SundaeSwap Governance Launch!

It’s been six months since our Governance Beta launch on testnet, and we’ve been working hard toward our formal Governance Portal launch to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the launch of the SundaeSwap protocol. We have a ton of people to thank in helping us get here; we couldn’t have done it without our partners and all the wonderful people that have helped us with the testing and feedback to help make the technology something special.

Background

In July of 2022, we launched our first public instance of our off-chain Validium-inspired secure Governance Solution on Cardano by taking a vote for the best ice cream flavor (cookies n’ cream won by a landslide!). After our vote, we had several conversations with partners across the Cardano ecosystem and discovered that voting was a fairly common pain point across several different projects in addition to ours. We also learned that many companies operating within the space simply would not have the resources necessary to build their own voting system, so we worked to make our solution malleable enough to support other projects.

Fast forward to today, and we’re proud to say that the Governance technology we are launching is the same technology powering the governance portals for NMKR, Discoin, NEWM, and that also powered the voting that took place leading up to the Cardano Summit.

What makes our governance unique?

The solution we’ve built is a custom layer-2 Validium solution. This means we publish a commitment to the votes we have seen on layer-1 Cardano in a way that allows us to present a cryptographic proof that your vote is included in this commitment. The benefit of this is that it generates zero fees for the end user. Votes are still signed by the user’s wallet, but don’t translate into a transaction directly on-chain. Instead, they get included in the next merkle-tree root, where users can verify for themselves that their vote is included. For a deep-dive on exactly how this works, see our video on NerdOut, Andrew Westberg’s Cardano education channel.

Adoption of Governance Procedures as a First Vote

To give the community guidelines on how to effectively propose changes for the SundaeSwap DAO, we have created an initial set of guidelines for submitting Temperature Checks and Proposals.

Each section of the Procedures, which includes Proposal Creation, General Procedures applicable to all Proposals, Moderator Roles and Obligations, and Definitions, are required to develop, manage, and organize the future SundaeSwap DAO community. Future DAO participants should become familiar with these Procedures to ensure that the DAO operates efficiently and transparently. The first Forum Temp Check introduces the proposed Governance Procedures document as a Temperature Check.

In closing…

Our team has been focused on Governance as our first major product release for 2023 because we view it as a critical component solidifying the SundaeSwap DEX as a fully decentralized project. With this launch, we are enabling a goal we’ve had since the launch of the DEX last January — to give SUNDAE token holders the capability to propose and vote on key decisions related to the future of the DEX protocol.

If you are a project on Cardano looking for a similar governance solution, please reach out to us on our discord at https://discord.com/invite/sundae or email us at contact@sundaeswap.finance!