Protocol Review DAO

This crowdfund forms a DAO to provide accessible explanations of decentralized protocols.

The core team currently includes 8 people with a background in protocol engineering and audits:

• Graeme Boy (CTO of Mirror, former Director of Engineering at Dharma)
• Carlos Flores (Lead Protocol at Mirror)
• Annie Ke (Software Engineer at Optimism)
• Aparna Krishnan (co-founder at Opyn)
• Nadav A. Hollander (founder and CEO at Dharma)
• Brianna Montgomery (Founding team at Fei, former audits team at ConsenSys Diligence)
• 0age (CTO at Dharma, former auditor at OpenZeppelin)
• Anon (A well-known full-time researcher)

This DAO will publish explanations of protocols and related upgrades to a Mirror publication. DAO members can help engage with protocols, understand the community’s needs, and help draft governance proposals.

DAO Goals

• Build a reputation by publishing high-quality overviews and reviews of protocols to a Mirror publication, analyzing and communicating how the code works.
• Pursue governance delegations from protocols, and provide analysis and clear technical communication about upgrades before voting on proposals.
• Allow for the DAO to vote on which projects to review.

Why We Need "Review DAOs"

Protocols are highly technical, but we seek a mainstream understanding of how they work - much more so than in the web2 world. Because these protocols are open-source and upgradable software, communities can form around their review and maintenance.

Moreover, given the nature of protocol upgrades via decentralized governance, there's a need for ongoing protocol reviews by community members. A robust auditing model exists for major protocol upgrades, but are optimized for large technical reviews, prepared primarily for the core team — producing an expensive and highly technical single artifact.

We think that a "review DAO" can provide a responsible party for ongoing protocol review and explanation, and that this particular DAO can serve as an example for others as well. In the future, we imagine many review DAOs existing, each with a focus on a few protocols, and containing expert members.

If proven beneficial, we hope more "review DAOs" will spring, filling the growing need for trusted reviews of community-owned projects, and enabling responsible decentralization of more protocols across the industry.

Ownership Composition

• DAO tokens will be used for governance, with 40% initially owned by the reviewers listed above, and distributed out more over time as reviewers become available.
• Other participants in the DAO ideally include community members who can help govern process, suggest reviews, provide feedback on reviews, help to engage with projects to facilitate better reviews, and so on.

Use of Funds

• Funds will be used sparingly to support and sustain the DAOs long-term goals of staying abreast of protocol changes and publishing reviews. There is no plan at present to pay reviewers from the funds generated via the crowdfund.
• Examples of expenses include transactions for research purposes, or for registering web3 publications and adding reviewers.

Follow the Protocol Review Twitter account for updates.