Governance Update #12

Updates and Announcements 📢 Governance Updates
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Governance Update #12

Today marks the last day of Season 9! Thank you to everyone who participated in Season 9 and the broader governance experiments Optimism has run over the past four years. Your contributions have not just shaped Optimism, but have shaped the broader industry’s understanding of decentralized governance, with applicability well beyond Web 3. Specifically, your participation has resulted in practical examples of how non-plutocractic voting systems, optimistic approvals, deliberative processes, algorithmic grant allocation, and futarchy can be applied to decentralized decision making at scale. Your contributions have outlined a path for improving the traditional corporate governance model in a way that increases accountability and further reduces platform risk. Even while the scope of Optimism governance has narrowed over time, the relevance of these experiments only expands in the current technology landscape.

We have simultaneously learned a lot on the protocol side from users amid an evolving market landscape. OP mainnet has evolved from a singular chain to a network of chains, and our target market has evolved from developers to enterprises with the shift to OP Enterprise. It’s important that governance track tightly with this evolution and given the ecosystem continues to evolve substantially, Optimism governance will remain a work in progress for longer than originally anticipated. In the meantime, the Foundation will put forth a series of proposals to temporarily constrain the scope of Optimism governance to shared protocol upgrades and accountable management.

One of the principles we’ve developed over the past four years is that governance should represent the most impacted stakeholders. Previously, protocol upgrades have been governed by four groups of stakeholders: tokenholders in the Tokenhouse, and Chains, Apps, and Users in the Citizens’ House. We no longer believe it is useful to separate out specific voting powers for Chains, Apps, and Users. The shape of platform risk looks different with OP Enterprise as stakeholders can apply more discretion in adopting upgrades and may exercise more power outside governance (e.g. self-hosting.) Participation among these groups in the Citizens’ House has been low and decreasing, which could be indicative of the reduction in platform risk with the shift to OP Enterprise. Given these factors, we’ve decided to pause operation of the Citizens House for the indefinite future.

In Voting Cycle #55, you can expect corresponding proposals from the Foundation aimed at:

  • Updating the Operating Manual to reflect the above mentioned changes and further streamline the protocol upgrade process
  • Deprecating the Grants Council, Milestones and Metrics Council, and the Developer Advisory Board (as partially outlined in Season 9: From Experiment to Organization)
  • Transferring management over the ETH and OP Treasury to the Foundation given the focus on protocol governance

A budget proposal for the next 12 month of operations for the Security Council may also be put forward during this cycle.

As outlined in Guide to Season 9, there won’t be dedicated Reflection Periods or Seasons going forward, governance will operate without interruption to regular Voting Cycles.

Finally, @lavande will be transitioning from Head of Governance to a seat on the Foundation Board at the end of this month. This will allow her to continue to advocate for transparency, accountability, and broad stakeholder input in high-level decision making. @Jonas will be the best point of contact for any governance related matters going forward.

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Congratulations. Optimism went from the most innovative DAO in the space (RetroPGF, futarchy, optimistic governance, non-plutocratic voting, the whole playbook everyone else copied) to officially killing the DAO.

It was a genuinely great experiment while it lasted. Thanks for the lessons, including this last one.

“The DAO is dead. The DAO remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?”

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Thank you for this update. Season 9 has clearly been a pivotal moment for the Optimism Collective not just in terms of what was built, but in terms of honest reflection on what governance structures actually work at scale.

The decision to pause the Citizens’ House is significant. While I understand the rationale declining participation, shifting platform risk with OP Enterprise, and the need to streamline this pause raises an important long-term question: without a non-token-weighted house, how does the Collective prevent governance from gradually drifting toward plutocratic capture? The Citizens’ House was one of the most distinctive experiments in bicameral DAO design, and pausing it indefinitely removes a key counterbalance to token-weighted voting.

On the deprecation of the Grants Council, Milestones & Metrics Council, and Developer Advisory Board I think this is a reasonable consolidation given the current phase. However, the community should closely monitor whether removing these bodies creates accountability gaps, especially around how grant outcomes and developer feedback will be tracked going forward.

The shift to continuous Voting Cycles (without Seasons/Reflection Periods) is interesting. Seasons provided structured pause-and-reflect moments that helped the community course-correct. Without them, there is a risk of governance fatigue and reduced deliberation quality something worth watching carefully.

Overall, this feels like a necessary recalibration trading breadth for focus. But the Collective should be intentional about defining clear conditions under which Citizens’ House and broader stakeholder governance can be responsibly reactivated.

Looking forward to Voting Cycle #55 proposals and the community’s response. @system @0xDonPepe