MELD DAO

MELD is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), known as MELD DAO. The governance system for MELD DAO v1 is based on key aspects such as proposal creation, discussion, voting, and ratification. The MELD DAO v1 governance process ensures a fair and transparent decision-making environment for the community. The initial interaction of the MELD DAO will be limited in direct voting up or down of Meld Improvement Proposals (MIPs). Over a period of 3 years, the DAO will progressively hand over full control of both MIP creation and voting to the community.

Governance in DAOs is still a very young domain, we have seen over the past two years that when done wrong, bad actors can take control of protocols for their own benefit. We want to make sure this doesn't happen with MELD and many of our DAO design decisions are built around these goals.

The Governance NFT comes with various features such as minting, locking MELD tokens, submitting votes per NFT, and being transferable. The delegation system allows users to delegate their votes to other users, with features such as enabling and disabling delegation, one-level delegation, and vote submission for multiple NFTs.

MELD DAO v1 Structure

The governance system for MELD DAO is based on the following key aspects:

● Proposals: Created only by MELD-approved users (governance committee).

● Debate: Proposals are debated on an external forum.

● Voting: Proposals are sent to the DAO and can't be modified after voting has started.

● Ratification: Proposals need to be ratified by the MELD committee after voting approval and before execution.

Governance Participation

Users stake 20k MELD tokens to participate in governance and receive a Governance NFT as a receipt. This NFT is used for voting, and one user can only own one NFT at a time. The NFT can be redeemed for the original amount of stake (minus a potential % fee) after all proposals the user has voted on have concluded.

MELD Governance Committee

For the initial stages of the MELD DAO we will have a committee of 13 elected people to support the voting process. The governance committee has the following powers:

● Control of the treasury multi-sig wallet.

● Rebalancing MELD tokens across chains.

● Submitting MIPs.

● Ratifying or rejecting a proposal if MIP receive less than 75% of participation compared to the available voting power.

If a MIP is approved by receiving more than 75% of the available votes, the governance committee must ratify the MIP. The committee is designed to start the process of full decentralization and while minimizing the possibility of a bad actor being able to engineer votes and gain control over the protocol. Over the next two years the governance committee role will be reduced.

Voting & Delegation

The Governance NFT is used for voting, with one NFT equating to one vote. Users can delegate their votes to another NFT, and their vote will be automatically cast by the NFT they delegate to. Users can change delegates at any time, but casted votes will not be modified.

MELD DAO v1 Interface

Users will have access to the following information and options in the MELD DAO v1 interface:

● Proposal creation (for the committee).

● Staking MELD to receive Governance NFT.

● Redeeming Governance NFT and getting back staked MELD.

● Viewing proposal history and details.

● Voting in proposals.

● Delegating votes and removing delegates.