs & more

Common Team -

A roundup of some of the most interesting developments in the crypto & blockchain worlds - with a special focus on DAOs & Governance - over the past seven (ish) days.

Crypto community fires back at amendment to US infrastructure bill (TechCrunch)

  • The Biden administration intends to pay for $28 billion of its planned infrastructure spending by tightening tax compliance within the historically under-regulated arena of digital currency.
  • In response, the crypto community has rallied together around this issue - In a joint letter about the bill’s text, Square, Coinbase, Ribbit Capital and other stakeholders warned of “financial surveillance” and unintended impacts for cryptocurrency miners and developers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, two privacy-minded digital rights organizations, also slammed the bill.
  • Coin Center, a cryptocurrency policy think tank, reshared a blog post on the ideal regulatory environment for BTC (https://www.coincenter.org/the-ideal-regulatory-environment-for-bitcoin/)
  • Tweet thread from @NeerajKA, comms @ Coin Center

What to know about Ethereum’s “London” upgrad, EIP-1559 (CNBC)

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 aims to change the way transaction fees, or “gas fees,” are estimated.

  1. “Currently, users must bid for how much they’re willing to pay to have their ether transaction picked up by a miner, which can be extremely costly. Under EIP-1559, this process will be handled by an automated bidding system with a set fee amount that fluctuates based on how congested the network is.” This will benefit casual ETH users and make the process less intimidating.
  2. Part of every transaction fee will be burned (removed from circulation), which will begin to reduce the supply of ether and potentially boost its price. This public good accrues to anyone holding ETH.
  3. Ethereum is eventually migrating over to a PoS (Proof of Stake) model in the next 6 months
  4. PoS is emerging as an attractive, climate-friendlier alternative that could reduce the need for heavy computing and huge amounts of energy required for proof of work mining. That makes it all the more puzzling that the latest amendment would specifically let proof of work mining off the hook - re updates to the US Infrastructure Bill from above.
  5. For more info on Proof of Stake: NBC News article

Not every chain has on-chain governance, so hats off to ETH for shifting economic policy with these upgrades! @kain.eth shares his thoughts on this news via Twitter here.

PartyDAO went live with PartyBid, a product for collective bidding on NFTs (The Defiant)

Notably, @jihad.eth shared a Tweet linking many updates from this week together - on the significance of an NFT minted that would donate all proceeds to Coin Center to support defense of open blockchain networks in the US. PartyBid was then leveraged to create PartyPAC to collective bid on the NFT and build communal action.

Founder of AAVE donates to university Student Associations participating in governance (Tweet thread)

Stani Kulechov, founder of AAVE, sent 1 ETH to blockchain student associations at HEC Montreal, UCLA, Berkeley, Penn, Columbia & MIT in an effort to promote diversity, curiosity and optimism in students actively participating in crypto & blockchain governance. He encouraged all groups - not just student organizations - to participate in Web3 governance.

Barnbridge, a tokenized risk protocol, sees their proposal rejected on AAVE (Twitter thread)

“TLDR: The lowest liquidity assets on AAVE or Compound from utilization % are the most risky. sUSD has less liquidity on AAVE even though it's my favorite models for a stablecoin. SNX doesn't control utilization on another money lego. So we listed sUSD. But it was not auto. That's the important piece. It seemed like a no brainer, and it wasn't. We had every reason from a relationship/partnership perspective to fast track it, and we slow rolled it.”

ConsenSys launched their Q2 DeFi report (Tweet)

ConsenSys is an Ethereum blockchain software company which helps users, developers, and financial institutions build a more trusted digital economy. They release quarterly reports deep diving into Ethereum’s decentralized finance ecosystem.