Wei DAO, the DAO for the WNS and NameNFT registration and fees, has so far worked reasonably well to allow .wei domain holders to participate in onchain governance through conviction voting their names.

Currently, Wei DAO has a multisig admin (exec.dao.wei), which is designed to steward and monitor the DAO so that it can validate the overall concept of this name-owned protocol. These are "training wheels" to ensure the NameNFT is not mismanaged at this stage, or if the treasury is approached for funding, it does not just become a vending machine for whatever people feel like (within reason). IMO the death spiral for DAOs occurs when participants feel like they must "always be online" in order to handle these things before a governance system is properly vetted and made immutable.

It would be helpful at this point to lay out the kinds of clear cases where the multisig should act to veto or cancel proposals. This post isn't meant to criticize or say any proposals so far have been "bad." In fact, I think everyone participating at this stage has good intentions, more or less, and is aware of the experimental nature of WNS.

Still some basic ground rules are helpful so that people don't guess at how the multisig may or may not act.

Most clearly: Proposals that do not have active discussion on X.com, here or elsewhere, and that ask for grants should be treated as governance attacks unless properly discussed and vetted, or that have a clear, and most importantly, trustless component to "doing the thing with the ETH." Two proposals so far have made nice gestures as to donating names back to DAO. I think this could be managed trustlessly so that we do not create a precedent of "spray and pray", but in their current format ("I am asking for ETH and I am saying I will donate names") they do not cut it for a project that wants to encourage broader participation.

On the positive side, proposals that simply withdraw accrued ETH from the NameNFT into the DAO should be passed routinely. Similarly, proposals that push ETH to the roll.wei lottery, which encourages both registration activity and DAO participation, should be passed ("top ups").

Suffice to say, things that use ETH from Wei DAO that have a reasonable chance of increasing the number of domain holders, or objectively improving the protocol or treasury (for example, staking a portion of ETH into stETH), will not be admin topics of concern.

Wei DAO is early. I would like to see people request ETH for bounties and other small scale things. Where asking for trust isn't a big deal based on relative treasury impact. But proposals that ask for 40% or more of the treasury, lacking any sort of discussion or automation, will be cancelled following an initial opportunity for users to also veto.

Be chill, be good, do great things, WNS.

ross.wei