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DAO / Voting FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions relating to Panther DAO

Table of Contents

General

Voting

How does Panther Protocol's governance system work?

Panther is, from Day 1, a fully decentralized entity, launched in a private and decentralized manner, with all major decisions made by the Panther DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization for protocol governance. This requires a level of technical and organizational maturity that starts with creating the base-layer tools to make Private DeFi a reality.
One of the unique features that will be observed in the later stages of the DAO is the eventual inclusion of quadratic voting, a mechanism to infuse systems with fairness by reducing the voting power of whales. A major problem identified throughout the DeFi space is that, when governed by DAOs, voting power tends to get concentrated on the hands of the wealthier users, often founding members and major investors. Quadratic voting and mathematical proofs should help the Panther DAO fairly distribute voting power amongst its token holders
Please refer to the DAO Governance section for more details.

How did Panther DAO launch in a decentralized manner?

Please see theGenesis section of the DAO Governance chapter.

How will Panther DAO be governed after launch?

Please see The future section of the DAO Governance chapter.

How does the Panther DAO get the revenue necessary to maintain Panther?

The Panther DAO collects fees for:
  • zAsset transactions
  • ZK Reveals
  • Private interchain transfers
and issues rewards for:
  • Privacy staking
  • Relayers
  • LPs

Why do we keep getting asked to vote on things?

From the very beginning, the vision of Panther's co-founders was for the protocol to be governed by a DAO, i.e. a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. Truly decentralized governance can only be achieved when there is a community that can democratically vote on the direction the protocol takes. If a single centralized team makes all the important decisions without input from the community, it is not a true DAO.
This means that even in situations where it seems obvious that the majority of the community would be in favor of a particular direction, a vote is needed.

What's the point of voting on a proposal when the team controls the protocol smart contracts?

The team does not directly control the core smart contracts; instead, they facilitate community control.
This is because once a proposal is approved by a vote, if the execution of that proposal on chain was handled by a centralized entity, then it would not be fully decentralized governance, because one party would still be responsible for controlling the smart contracts.
Instead, where appropriate, the Snapshot.org proposals which are voted on by the community include proposed transactions interacting with the protocol's core contracts. If a proposal passes, these transactions are executed autonomously via the Zodiac Reality module within the DAO multi-sig contract. See the Gnosis blog post announcing this technology for a great explanation of how it works.

Can $ZKP holders vote on proposals using a fair and weighted voting system? What aspects of the project can $ZKP holders modify and improve?

One of the unique features that will be observed in the later stages of the Panther DAO is the eventual inclusion of quadratic voting, a mechanism to infuse systems with fairness by reducing the voting power of whales. Voting proposals cover aspects such as setting charges, privacy thresholds, new improvements to protocol — the list is long and always growing.

The Panther DAO will operate with a quadratic voting system. What is a Quadratic voting system?

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a redesigned voting method reflecting the intensity of people’s preferences in collective decisions. It greatly mitigates tyranny-of-the-majority and factional control problems.
Votes in QV convert to “weighted votes” according to their square root. So if a user that holds 1 $ZKP puts in one vote on an issue, that is one vote; four $ZKP are two votes; nine $ZKP are three votes, and so on. This limits the power of whales and increases the power of the community, as one user with 10,000 $ZKP would have the same voting power as 100 users with just 1 $ZKP each.

Why can't I vote, even though I have $PreZKP?

The $PreZKP token from LaunchDAO is no longer relevant for voting. That was purely for bootstrapping the main Panther DAO as described in the LaunchDAO docs and protocol launch proposal.
Consequently, LaunchDAO is now closed, although the technology will almost certainly be repurposed for other interesting use cases in the future.

Why can't I vote, even though I have $ZKP?

This is almost certainly one of the following reasons:
For each proposal, you can see the start time displayed at the top right of the page.