An (EIP-4824 powered) daoURI for the Arbitrum DAO

Description

Abstract

We propose that the Arbitrum DAO takes control of its data by publishing a daoURI onchain. The daoURI, following EIP-4824, will create a single source of truth on the DAO, that cannot be altered by external agencies, is fully manageable via governance, bringing helpful context on the DAO onchain. This will be helpful for newcomers, tooling providers, and experienced governooors alike.

DAOstar received a grant from the Arbitrum Foundation to improve the adoption of EIP-4824 in the Arbitrum ecosystem. We are allocating a portion of that grant to steward this proposal. Adopting EIP-4824 requires no additional spend from the DAO treasury, and it makes no change to its smart contracts or governance structure.

Motivation

The Arbitrum DAO is one of the largest DAOs, and there is a lot of data surrounding it. This dataset grows with every new initiative and has multiple components that may not be very visible from the “outside”. For example, consider the following questions:

1. Who are the current Security Council, Arbitrum Research & Development Collective, Procurement Committee members? (Answer: you can search the respective forum post to find this)
2. Can you share a location that tracks all DAO-owned/managed multisig addresses? (Answer: this could be https://www.arbwallets.xyz/)
3. Can you share a status update on the DAO’s grant spending? (Answer: R3gen Finance reports this on the forum)
4. Where can we see delegate performance? (Answer: KarmaGAP or Tally)
5. How much in sequencer fees is being collected? (Answer: there is a dashboard for this)
6. What orbit chains exist? (Answer: the ecosystem page tracks this)
7. Where to find recordings and transcripts of public meetings? (Answer: I’m not sure!)

For an active participant, these answers might not be very hard. But for the majority of people who are not active participants of the DAO, and even for tooling providers, collecting this information requires a painstaking amount of manual effort. This leads to inconsistencies, errors and outdated information.

There are over 200 DAOs at the moment with a treasury size of over $1M, and collecting information on them manually is becoming an exponentially difficult task. EIP-4824 was authored by DAOstar with the support from the Ethereum Foundation, Gnosis, Etherscan, DeepDAO, Snapshot, and a large number of DAO tooling companies, to create a better infrastructure for DAO data.

Adopting EIP-4824 essentially means that the DAO publishes a daoURI onchain. daoURIs have a standard JSON-LD format:

{
"@context": "http://www.daostar.org/schemas",
"type": "DAO",
"name": "<name of the DAO>",
"description": "<description>",
"membersURI": "<URI>",
"proposalsURI": "<URI>",
"activityLogURI": "<URI>",
"governanceURI": "<URI>",
"contractsRegistryURI": "<URI>"
}

It contains information on governance, members, activities and contracts by default. Outside of the endpoints mentioned above, a DAO can also choose to publish information that is specifically important to it. For Arbitrum, this could be information about orbit chains, different multi-sigs and councils, spending, sequencer fees, link to its constitution, etc. Essentially, the daoURI creates an “official repository” of information on the DAO.

Here are some examples of how the daoURI could be used:

1. It can be used to bring more context to contracts on block explorers. For example, we could go from this:

to this:

2. We can make DAO data easily and freely available to everyone

For example, Arbitrum DAO’s current DeepDAO profile misses a ton of info - contracts, or revenue, or governance guardrails (councils and multi-sigs), etc. Messari’s Arbitrum DAO dashboard requires a paid membership to access, which could also be due to the difficulty of collecting and presenting DAO data (thus making it too valuable to give away for free). By making access to this information easy, we can greatly improve the DAO’s transparency. i.e, go from:

to this:

3. daoURI makes it much easier to structure metadata improvements.

A specific example that surfaced during Arbitrum GovHack (thanks to Paulo Fonseca): onchain proposals at Arbitrum DAO (or any DAO for that matter) do not reference a forum discussion. This takes away a lot of available information. If we wanted to change this, we could achieve it easily by enforcing a discussionURI field inside the proposalURI (which is a standard component of daoURI). Tally, Aragon, Snapshot X, and most governance tooling providers are members of DAOstar. Extending the standard will create an easy upgrade pathway for them and this change would reflect the change across the ecosystem.

To summarize, a daoURI creates a source of truth for metadata, that can represent the present state of the DAO, and is easily accessible for onchain and offchain tools. This proposal carries no additional cost, or changes to any existing smart contract or process. It's a step in the right direction with no downside.

Specifications

Execution is a simple contract call to the EIP-4824 Registration Factory which deploys a new registration contract that’ll store the daoURI. The registration will be on Arbitrum One network, setting the DAO’s Governor timelock as admin, and managers as the DAO decides.

A DAO that runs the same configuration as Arbitrum DAO and has adopted EIP-4824 is Unlock Protocol. We are adding that transaction here for reference, along with successful proposals at Treasure and 1inch that were executed through their respective treasury safes.

Timeline

Creation of daoURI V0.1 (includes conversations with delegates, service providers, the Arbitrum Foundation, and all other participants through the forum, led by DAOstar): 4 weeks

Testing (ensuring that the subURIs work well & that any static data is either uploaded to IPFS or hosted by a trusted 3rd party, for example the Arbitrum Foundation): 2 weeks

Overall: 6 weeks before the proposal is ready to be executed

Overall Cost

This proposal does not require any transfer of funds from the DAO treasury.

Special thanks to @Bobbay, @Matt_StableLab, @raam, @coolhorsegirl, @Srijith-Questbook, @Sinkas, Hayden (BlockworksResearch) and Nick Nahaghi (Hats) for feedback and edits; @krst, @AlexLumley, @Frisson, @dk3, and George Beall (Gauntlet) for the expert sessions, and to Klaus and the rest of the GovHack team for making an awesome event happen at Brussels!

EIP-4824 has already been adopted by Snapshot, Aragon, Treasure, 1inch, Optimism Collective (through the Optimism Foundation), and multiple frameworks and DAOs. The effort is supported by grants from the Arbitrum Foundation, Optimism Collective, ENS, Gnosis, Solana and many other stakeholders of the web3 ecosystem. Thank you to everyone:)