Monthly Governance Reports

Announcements & Updates Updates
6

June 2024 Update

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

This update includes:

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

Proposals and Updates

Moonwell’s primary governance initiatives for this period included:

  1. Risk Management and Parameter Adjustments: Gauntlet continued their coverage of Moonwell with monthly recommendations in early June that included MIPs to adjust important asset risk parameters (e.g. collateral factors and IR parameters), intending to balance risk and capital efficiency. Throughout the month, they continued to post regular weekly updates. Similarly, Warden Finance contributed with coverage of the Base deployment’s liquidity incentives, as seen in this post from mid-June.
  2. Integrating MetaMorpho Moonwell Vaults: In early June, Block Analitica proposed a collaboration between Moonwell, Block Analitica, B.Protocol, and Morpho Blue. Block Analitica is a risk management firm; Morpho Blue is a governance-minimized lending protocol that hosts MetaMorpho, a protocol for creating lending vaults; and B.Protocol is a builder of open-source protocols and risk mitigation infrastructure. This proposal entailed creating yield-generating Moonwell MetaMorpho vaults with initial support for USDC and WETH. The proposal then progressed to a Snapshot vote before moving onchain. It successfully passed its onchain voting period and the USDC and WETH MetaMorpho vaults were launched on June 19th. The launch of the vaults was a quick success, resulting in significant growth across all metrics of the Base instance of Morpho Blue. By June 20th, total deposits reached $17.47M and total borrows reached $2.41M. The Flagship Moonwell ETH vault and Flagship Moonwell USDC vault accounted for ~70% of all deposits. When these metrics were reached, Block Analitica and B.Protocol submitted a cap to the Flagship Moonwell ETH vault USDC/WETH market to address user demand and maintain momentum. By the end of the month, deposits totaled $20M.
  3. Largest amount of proposals in a week: In the first week of June, Moonwell experienced the largest amount of proposals in a single week in the protocol’s history. The community came together to collectively push through MIP-M29​​ (Gauntlet’s Moonbeam Recommendations), MIP-B19 (Gauntlet’s Base Recommendations), MIP-R19 (Gauntlet’s Moonriver Recommendations), MIP-M30 (transferring the wBTC Market Admin to the new governor), MIP-M31 and MIP-R20 (Rebalancing Moonriver and Moonbeam Liquidity Incentives), a Morpho Snapshot proposal, and MIP-B20 (adjusting the Base Safety Module reward speed). Even more impressive is that for one of the proposals, MIP-M30, voting took place from Boardroom’s front-end due to its support of the old governor contract.
  4. New network deployment proposal: In mid-June, following Moonwell’s successful activation on Base, delegate @coolhorsegirl created a Snapshot signal vote to potentially activate Moonwell on Optimism. The Snapshot passed, and the proposal is expected to progress to an onchain vote in the coming weeks.

Major Milestones Achieved:

  • Smart Wallet: Following last month’s technical preview, Coinbase’s Smart Wallets were officially integrated into Moonwell on June 5th. To learn more about Smart Wallet features and how to use a Smart Wallet on Moonwell, check out this Discord announcement.
  • Moonwell Contributor Luke Youngblood on the Unchained Podcast and The Scoop Podcast: June 7th, Laura Shin posted a new episode of the Unchained podcast featuring Luke Youngblood. The pair discussed the newly unveiled Coinbase Smart Wallet, onchain finance and Coinbase’s role in making it easier to use, and Moonwell’s focus on emerging markets. On June 28th, Frank Chaparro of The Scoop Podcast hosted Luke to further discuss the Coinbase Smart Wallet and other topics.
  • Moonwell MetaMorpho Vaults (ETH and USDC): In mid-June, prior to the official launch, Moonwell announced that the technical preview for Moonwell MetaMorpho vaults had gone live. To use this preview, users could supply either ETH or USDC to one of the newly established vaults. The vault dynamically allocates funds across Morpho Blue markets. By June 29th, the vaults had already reached $20M in total deposits.
  • June Monthly Governance Participant Galxe campaign: In June, Moonwell kicked off a full-scale, monthly recurring governance campaign. Each month, $2000 WELL will be rewarded to 20 random NFT minters ($100 each). For June, the qualifying tasks for users to complete were (1) vote on at least two onchain proposals during June and (2) create a quality forum reply.

Voting Insights and Observations

Summary of governance participation trends in June:

  • 7 onchain proposals (excluding one canceled proposal)
  • 2 Snapshot proposals
  • 27 forum posts

For the observed period, the number of active voters for onchain proposals averaged 41, with a minimum of 14 and a maximum of 67.

Proposal Onchain votes
MIP-B19 47
MIP-R19 15
MIP-M31 37
MIP-R20 14
MIP-B20 57
MIP-M32 53
MIP-B21 67

The original MIP-B20 proposal gathered an additional 38 votes before being canceled, but it is not included in this month’s analysis.

This month, there were two Snapshot signal votes.

Proposal Offchain votes
[Temp Check] Moonwell MetaMorpho Vaults: Next-Gen DeFi Lending 39
Activate Moonwell Protocol on Optimism 50

The previous maximum number of Snapshot voters occurred in April when a proposal from Gauntlet to Add AERO Market to Moonwell on Base managed to attract 86 voters.

Success Insights:

  • Onchain: The onchain proposals in June witnessed a 100% success rate.
  • Offchain: Both Snapshot proposals for June successfully passed with a high degree of consensus opinion. 100% of voters chose “Yes” to activate Moonwell on Optimism and to deploy Moonwell MetaMorpho Flagship vaults.

Browse all of the proposals here.

Community:

Community Strengths

A total of seven onchain proposals makes June tied with April for the second-most amount of passed proposals in a single month since Boardroom began covering Moonwell governance. The average number of votes for April was on par with this month, coming in at 45 and 41 votes, respectively. During this period, the first week of June included the highest number of proposals for a single week. Those included market recommendations from Gauntlet, a transfer of the wBTC market admin, token liquidity incentives rebalancing for Moonriver and Moonbeam, a Snapshot for the Morpho proposal, and a Base Safety Module reward speed adjustment. This is the most attentive that governance participants have ever had to be, and they consistently came together to reach quorum.

Thematically, the community is focused on passing forward-looking integrations that could benefit the protocol in the future. One main example from this month was the proposal which accepted ownership of and incentivized the Moonwell MetaMorpho Vaults. Uncoincidentally, this proposal received the highest voter turnout all month. In just over one week after the proposal’s passing and the initial vaults going live, the Moonwell Flagship Vaults gathered $20M in deposits. Another example of the prioritization of forward-looking Moonwell integrations, a Snapshot temp check from mid-June indicated that the community is strongly in favor of activating the protocol on Optimism. This proposal is expected to progress to an onchain vote in the near future.

Opportunities

After gathering data from the Based Voter campaign and the first month of the Monthly Governance Participant campaign, we see an opportunity to make the campaigns more inclusive. While we want to properly incentivize all aspects of getting involved in governance, it makes sense for July to be focused solely on increasing onchain voter turnout. We still encourage thoughtful forum activity, Discord discussions, and governance call attendance, but for this month, we will limit direct incentives to encouraging voting onchain.

In terms of the wider community, there is an opportunity for users to make their voices heard during choppy market conditions. In times like these, novel discussions and increased voter turnout go a long way to indicate the future direction of the Moonwell protocol. Users who wish to get involved in governance have an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and contribute directly to a leading DeFi protocol.

Conclusion

The June 2024 report highlights an uptick in the number of passed proposals in a short time period, without sacrificing voter attention. The proposals that consistently engage the community the most tend to be future integrations and activations that expand Moonwell’s reach and influence. There are opportunities to make the Galxe campaign incentives more inclusive and for individual users to make their voices heard. Voter turnout was on par with previous months and social metrics generally continue to rise across the board.

Be sure to attend the upcoming governance community call on Wednesday, June 3rd at 5pm UTC in Discord.

Links

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