Monthly Governance Reports

Announcements & Updates Updates
3

March 2024 Update

The monthly governance recap serves as a compendium of key governance updates for the preceding month. This monthly update covers Moonwell governance activities for March 2024.

This update includes:

  1. Proposals and Milestones
  2. Voting Insights and Observations
  3. Community Strengths
  4. Opportunities
  5. Conclusion and Links

Proposals and Updates

Moonwell’s primary governance initiatives for this period included:

  1. Risk Management and Parameter Adjustments: Gauntlet utilized Cap Guardian to adjust borrow and supply caps for different assets in March. For example, here is a forum post from March 14th where Gauntlet altered the borrow/supply caps for USDC and DAI on Base. The supporting data for these decisions can vary. In this case, the decrease in DAI caps was implemented to prevent concentration risk due to declining circulating supply. Similarly, Warden Finance contributed their risk analysis with posts including “Rebalancing of Base Liquidity Incentives,” informing the community of a new rewards pool for the native USDC market and an upcoming Safety Module for Base.

  2. Preparations for the xERC20 Token Standard: On March 16, Moonwell contributor Elliot of Solidity Labs introduced MIP-M21: Upgrade Wormhole Bridge Adapter on Moonbeam. This was the first in a series of proposals to activate multichain governance for Moonwell. To enable WELL to be used on Base for voting and staking, MIP-M21 detailed upgrading the Wormhole Bridge Adapter on Moonbeam. The upgrade would improve the user experience of bridging, automatically unwrapping the WELL (xERC20) back to the original Moonbeam WELL token on transfer. Following MIP-M21, Elliot proposed MIP-M23 and MIP-M24: Multichain Governor and WELL Migration. This pair of proposals sought to move from Compound’s Governor Alpha smart contract to the new cross-chain governor, activate xWELL, and accept ownership of the contracts, finalizing the new governor’s abilities. These three proposals successfully passed their on-chain vote. Finally, on March 31, Elliot outlined MIP-M25 Base Safety Module Activation. MIP-M25 aims to enable rewards for stakers in the Safety Module with the new multichain WELL token on Base.

  3. Reward Speed Proposals: In mid-March, delegate Curly submitted a pair of regular on-chain proposals for Moonbeam and Moonriver. These proposals dealt with the rebalancing of liquidity incentives to ensure that the protocol maintains healthy levels of rewards on the networks. Both passed their onchain votes and the reward speeds were adjusted accordingly.

  4. Enhancing Frax Liquidity: @curly submitted MIP-M22 for on-chain voting on March 20. This successful proposal was a follow-up to MIP-16 and aimed to enhance FRAX liquidity on Moonbeam. This comes as part of the Nomad Collateral Redemption and Reallocation initiative being spearheaded by Solidity Labs. The discussion can be found here.

Major Milestones Achieved:

  • Aera V2 Migration: The community voted in late February to migrate the existing Apollo vault from Aera V1 to V2. There were multiple potential voting outcomes for the proposal, but the community decided to upgrade the vault with the addition of leveraging Aave USDC to generate yield. On March 1, Aera informed the community that the vault was live. The Moonwell community can track financial data for the V2 vault here.

  • USDC Anywhere Galxe Campaign: On March 4, Moonwell kicked off a campaign using Galxe to help users explore the cross-chain USDC update launched in February. The total prize pool was 1000 USDC and 10 total winners had the opportunity to be randomly selected after completing the tasks and minting the NFT.

  • New Asset Support: In early March, delegate @coolhorsegirl proposed activating a WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) market on Moonwell. In doing so, Moonwell would be the first lending market on Base to support the asset. The proposal first went up for a successful Snapshot vote. Following that, Gauntlet provided their initial recommendations for the asset and Coolhorsegirl informed the community that an on-chain proposal was in the works.

  • Total Value Locked (TVL) Highs: On March 11, the Moonwell protocol deployment on Base reached a significant milestone: $70M TVL. Only 17 days later, that metric became $100M.

Voting Insights and Observations

Summary of governance participation trends in March:

  • 8 on-chain proposals
  • 1 Snapshot proposal
  • 26 forum posts

For the observed period, the number of active voters for on-chain proposals averaged 56, with a maximum of 105 and a minimum of 13.

Proposal On-chain votes
MIP-B14 30
MIP-M19 33
MIP-M20 36
MIP-R14 13
MIP-M21 75
MIP-M22 63
MIP-M23 91
MIP-M24 105

This month had a below-average number of Snapshot proposals compared to the number of onchain proposals.

Proposal Off-chain votes
Add WBTC to Moonwell on Base 49

The previous maximum number of Snapshot voters occurred in February when a proposal for Gauntlet becoming Cap Guardian on Moonbeam managed to attract 51 voters.

Success Insights:

  • On-chain: The on-chain proposals in March witnessed a 100% success rate. All proposals passed with 91.4% consensus or above.
  • Off-chain: The single Snapshot proposal for March also successfully passed with a high degree of consensus opinion, coming in at 99.2% agreement.

Browse all of the proposals here.

Community:

Community Strengths

The overarching theme for March can be summed up as “adaptability to changes.” The community has stayed aware of the evolution of the Moonwell protocol and consistently showed up to vote for the highest-impact decisions. Upgrading the governance smart contract infrastructure is a difficult task; this is even more true for infrastructure that requires cross-chain message passing. Moonwell contributors and the community worked in tandem to push out and pass three high-level MIPs that improve the user experience of voting and staking on Base. March has also notably included more on-chain proposals than the previous months. The community has continued to stay engaged; a quorum was reached on every proposal.

The largest increase in community numbers came from the @MoonwellGov X account which could be attributed to increased account activity. Finally, there continue to be healthy debates in the forums. As an example, look at the discussion brought forth by contributor @elliot on MIP-M23 and MIP-M24. @curly sought clarification on the implementation details of the pair of MIPs and gave constructive feedback on the rollout/minimum proposal threshold. Conversations like these help Moonwell become more resilient as they reduce the chance of blindspots that could introduce negative externalities to the protocol.

Opportunities

While Moonwell continues to scale - as reflected in TVL growth, an increasing social media following, and engagement on the forums - there is an opportunity to directly reward users who perform the actions that most benefit the governance of the protocol. Those actions could include voting on on-chain proposals, attending the monthly governance call or submitting a question, voting on Snapshot, registering in the forums or replying to forum posts in a meaningful way, starting a governance discussion in Discord, or staking to help secure the protocol. Boardroom will work in tandem with Moonwell delegates to formalize these ideas and put it up for a community vote in the near future.

Conclusion

The March 2024 report highlights high-level governance-related changes, major protocol milestones, an increasing number of onchain proposals, and a growing level of community engagement. Moonwell has seen maintenance or improvement in nearly all governance metrics when compared to February. The total on-chain vote count, the number of forum posts, and the number of on-chain proposals are all up. Social media following is either on-par or up across all channels. A voting quorum is consistently reached.

Be sure to attend the upcoming governance community call on Thursday, April 4th at 5pm UTC in Discord to hear directly from the main contributors to the multichain governance upgrades from this month.

Links