Hi Swingby community, hope that 2022 has been great for you so far! In our last post, we mentioned that Swingby is transitioning into a DAO this year.
Today, we’re excited to share more details about the Swingby DAO and how things will change moving forward.
Why DAO? 🤔
As mentioned in our previous articles, Swingby was started to achieve our vision of a multi-chain future where there is free movement of users, assets and liquidity between different worlds. To facilitate this, we started with a small team and built Skybridge - enabling swaps that were trustless, simple to use & community-owned.
As a team, we wanted to ship our first products and lay the foundations in the initial years of Swingby Network. Have we accomplished what we wanted to do? Yes - till date, Skybridge has swapped over 2,000 BTC trustlessly without any exploits and hacks (thankfully). More recently, SkyPools (the next phase for Swingby) has done well in testnet testing and is preparing for a mainnet launch in February.
Moving alone, moving fast has been efficient for Swingby. In 2022, however, we want to do more. We want to do things differently. We want to DAO things together with you
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” - African Proverb
From what we observed in the Web 3 space, centralized teams can work really well in terms of efficiency. However, they lack the openness, diversity and emergence that we see in community-led Web3 projects and DAOs. When the community is involved in making a project’s vision come true, magic happens! And that’s where we want to be in 2022.
Furthermore, at Swingby, trust-minimization has always been a principle we uphold in everything we do, be it our systems architecture, smart contracts and or Metanode design. If our tech stack is decentralized but a small group of people still hold the keys to the kingdom, is that sufficient trust minimization?
We think we can do better, so we want to transition into a more decentralized, open and community-owned model - a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
What’s Next? 👇
To kick off the DAO transition, the Swingby Labs company will be dissolved and all treasury tokens and operating funds will be transferred to the Swingby DAO. $SWINGBY will be the governance token of Swingby Network and the DAO contract has been successfully deployed on Ethereum Mainnet here. We are using a fork of Barnbridge’s DAO platform to do staking, delegation, on-chain proposals and voting.
There will be no changes to the development & roadmap as we stay focused towards the deployment of SkyPools on mainnet. The Swingby development team will continue to build and maintain the Swingby Network & its products, requesting compensation from the DAO. Since a “CEO” position and hierarchy is not needed by a DAO, Jacob will still continue his work with Swingby but there will no longer be the CEO position within Swingby Network.
Our DAO Platform 🗳
The Swingby DAO Platform sits at the core of Swingby governance. To participate in voting, delegation and proposal creation, all token holders must stake their SWINGBY on dao.swingby.network.
Staking SWINGBY will give you vSWINGBY which is a representation of voting power (not an ERC-20 token). For stakers who lock up their SWINGBY, they will receive bonus vSWINGBY (voting power) for being aligned with the long term success of Swingby Network. A 2-year timelock will give you 100% vSWINGBY and the bonus is given linearly based on timelock period.
The Swingby DAO Platform will eventually become the hub for all things Swingby. Moving forward, other than staking, the platform will also be for Metanodes to bond their SWINGBY tokens. Currently, only BTC-ETH Metanodes will do their bonding on the DAO UI. We will be gradually transitioning the BSC-ETH Metanodes’ bonding to the DAO UI in the coming weeks.
Our Process 💡
Enabling the Swingby DAO to make the right decisions is crucial for Swingby Network’s long-term success. To help us go from idea to proposal in an open and rigorous manner, we took inspiration from several governance frameworks and designed this 4-phase process:
Phase 1 Informal Discussion: Proposers discuss & seek high-level interest on the problem statement in Discord.
Phase 2 Proposal Refinement & Temperature Check: When there’s high-level interest in the problem statement, proposers create a Proposal Draft and discuss it with the community. Eventually, they create a Final Proposal and hold a Discord emoji poll to do a temperature check.
Phase 3 Signal Voting: When the community passes the temperature check (>60%) & Final Proposal, we go for Signal Voting via our Snapshot page.
Phase 4 On-chain Voting: When the Snapshot vote has >60% approval, we go for on-chain voting and execution on the DAO UI.
Proposals which can be executed on-chain (e.g. arbitrary smart contract calls, token transfers or change in DAO parameters) need to complete Phases 1 to 4. This process should take around 21 to 25 days to complete.
On the other hand, there are social ratification proposals (e.g. petitions or development suggestions) that cannot be executed on-chain but require the DAO’s agreement. These proposals will go through Phase 1 to 3 and are passed when they receive 45% Quorum and 60% approval on Snapshot. This process should take at least 9 days to complete.
For more in-depth details about the governance process, please refer to our docs here. We will be creating more explainer videos to bring you through the process further.
Now, We Need Your Help 🤝
The Swingby DAO contract is live here. From now till 7 February, our target is to go live with the DAO by having at least 26,000,000 SWINGBY staked on the DAO UI. Hitting this threshold would ensure that sufficient representation and voting power of SWINGBY token-holders are represented on the DAO UI.
To kick off the DAO, we will be organizing a call in our Discord on 7 February 11AM UTC to run through the DAO framework and processes. Meanwhile, here are some areas we need your help to move forward with our transition to a DAO.
As a token-holder looking to stake your tokens, we need your help to:
Bridge your tokens from BEP-2 or BEP-20 to ERC-20.
Stake your tokens here
(Bonus) Lock your tokens for bonus vSWINGBY here
As a ETH-BTC Metanode, we will need you to transfer your Metanode bonds to the DAO UI.
Bridge your tokens from BEP-2 or BEP-20 to ERC-20.
Bond your tokens here
As a ETH-BTC Bitcoin liquidity provider, you will be required to migrate your BTC liquidity and farms to a new contract address on the Skybridge UI in the coming weeks. We will send out more information when the migration is ready to begin.
We look forward to you attending our first community call where we will explain the process in greater detail. If you have additional questions, please hop into our Discord and ask your question in the #governance channel.