👨‍🔬 Governance Lab #094

Lab Report #094 - ACI "Road to 80" Renewal, Horizon Updated Aave Instance, Arbitrum's Vision for the Future, and more

Apr 17, 2025

gm frens 👋

Welcome back to the Governance Lab, your weekly source for all things StableLab, DeFi, and DAO Governance. As always, we've filtered through the noise to bring you the governance signals (and drama) that matter.

At a Glance 👀
🛣️ Aave Chan Initiative proposes Phase IV "Road to 80" renewal at Aave DAO
🔍 Aave Labs submits revised Temp Check to create white-label Aave instance for RWA with 50/50 revenue split
👁️ Arbitrum Foundation shared vision for the future of the DAO

Let’s dive in 🏊

Road to 80

Aave Chan Initiative proposes Phase IV "Road to 80" renewal

The Aave Chan Initiative (ACI) has submitted a proposal to renew and expand its mandate as Aave DAO's Growth and Governance Coordination service provider. Building on their 2024 performance, which saw Aave's share of the active loan market increase from below 50% to 71.2%, ACI now aims to reach 80% of total active DeFi loans across all tracked platforms.
For this new 12-month mandate, ACI has outlined six strategic objectives: achieving 80% market share leadership, expanding the Merit-as-a-Service Incentive Vault (MASIv) model as the standard growth engine, delivering a CeDeFi partnership with a top-tier centralized exchange, continuing development of their Aave-native node infrastructure (Frontier), establishing readiness to operate across non-EVM chains beginning with Aptos, and expanding their core team beyond the current 8 members. The proposal requests a budget of 3M aEthLidoGHO delivered as a yearly linear stream, replacing previous funding streams.

Friendly Forks

Aave DAO discusses revised Horizon proposal

Aave Labs has submitted a revised proposal for Horizon, permitting a friendly fork to create a white-label instance of the Aave Protocol focused on RWAs. This fork would enable the Aave DAO to capture new revenue from institutional RWA activities while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements that necessitate some centralization for permissionless DeFi integrations.
In this new version, Aave Labs proposes a 50/50 revenue share with the Aave DAO from the Horizon instance's Reserve Factor and GHO revenue. To accelerate growth, Aave Labs will contribute $500k in incentives (paid in AAVE) with a proposed matching $500k from the Aave DAO. The proposal also requests a dedicated GHO facilitator starting with 1M GHO, scalable to 5M based on Liquidity Committee recommendations.

AAE

Arbitrum Foundation shares vision for the future with AAE framework

The Arbitrum Foundation has published "A Vision for the Future of Arbitrum," outlining a significant restructuring of the ArbitrumDAO's governance model. The proposal identifies several operational inefficiencies in the current system, including proposal gridlock, inefficient processes, above-market pricing, minimal cohesiveness across initiatives, and lack of accountability for executed proposals.
At its core, the vision introduces "Arbitrum Aligned Entities" (AAEs) - organizations with Arbitrum as their primary focus that would handle strategic and operational decisions. Five AAEs are identified: Arbitrum Foundation, Offchain Labs, OpCo, Gaming Catalyst Program, and Entropy Advisors.
The proposal recommends two major changes: giving AAEs authority over discretionary decisions once proposals are approved, and refocusing delegates on approving/denying AAEs rather than micromanaging operations. Community response has been mixed, with efficiency supporters facing off against those concerned about centralization and reduced delegate power.

Proposal Tracker™️

⚡ VOTING UNDERWAY | Across DAO - Three-month Renewal of the Reward Locking Program

Summary: This proposal from the ACX Emissions Committee (AEC) seeks to renew the reward locking program for an additional three months, following a previous extension. The program, which began at the ACX token launch, incentivizes liquidity providers who stake tokens in Across by rewarding them based on position size and age of staked LP tokens. The proposal budgets 6MM ACX tokens toward continuing the program, with a current emissions rate of approximately 56.7k ACX per day.

💬 DISCUSSION | Morpho DAO - Approve Review of 2024 Contributor Grants

Summary: This proposal seeks to ratify contributor grants allocated by the Morpho Association between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024, following a previously established yearly approval process. The proposal emphasizes that this is not a new funding request but rather a formal approval of distributions from a previously allocated reserve.

From the Lab

BLOG: Measuring DAO Governance Security

In our latest blog post, we introduce the Target Votable Supply model, a custom framework designed to analyze governance security by incorporating dynamic market conditions, delegate collusion scenarios, and providing actionable targets for votable supply based on security thresholds.

▶︎ READ the full post

PODCAST: Doo on the Ungovernable Podcast

A couple weeks ago, Doo was invited on the Ungovernable podcast to discuss stablecoin designs, the future of Uniswap, risk management vs growth, and much more!

▶︎ WATCH the episode