Introduction

Current day DeFi governance is still fresh and requires fine tuning just as current day governments have evolved over the last 4,500 years. There are many examples of DeFi Governance processes having failed to react appropriately, for example in times of emergency after the recent LUNA/UST crash.

Kujira has already excelled in a number of governance areas with their ability to move quickly as well as their strong core community engaging in discussion. Here we explore a minor yet practical iteration that Kujira could test to measure impact on Governance and community participation.

This suggestion comes from our team’s experience during Kujira Proposal 17.

NOTE: This is a reflection on governance as a whole, not an opinion on who should make the decisions for community funding.

The Situation

Governance is a powerful tool for gathering community feedback. It is the chance for individuals to put their money where their mouth is and vote with their staked $KUJI.

As a proposer, it’s vital to understand the reasons why voting decisions have been made to inform future action.

As a voter, it’s important to understand the values and decision making of the validator that you have delegated to as well as form your own opinion.

As a validator, it’s important to make the best decision and take on everyone’s feedback to make a fair decision and ensure the best outcome for the ecosystem.

Despite many validators being run for profit, the role of the validator is that of an elected governing official.

In design thinking, there is a technique for analysing qualitative feedback called affinity mapping. It’s the process of linking related feedback to identify common trends or clusters.

The Complication

During proposal 17 there was a few key opinions being voiced and if you would have had access to all these points of view, you would have been able to recognise that there may be a few solutions available.

However, these opinions were siloed across a range of different platforms. Some validators didn’t provide an explanation to why they voted a particular way. Some were too busy to take part in the community discussion in the lead up and some just copy voted others.

Without the ability to collect and analyse opinions in a single, easily accessible location, the community is not capturing the true power of governance.

This means it’s harder to design solutions based on community feedback and it means it will take a longer more time intense approach to make process updates. This all results in slowed ecosystem development, and in the DeFi space it’s important to innovate and make decisions quickly.

A Potential Solution

We propose the idea of:

• Requiring “Yes”, “No” and “No with Veto” votes to include a memo in the transaction that explains why a decision has been made
• Build a front-end similar to
• Smart Stake
• ’s governance dashboard

Potential benefits:

Here we list out some potential benefits we could see come into effect.

For the proposer:

• Resources for understanding common points of view on their proposal
• A tool to make future decisions

For $Kuji stakers:

• A better understanding of why decisions have been made
• Develop a point of view on validators beyond commission
• Feel more educated to make their own decisions
• Feel more engaged with the community

For the validators:

• Start building a brand that delegators can align with
• Identify common themes in the validator community
• Have grown-up discussions

For the ecosystem:

• Proposals get more interesting
• It’s a simple yet unique innovation that Kujira introduces to push the governance boundaries
• Opinions are documented on the blockchain in a single location (not spread out between Twitter, discord, telegram etc)
• Ability to retroactively review old proposals when designing new solutions

Understanding the why behind votes turns governance into a powerful tool for the community, future proposals and execution teams. Let’s continue to refine and iterate on governance in our search for Grown up DeFi

Possible future steps:

1. A smaller council is introduced that is responsible for analysing the outcome of each proposal and developing solutions if common themes are identified
2. Reducing voting power for those that vote “Yes”, “No” and “No with veto” and do not leave a memo/give an opinion. If no opinion formed then abstain should be the vote.

‍