The next generation of governors will be modular! by Hadrien Croubois | Devcon SEA

everyone to take a seat please we have Adrien to give us the next talk the next generation of governance will be modular um I encourage everyone to scan the QR code on the right so if you have any questions Adrien uh will address them in the end all right let's give a round of applause for hijan hello thank you than you for being here wait let's do that yeah thank you for being here everyone so very quickly uh Governors are a big thing in ethereum uh there is an estimation that there is about $30 billion locked into different forms of Dao Governor contracts that kind of thing but I think that's just the tip of the iceberg because most of the value is also this Governor contract controlling the upgrade of the L2 and all this kind of processes like like Governor control compound and compound holds a lot of assets and this is governed by about 30 million people that have wallets that contain whether they know it or not tokens that allow them to vote and that's a lot of people and and you can go to Tali one of our partners to have a look at all the governor that exist there are a lot and maybe some of them are not even here but like this is a big part of the space yet users are not that much involved into this process most people don't vote in the best case they delegate to someone else so the question is what can we do here and what's missing usually when you have an application you start your application by deploying it with like Ana and as your application grow you update your governance you go from an EA to a multi in your early stage and once you have a big enough user base with token distributed you can go to to having a full-fledged Dao but like this Russ this should not be rush you should take your time doing it but you should be aware that this is where you should be heading at some point and prepare for that and so usually the question that we get is if I want to launch a governor which governor should I use and the thing is that there are many many option to choose from uh and there are a lot of questions that you need to ask yourself when you are going to launch a governor who is going to vote what's the model is it like a multi with a small party of people or is it like completely open like like comp with a with a voting token like what am I going to do with my Governor am I going to manage some funds that came in like for example the funds that are raised by ens by selling domain names or am I going to upgrade the bridge for from mayet to my 2 and what's going to be the life cycle of our proposal and there are a lot of options that you need to figure out and and that's painful to figure out because you need to figure that out early before you launch your governor and so you can BAS basically use open the contract we have a set of contracts to building your governor and hopefully you can choose from many option and build a governor build a governor that fits your need but ultimately like this is not a silver bullet because uh you still have some limitation uh for example like maybe you want to have different rules for executing a proposal depending on the details maybe like if it's just paying a subcontractors some some multi would be able to do it but if it's a bigger upgrade you want the entire Community to vote for it uh maybe you want to to have a complement like this of of the votes of the user and the vote of Guardians there are many things that you may want to do you may have a dynamic approach to voting whatever that may mean to you and so you could have an upgradeable uh a governor that will have a new feature at some point but upgradeability is not ideal in particular because if you have proposals that are in Flight when you that are active when you do the upgrade you might mess up with this proposal and and and so we need something better and my claim here is that we want to do something that is more modular uh and by modular you may understand a lot of things some people may think like oh we can make it modular by using like a diamond proxy approach and and we can add new feature and it's less monolithic but I don't think that's the right approach and my claim today is that I think that you should be able to do that transition from the multi phase to this do phase very smoothly by having a single core contract that is basically the Vault of your governance and being able to turn on and turn off different modules like having a module that you use early on so that it behaves like a multisig and at some point this module would go away opening the space to another module that would allow people voting with token and maybe those two module can coexist with a system that decide depending on what the proposal is and what the state of this proposal is which module takes over so that was what I could come up within five minutes uh but I hope I got you interested in the subject of Governor contract and governance of application in general and please stay in touch with with this if this something that interests you we'll definitely want user feedback on whatever we build for for doing that thank you um we don't have live questions rolling in so let's do uh let's pass around the mic in the audience if anyone have questions for hi awesome and thanks for building uh all the the good stuff you have there for free and open source uh so is any of these things that you've mentioned already being built uh what's the the state of the road map so the governor contracts from open Zeppelin that's built and that's modular in the way that you can assemble module before compilation and then it compiles to a monolitic contract that may be upgradeable so that's something we already have and we have a big set of modules and some some modules we design on our own some design we design with users like the ens foundation and we are going to extend that with more modules uh and you can build your own modules but for like the endgame thing I'm talking about like the the smart account um honestly it's a very fresh idea that came up during Defcon so those slides are very very new we do have an effort to building uh a framework for ERC 4237 smart account that uses ERC 7579 as a plug-in system so this is something we've been working on for a few months it will very soon be available as a public demo like sort of a of a back and forth discussion space before it get frozen into the main repository and during this back and forth discussion with the community that we're expecting to have in the upcoming months we will try