Should the Enzyme council expand & specialise?

In February 2019, Enzyme Council came into play as the first DeFi protocol to decentralise its governance. We structured the Council as a technically skilled and user representative group of people and granted the decision making authority of the following actions to the Council:

• Protocol upgrades
• Protocol parameterisation
• Grants & Ecosystem funding

We’ve faced some challenges as a DAO but managed to maintain a stable governance process throughout. However, with the recent growth of the protocol and the roadmap ahead, the workload is only increasing and having one council to do all tasks isn’t the most optimal way forward.

This post proposes the expansion of the council and the creation of specialised squads.

The council is currently made up of technical and experienced users but they all have different skill sets. The idea of breaking up the protocol into squads should enable higher efficiency and throughput for what the council (and protocol) can deliver.

As the protocol grows in complexity and we start to imagine multiple deployments it makes sense that the workload is going to grow exponentially and thus the governance required with it. So we’d like to propose splitting the council into squads which focus on different aspects of the protocol.

Squad 1: Protocol Changes, Upgrades and Emergency Operations: Ideally made up 100% of technically skilled web3 developers or auditors who have experience with the Enzyme Protocol.

Squad 2 : Strategy, Fees & Tokenomics: A team made up of technical experts who are very familiar with Enzyme and can help increase use-cases around MLN. Eg. Staking, gated communities, L1/L2 strategy, gameFi etc.

Squad 3: Grants, Ecosystem, Operations, Treasury & Accounting: Taking care of payments, accounting and making sure that treasury is managed efficiently. Made up 50:50 of investors with grant/ecosystem growth experience and user representatives who can work towards growing the protocol grants and strategically incentivizing the work that needs to be done.

The other change that we would propose is reducing the quorum on squad 1 from 50% to a fixed 4 votes (irrespective of council size). As we grow, this will help the council to be able to react quickly to protocol changes or emergencies when required.

This isn’t a plan we need to implement overnight, but something that we plan to work towards in phases.

We propose starting by breaking out the Technical Council role immediately and keeping the voting threshold at 50% for a council < 10 people and 40% for a council > 10 ppl.

Growing the Technical Council We’d like to invite anyone who feels they have the skill sets laid out below to apply to join the Enzyme Council.

Minimum requirements:

• Technically skilled in web3 and ideally experience writing or auditing contract code
• Keen interest in Enzyme as a DeFi Operating System
• Able to read and understand all of Enzyme’s audit reports
• Able to understand the architecture of Enzyme
• Able to operate and check transactions with the help of an SOP
• Able to verify parameters of protocol related votes by decoding function data and/or simulating transactions.
• Checking payload of each transaction on Tenderly or similar tool.
• Speaking up when something doesn’t look right or not understood.
• Up to 2 hours to dedicate a week for transaction verification, signing and meetings.
• Experience with op-sec and handling ledgers securely

Additional nice to haves:

• Audit experience
• Experiences as a recent active user or contributor of Enzyme
• Availability