👨‍🔬 Governance Lab #081

Lab Report #081 - Aave DAO USDe Pricing Changes, RARI Foundation Budget, Arbitrum STEP 2.0, and more

Jan 10, 2025

gm frens 👋

Welcome back to the Governance Lab, your weekly source for all things StableLab, DeFi, and DAO Governance.

Happy New Year! Hope you’ve all had a restful and enjoyable holiday season. We’re finally back in the governance trenches for 2025. First off thank you to our readers who stuck with us in 2024 and to all the new subscribers welcome. We have big plans on improving this newsletter this year so stay tuned and recommend the newsletter to a fren.

As always, we've filtered through the noise to bring you the governance signals (and drama) that matter.

At a Glance 👀
😓 Aave DAO considers hardcoding USDe price to USDT feed
🏦 Arbitrum DAO votes on offchain approval of STEP 2.0
🧾 RARI Foundation seeks $2.04M 2025 budget

Let’s dive in 🏊

Aave

Aave DAO considers USDe pricing changes

Aave’s risk service providers Chaos Labs and LlamaRisk have proposed hardcoding USDe's price to USDT in Aave's pricing feeds. The controversial proposal hopes to protect against liquidation risks, as current modeling shows a 5% USDe price deviation could trigger $300M in liquidations.
Community response has been critical, with members highlighting potential conflicts of interest and questioning the proposal's approach. Critics note that both Chaos Labs previously helped design Ethena's risk frameworks, while LlamaRisk serves on Ethena's Risk Committee. The DAO is now posed with a difficult question in order to mitigate potential bad debt and liquidations for its users.

Arbitrum

Arbitrum DAO votes on Snapshot approval of STEP 2.0

Arbitrum DAO has proposed the second iteration of its Stable Treasury Endowment Program (STEP), requesting 35M ARB to diversify into RWAs. The initiative follows STEP 1.0's successful deployment of $30M, with Arbitrum's RWA sector growing from $100k to $150M in early 2024.
The program sticks to a conservative approach, focusing on US Treasury bills and money market instruments. A selection committee featuring leading figures from the ecosystem (GFXlabs, northlakeslegal, Nethermind, Entropy Advisors, and karpatkey) will manage the deployment, with a 125k ARB budget allocated for their services.
Implementation is set to run from January through May 2025, following a structured process of snapshot voting, RFPs, and final DAO approval. Rather than paying traditional management fees, Arbitrum is keeping asset selection and management in-house - a move that’s been welcomed by the community.

Rari DAO

RARI Foundation requests 2025 budget

The Rari DAO community is voting an onchain proposal to fund the RARI Foundation with $2.04M for its 2025 operational budget. The budget, equal to 803,145 RARI tokens at current prices, seeks to fund 8 full-time and 2 part-time contributors while covering legal, vendor, marketing, and technical costs.
Key objectives for the Foundation in 2025 include transitioning governance to RARI chain, implementing multichain governance, enabling token staking, and executing treasury diversification. The Foundation aims to attract 500k+ RARI for governance and achieve a 5x increase in monthly active users.

Proposal Tracker™️

⚡ VOTING UNDERWAY | SafeDAO - Governance Amendments Season 4, Sprint 4

Summary: This proposal seeks to amend SafeDAO's governance framework by removing Sprint 4's exclusive mandate as a review period and permitting all four seasonal Sprints to process any type of governance proposal. The framework changes eliminate Sprint-based proposal restrictions, allowing constitutional, governance, and standard proposals to be processed in any Sprint, enhancing the DAO's ability to address time-sensitive matters while preserving its established four-week Sprint cadence.

💬 DISCUSSION | Compound - Deploy Compound III on Ronin

Summary: This proposal outlines the deployment of Compound III on Ronin, an EVM-compatible L1 optimized for gaming, with $10M liquidity and $1M in incentives through the Growth Program. The initiative establishes Compound III markets for WETH and USDC, with RON, WETH, USDC, WBTC, AXS, and PIXEL as collateral assets.

💬 DISCUSSION | Aave - [TEMP CHECK] Deploy Aave on Rootstock Network

Summary: This temp check proposes deploying Aave V3 on Rootstock, a Bitcoin EVM-compatible L2, with 500 BTC (~$50M USD) and $750,000 in incentives. The initiative looks to tap into Bitcoin-based DeFi through Rootstock's native RBTC token. The deployment includes GHO stablecoin integration and positions Aave to become a leading lending protocol on Rootstock.

From the Lab

A Year in Review 2024

2024 was a big year for the StableLab team as we entered a new era of governance solutions with new product launches, new partnerships, core team expansion, top governance metrics, and lots more. We’ve put together a short video highlighting our 2024 achievements and milestones. Enjoy!

▶︎ Watch the video HERE

Livepeer Community Update

We’ve published the latest Livepeer Community Update by GovWorks. Notable updates include: New Governance Hub launched with treasury dashboards + contributor tools, Education & Experience SPE passed with 87% support,3 active proposals: AI Video, Agent, and Credits SPEs.

Join our Treasury Talk (Jan 15 @ 3PM UTC) to discuss 2025 plans.

▶︎ Full Update HERE

❲ Our Voting ❳

📆 Dec 20th 2024 → Jan 11th 2025 | 🗳️ Total Votes: 31

See our full vote history and detailed rationale HERE.

Meme

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Governance Lab

👨‍🔬 Governance Lab #081

Lab Report #081 - Aave DAO USDe Pricing Changes, RARI Foundation Budget, Arbitrum STEP 2.0, and more

Aave

Arbitrum

Rari DAO

Links

🚀 Launches, Deployments, Partnerships, and M&A

📑 Reads, Insights, and Reports

🧗 Milestones & Updates

🔒 Security, Risk, & Hacks

🗞️ Everything Else

📺 Podcasts, Presentations, & Listens