Introducing the Proposal Framework

As the authors of both the DAO Framework and whitepaper, we are excited to see the growing momentum behind an initiative that will put safety as the forefront of the Proposal submission process while establishing a proper procedure to see The DAO’s own governance model iterated on in the coming months.

Because The DAO has raised a considerable amount of Ether, a lot of people have and will continue to peruse the contracts and its mechanisms. It started with just 3 of us, but The DAO now has had thousands of pair of eyes reviewing it.

Examples of such research includes numerous pull requests, the painstaking flagging of various issues and a recent, much talked-about paper.

Executive Summary

1 — Is the Ether in the contract currently in danger, or can it be lost? No, and none of the issues raised so far would jeopardize the Ether in the contract, nor has anyone made a claim that they would.

2 — Can the smart contracts be improved? Absolutely, and this is why we built in the possibility to update them. Expect to see a 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc release of the Framework.

We plan to address the feedback from the community by working hand in hand with the Curator signatories, DAO Token Holders, thought leaders, auditors and security experts. Two initiatives have already begun in parallel.

Initiative One — Updating the DAO Framework to v1.1

As part of the DAO Framework 1.0, the governance model was kept simple on purpose to avoid complexity in its smart contracts, as complexity may have led to bugs or the creation of other attack vectors.

Developing and updating the DAO Framework 1.1 will take some time, especially as we’ll have to account for extensive tests, in-depth security audits and game theory analysis which will need to be done every time a line of code is changed.

A technical list of the changes we’d like to see in 1.1 is detailed in the GitHub issue repository for the DAO Framework and is kept updated in real time.

But more importantly, we feel it’s also a great opportunity to include the large group of talented people that want to actively take part in The DAO’s development, and may not have had enough time to contribute to the DAO Framework 1.0.

Initiative Two — Developing the Proposal Framework

The Proposal Framework is a formal set of rules for Proposal smart contracts that will insure their safety.

Smart contract Proposals are discrete pieces of code. It’s therefore possible to guarantee their safety by requiring a certain set of rules to be implemented as part of their code base. Numerous ideas of what these rules should consist of have already been suggested, for example as part of this excellent reddit post by Alex van de Sande.

One concept we’d like to add to the Framework would be to delay the initial payment three weeks after a Proposal has been approved. This would provide The DAO the option to “double tap” meaning that in the unlikely case of the ‘sniping’ of a Proposal through an overwhelming number of unexpected votes at the very end of a voting period, a second Proposal to reverse the first.

Alternatively, a similar outcome could be achieved with an informal pre-vote on addresses which requested to be whitelisted. In any case, these extra requirements will mitigate most of the governance concerns that have been raised, without requiring any changes to the currently deployed contracts that form the DAO.

Conclusion

This work is currently underway, and the Proposal Framework will soon be publicly offered as a suggestion to the Community and Curators. If accepted, Curators could start whitelisting addresses following those guidelines immediately.

We look forward to your comments and as usual, please join the conversation on The DAO’s Slack which has now grown to an amazing 5.8K members over 52 channels covering all topics from Proposal discussions, governance and even a real time DAO watch (which I highly recommend).