Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on July 30th, 2020

Over the past months, a number of projects have started experimenting with the incentivization of liquidity provision and governance participation. This has provided the Ethereum community and wider industry a unique opportunity to earn governance tokens via novel token distribution methods.

Liquidity Mining allows users to lock their assets inside different DeFi protocols and receive governance tokens as a reward.

Even though governance tokens aren’t novel to the ecosystem, the recent trend has resulted in an explosion of them and has exacerbated their distribution. This, in turn, has enabled a growingly diverse set of stakeholders to participate in network decision-making after having used the protocol and earned the right to do so.

In many of these instances, these governance mechanisms allow for the delegation of those earned governance rights (disassociating power and ownership) and have led to the creation of a nascent but growing market for delegates vying for votes of confidence from token holders to increase their influence on the protocol, not completely unlike validators in much larger Proof of Stake protocols.

So… what happens next?

Boardroom is an integrated governance and communications management portal providing an easy and flexible solution for stakeholders to exchange a wealth of governance information, insight, and participation tools.

The goal of the portal is to enable token holders, issuers, and protocol politicians (delegates) to understand the governance processes they hold influence in and allow them to frictionlessly participate across different protocols.

The lack of structured discourse and deliberation forums have hindered the subsequent governance and decision-making processes. Telegram, Slack, Twitter, etc... are plagued with spam and cannot be used as community signaling tools. Despite their efforts to explore fair ownership and power, it is difficult for founding teams to gauge whether their project facilitates a diverse stakeholder pool.

There is often miscommunication, misalignment, and minimal feedback between stakeholders. Seemingly "informed" decisions are still siloed, centralized, and carried out behind closed doors. We envision Boardroom as an infrastructure layer that can facilitate stakeholder identification, communication, discourse, and voting tools that help projects properly manage their governance in the long run.

After receiving very early support from the MetaCartel community 👏💙 we’re ecstatic to announce that we’ll be releasing an Alpha of the Boardroom Portal on August 6th.

Community-driven approaches to product development have been instrumental in the exponential growth of the DAO and DeFi ecosystems - we’re hoping that feedback and contributions from the very same stakeholders that are entrenched in the day to day of DeFi and Web3 projects will increase the usefulness of this product exponentially.

With that said, we’d love for you to sign up for early access at tryboardroom.com.

In addition to the governance management portal, we’ll be building the Boardroom SDK in the coming months. We’re hoping it will provide crucial middleware for the immensely fragmented crypto governance and communications ecosystem. As we see brokers, like exchanges, wallets, and custodians scramble to offer governance data and voting capabilities to their users, we expect they’ll run into some major roadblocks:

The infrastructure is haphazard

• Protocols are all different and dynamic

• Governance data and applications are disconnected

• Protocol teams will offer hundreds of different APIs and data connectors

The pain is high and maintenance is costly

• Every single integration is manual, limiting scale

• Painful for apps, developers, and users

• The information overflow centralizes decisionmaking power

The SDK provides a single solution that, with a few lines of code, allows developers to display cross-protocol standardized data and participation modules for users while they retain their native brand or application UX.

A Standardized Governance SDK: Connect your Native UI with a Few Lines of Code

We believe that wallets, exchanges, aggregators, validators, should have simple and comprehensive access to standardized governance data, features, and components, across a diversity of protocols, without having to sacrifice convenience - we’re lucky to be working with some of the most prominent projects and forward-thinking teams in the industry and hope that the others will reach out as we design this tool for them. Please reach out with any comments or feedback - my social handle is @kevinknielsen everywhere!

Originally published on Boardroom's Substack on July 30th, 2020

Over the past months, a number of projects have started experimenting with the incentivization of liquidity provision and governance participation. This has provided the Ethereum community and wider industry a unique opportunity to earn governance tokens via novel token distribution methods.

Liquidity Mining allows users to lock their assets inside different DeFi protocols and receive governance tokens as a reward.

Even though governance tokens aren’t novel to the ecosystem, the recent trend has resulted in an explosion of them and has exacerbated their distribution. This, in turn, has enabled a growingly diverse set of stakeholders to participate in network decision-making after having used the protocol and earned the right to do so.

In many of these instances, these governance mechanisms allow for the delegation of those earned governance rights (disassociating power and ownership) and have led to the creation of a nascent but growing market for delegates vying for votes of confidence from token holders to increase their influence on the protocol, not completely unlike validators in much larger Proof of Stake protocols.

So… what happens next?

Boardroom is an integrated governance and communications management portal providing an easy and flexible solution for stakeholders to exchange a wealth of governance information, insight, and participation tools.

The goal of the portal is to enable token holders, issuers, and protocol politicians (delegates) to understand the governance processes they hold influence in and allow them to frictionlessly participate across different protocols.

The lack of structured discourse and deliberation forums have hindered the subsequent governance and decision-making processes. Telegram, Slack, Twitter, etc... are plagued with spam and cannot be used as community signaling tools. Despite their efforts to explore fair ownership and power, it is difficult for founding teams to gauge whether their project facilitates a diverse stakeholder pool.

There is often miscommunication, misalignment, and minimal feedback between stakeholders. Seemingly "informed" decisions are still siloed, centralized, and carried out behind closed doors. We envision Boardroom as an infrastructure layer that can facilitate stakeholder identification, communication, discourse, and voting tools that help projects properly manage their governance in the long run.

After receiving very early support from the MetaCartel community 👏💙 we’re ecstatic to announce that we’ll be releasing an Alpha of the Boardroom Portal on August 6th.

Community-driven approaches to product development have been instrumental in the exponential growth of the DAO and DeFi ecosystems - we’re hoping that feedback and contributions from the very same stakeholders that are entrenched in the day to day of DeFi and Web3 projects will increase the usefulness of this product exponentially.

With that said, we’d love for you to sign up for early access at tryboardroom.com.

In addition to the governance management portal, we’ll be building the Boardroom SDK in the coming months. We’re hoping it will provide crucial middleware for the immensely fragmented crypto governance and communications ecosystem. As we see brokers, like exchanges, wallets, and custodians scramble to offer governance data and voting capabilities to their users, we expect they’ll run into some major roadblocks:

The infrastructure is haphazard

• Protocols are all different and dynamic

• Governance data and applications are disconnected

• Protocol teams will offer hundreds of different APIs and data connectors

The pain is high and maintenance is costly

• Every single integration is manual, limiting scale

• Painful for apps, developers, and users

• The information overflow centralizes decisionmaking power

The SDK provides a single solution that, with a few lines of code, allows developers to display cross-protocol standardized data and participation modules for users while they retain their native brand or application UX.

A Standardized Governance SDK: Connect your Native UI with a Few Lines of Code

We believe that wallets, exchanges, aggregators, validators, should have simple and comprehensive access to standardized governance data, features, and components, across a diversity of protocols, without having to sacrifice convenience - we’re lucky to be working with some of the most prominent projects and forward-thinking teams in the industry and hope that the others will reach out as we design this tool for them. Please reach out with any comments or feedback - my social handle is @kevinknielsen everywhere!