🏛️ Governance
Last updated
Last updated
Our decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a member-owned community without centralized leadership.
You can delegate your voting power from your cold wallet to your hot wallet using snapshot delegation.
gmDAO governance is coordinated using a gm.token minted on our V2 contract that grant one voting power. Admission to the DAO is limited to people who have a confirmed ownership of it in a cryptocurrency wallet, and membership may be exchanged. It entitles the holder to vote & propose the direction of the DAO. The possession of more gm.tokens translates to greater voting power.
Governance process is subject to changes by amendments.
Governance is conducted through 7-days governance cycles. It usually features a series of proposals that members discuss and vote on through the blockchain. We use Discord as the place for governance discussions and Notion as a governance database at the moment. We use Snapshot for voting and ratifying decisions.
Our governance cycle has been enacted in GM 1.2 — Enact Standardized Gov Processes and has since evolved multiple times to the final iteration GM57.2 : Governance V3.
The gmDAO is now incorporated off-chain as per the Swiss law as an non-profit association, domiciled in Zug, Switzerland. Being an association involves legal and moral duties according to Switzerland’s law. Therefore, our governance process needs to match those requirements while staying true to our original vision of a tokenholders driven, decentralized, flat-hierarchy governance. Incorporation allows us to :
Interact with other parties: Our DAO couldn’t sign contracts or enter into agreements without corporate personhood, which our DAO gained when it created the association.
Protect the liability of our contributors: If our DAO was not incorporated, it could be considered a general partnership. This means that all our contributors would be liable in the case of a lawsuit or other legal issue.
Hire employees: The gmDAO needed a legal wrapper to legally hire employees rather than paying workers “under the table,” or “off the books,” which is technically considered tax evasion.
Pay taxes: To be legally compliant, DAOs need to pay their taxes. Whenever money is changing hands, we needed to consider the tax implications.
The gmDAO off-chain association is composed of three organs (The Association Board, the General Assembly, and the Members Community), which allows mutual monitoring of their actions. Details about these organs can be found in GM57.2 : Governance V3.
The diagram below aims at summarizing the relationship between these organs.
