We launched the Community Working Group just over three months ago and as the community at Inverse grows, it’s a good idea to periodically take a step back and evaluate how we are doing. In addition, I would like to share some news on the expanded role of CWG to now include improving our governance functions at Inverse.
The Inverse Finance DAO Community
Today, the success of most DAO’s stand or fall with the integrity and quality of its community. Great communication and coordination across the many voices among INV holders and users of our products enable us to work together in an effective and intelligent way.
The most prominent way the Inverse DAO community interacts is via our Discord server, both in text and voice calls. It is a great platform for building a community with real-time chat and VOIP options. We host weekly public calls ranging from more vertically oriented calls like the weekly Growth Working Group call to the more broadly-targeted community Orientation calls. We also use Discord for more “relaxed” Thursday Poker games (open to everyone!) or the occasional podcast-style interviews in Inverse Braintrust.
The “Glue” For Inverse Finance DAO
A major goal of the Community Working Group is to build a layer of “connective tissue” between working groups, delegates, end users, and other community members. In a globally-distributed, asynchronous, and often pseudonymous environment, this “glue layer” is indispensable and ultimately forms a competitive advantage for Inverse.
DAO’s who utilize on-chain voting all encounter a divide between human coordination and the immutability of the actions on the blockchain, and that divide needs to be bridged for the system to persist. In addition to the inherent challenges of on-chain governance, there is little point in having an iron-clad voting system if the proposals are disjointed or contradictory to previous proposals because of miscommunication. Read more about our efforts in our front-end developer TheAlienTourist’s blog post.
It’s exciting to see projects and ideas take form in a functioning governance system, but it can also be just as demoralizing to see resources mismanaged or great ideas shelved because of poor communication, etc. Working on a proposal does not only mean clearly expressing what you want to accomplish and how to evaluate success, but also by socializing the idea with core contributors in the DAO to explore its synergies in the bigger picture.
Improving Governance Safeguards At Inverse
With this need for more efficient governance in mind, we are re-defining the scope of responsibilities for the CWG to include governance-related coordination and stewardship. Going forward, the CWG will take the lead on answering questions and helping community members utilize our governance system. For example, when new proposals are drafted and prepared for governance, the CWG will schedule dedicated calls on Discord to discuss them, offer Q&A opportunities, and even give proposals “red team” treatment to ensure one of our members is playing the devil’s advocate and looking for weaknesses in each proposal.
The process for bringing a new proposal from concept to an on-chain vote now looks like this:
Easy-To-Use Governance At Inverse
Anyone can buy INV permissionlessly and partake in the governance activities of Inverse Finance DAO. Because of this, and especially in contrast to corporate behemoths, we strive to be radically transparent with our token holders and this has turned out to be one of our strengths.
Unlike some governance systems which are opaque or intimidating to non-technical users, Inverse’s interface for creating on-chain actions in proposals is accessible for anyone, not just developers. Want to put a proposal forward at Inverse? It’s all done with a non-technical layout that non-technical people can use.
Major decision making in Inverse Finance DAO derives its authority from on chain INV token voting which takes a minimum of five days from voting to execution in addition to any socializing and feedback for the proposal. Many decisions need to be taken by people who are deeply involved in the subject matter and in a shorter time span, hence we have Working Groups with limited autonomy and budget.
We offer new talent ways to learn in interaction with the community and progress at their own pace, eventually proving the value of their contributions in Discord and the governance Forum, offering a path to gaining trust among peers. Some of our core contributors grew into their roles after being longtime supporters, others were hired into their roles and hit the ground running.
Driving Greater Decentralization
The cryptocurrency space includes diverse organizational structures, and many times you can find some parts of an organization that have reached further into the decentralized end of the spectrum, while other parts may remain centralized or have been given the authority to be autonomous in specific ways.
Inverse evolved from having a barebone governance structure with a challenging proposal and voting experience to what is now a more fully-featured and functional one. For example, authority that rested in a single wallet in 2021 has since been decentralized across trusted contributors who can populate multi-signature wallets in order to spread risk.
Nour, the founder of Inverse Finance DAO, until recently held the responsibility to act as the Guardian for pausing borrowing and other security measures for the Feds and Frontier, previously Anchor. As the DAO grew and the Risk Working Group was formed, in response to the April 2 incident, changes were made to define and mitigate any risk in our governance structure. Trusted peers from among the core contributors were added to the Guardian multisig wallets to decentralize decision making and further de-risk the DAO from single points of possible failure.
The Road Ahead
Over the past 90 days we made great strides in our community including navigating difficult market conditions and price manipulation incidents, but the addition of governance to the CWG’s responsibilities is a valuable part of our path to getting DOLA to its goal of $1 billion in circulation. Most DAO’s - whether they admit it publicly or not – know that DAO governance is a work-in-progress and greater alignment between community and governance at Inverse DAO will yield great things for us in the weeks and months ahead.
The Community Working Group was formed on a three month experimental basis in March 2022 and was recently renewed. You can check out the post on the forum for more details or the governance proposal here. Also - please join our Discord and read in on the conversations or read the Docs for more formal insights.
