July 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 July 2024.
This update includes:
- Proposals, Updates, & Milestones
- Voting Insights & Observations
- Community Strengths
- Opportunities
- Conclusion & Links
Proposals and Updates
Moonwell’s primary governance initiatives for this period included:
- Block Analitica and B.Protocol’s first actions as Curator and Allocator of the Moonwell Flagship USDC Vault: In mid-July, Block Analitica and B.Protocol announced a transition from the exchange rate oracle cbETH/USDC market to the new cbETH/USDC market utilizing a secondary price oracle. One of the reasons for this transition was the intention to strengthen the risk management of the Moonwell Flagship USDC vault. This serves as the first exercise of Curator/Allocator responsibilities after the initial introduction post and subsequent successful onchain proposal back in June. At the end of the month, the teams created a similar forum post for the Moonwell Flagship USDC - wstETH/USDC Market Listing with a Market Price Oracle.
- Moonwell’s First Multi-Network Proposal - MIP-X01: As a part of the effort to potentially activate Moonwell on Optimism (following a successful Snapshot signal vote), the first onchain proposal in this process was created to activate the WELL token on OP Mainnet and facilitate its cross-network transfer capabilities. This was a first-of-its-kind “multi-network” proposal, meaning that changes will be executed on different networks simultaneously. The proposal additionally sought to upgrade the Multichain Governor on Moonbeam and the Vote Collection contract on Base.
- Moonwell Activation on Optimism: In late July, the first Optimism-native MIP was published. MIP-O00 and MIP-O01 sought to officially activate the Moonwell protocol on OP Mainnet and expand Moonwell’s reach within the Optimism Superchain. The pair of proposals were overwhelmingly supported and passed by the community. The protocol was activated on Optimism on July 29th.
- New Moonwell Markets: In the first half of June, Justin from Ether.fi created a forum discussion with the intention of adding a weETH market to Moonwell’s Base deployment. Ether.fi is a liquid staking protocol built on Ethereum; the protocol issues eETH as a liquid restaking token and weETH is its non-rebasing equivalent. For more information on risk assessment, decentralization, market history, and more, see the forum post. On July 25th, the team submitted a Snapshot to gauge the community’s sentiment on this proposal. It passed its voting period and is expected to move to an onchain vote in August. Similarly, a representative for Kelp DAO created a forum post at the end of the month with the intention of adding Kelp DAO’s liquid restaking token (LRT), wrsETH, to the Moonwell markets on Base. KelpDAO is a liquid restaking protocol built on top of EigenLayer; users can stake and restake on the platform to earn rewards and DeFi yields. For more, see: Add wrsETH market to Moonwell on Base
- Risk Management and Parameter Adjustments: Gauntlet published two MIPs on the first day of the month to adjust asset risk parameters for Moonwell’s Base and Moonbeam deployments. Throughout the month, Gauntlet also published weekly updates to give an overview of asset utilization, liquidations, protocol growth, and more. In the first week of the month, delegate Curly submitted MIP-M34 and MIP-R21. These monthly reward speed proposals aim to rebalance liquidity incentives and maintain healthy levels of rewards on Moonbeam and Moonriver.
Major Milestones Achieved:
- July Monthly Governance Participant Galxe campaign: The second iteration of the three-month Moonwell Governance Galxe campaign period reduced the required actions of users when compared to the campaign for June. For this campaign, users were required to vote on at least two onchain proposals during the July calendar month. The previous local maximum in voter turnout occurred in April when MIP-B17 gathered 145 onchain votes, which coincided with the Based Voter Galxe campaign and was the highest amount of votes received on a proposal since August 2023. With the July campaign, the first two proposals of the month, MIP-M33 and MIP-B22, eclipsed MIP-B17 with 195 and 198 votes, respectively. MIP-X01 further went on to gather 237 votes.
- Isolated Markets on Moonwell: In early July, Isolated Markets were launched for Moonwell. These markets are a result of the collaboration between Morpho Blue and Moonwell; they are specialized lending pools that pair one collateral asset with one borrowable asset and each pool operates independently of one another. 8 Isolated Markets were available on launch.
- Optimism SuperFest & Galxe Campaign: On July 9th, Moonwell announced that, as a part of Optimism’s SuperFest (a DeFi incentives campaign funded with 1.5M OP), users could supply USDC on Moonwell to earn OP rewards. Users could use Galxe to mint the commemorative SuperFest NFT.
- Optimism Retro Funding Round 4: On July 18th, Moonwell announced that they were a recipient of Optimism Retro Funding Round 4, receiving 80,156.8 OP tokens. 100% of the funding will be distributed as liquidity incentives on Moonwell.
- Growing Number of Moonwell Users on Base: By July 15th, Moonwell on Base had grown to over 150,000 users since launch on the network.
- Podcast Appearance: Moonwell contributor Luke Youngblood appeared on the Pirate Pod to explore Moonwell’s “lending made simple” approach that has propelled it as one of the leading DeFi projects on Base.
Voting Insights and Observations
Summary of governance participation trends in July:
- 7 onchain proposals
- 1 Snapshot proposal
- 20 forum posts
For the observed period, the number of active voters for onchain proposals averaged 154, with a minimum of 13 and a maximum of 237.
| Proposal | Onchain votes |
|---|---|
| MIP-B22 | 198 |
| MIP-M33 | 195 |
| MIP-R21 | 13 |
| MIP-M34 | 46 |
| MIP-X01 | 237 |
| MIP-O00 | 217 |
| MIP-O01 | 174 |
This month, there was a single Snapshot signal vote.
| Proposal | Offchain votes |
|---|---|
| [Temp Check] Add weETH Markets to Moonwell on Base | 44 |
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 July witnessed a 100% success rate.
- Offchain: The single Snapshot proposal for the month passed with 76.48% consensus.
Browse all of the proposals here.
Community:
- Main X account: 36.7K Followers (+0.27%)
- Governance X account: 519 Followers (+2.97%)
- Discord: 6953 Members (+5.99%)
- Announcements Telegram: 704 Members (-1.54%)
- Chat Telegram: 6251 Members (+5.56%)
Community Strengths
With the adjusted requirements of July’s Galxe governance incentivization campaign, we have seen the highest voter turnout since April 2023 with MIP-B22, MIP-M33, and MIP-X01. The community has also been receptive to fundamental changes in Moonwell’s governance systems. First, MIP-X01 brought about upgrades to the governance contracts on Moonbeam and Base, enabling changes to be executed on multiple chains without the need for multiple proposals. This likely is correlated with the community’s excitement for the efforts to activate the Moonwell protocol on Optimism mainnet. Given Moonwell’s significant traction on Base, users appear eager to play an equally large role in Optimism’s Superchain strategy.
Opportunities
After gathering data from the June Galxe campaign, we determined that the best path going forward for July was to reduce the requirements to mint the NFT. It makes the campaign more inclusive and still accomplishes one of our primary goals of increasing voter turnout. These governance incentive campaigns have given us valuable data and have largely had positive results on short-term voter metrics. Now, following the final August iteration of the campaign, it makes sense to shift focus to long-term engagement and sustainable expansion of the delegate roster and working cohesion. There is also an opportunity to improve the community onboarding process through a structured, tiered Discord Role system. Look out for comms on these topics in the upcoming months.
Conclusion
The July 2024 report highlights significant changes to Moonwell governance systems and community excitement for future activations in other ecosystems. Voter turnout has significantly increased compared to previous months and social metrics generally continue to rise across the board.
Be sure to attend the upcoming governance community call on Thursday, August 1st at 17:00 UTC in Discord. Add it to your calendar here.