The yAxis DAO: A Look At Our Future Governance

The yAxis Project has evolved over the past several months. With an expanded and re-energized team, it seemed an appropriate time to start transitioning toward a DAO-led model. At the end of 2021 we ran elections for the first yAxis DAO Council.

The DAO Council acts as the official contact point between the project and the DAO. The Council also acts to keep yAxis Champions accountable and to provide support as needed. You’ll find them by their “DAO Council Rep” role in our Discord (https://discord.gg/yaxis-project)

yAxis DAO Bylaws

This council’s first and most important task was publishing bylaws on behalf of the yAxis community. The bylaws are a standard set of guidelines and policies for the project and DAO to abide. This enables checks and balances among the DAO Council, the DAO Community/Investors and the Project Team (also known as Champions, at yAxis).

The Council completed a great deal of research before drafting the bylaws, just as the protocol itself is incorporating the insights drawn from DeFi 2.0, we also want the community bylaws to reflect the rapidly evolving decentralized space and we incorporated many of the best practices and lessons-learned by other projects before us.

This resulted in a 23 page document, outlining the roles, responsibilities and expectations of the different participants in the yAxis DAO. This was ratified by the council in the first week of February, and is now in-effect.

The yAxis Bylaws are in PDF format to prevent unintended editing, but it is a living document. As the DAO matures, the bylaws can be amended and supplemented through the official change process. You can find the bylaws here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kzPneH_G5oLDcBXjw-qSj9dTpmLliFAW/view

The Important Bits

For convenience, here is a high level overview of the yAxis Bylaws:

1. Project organization is as follows. Like the rest of the bylaws, the community can vote to change this but it is our current organizational structure. The structure and bylaws took a hybrid approach that leaves us with a project team that remains nimble and ready to tackle the rapidly evolving landscape.
2. We outline the ethos of yAxis and set expectations that the project is a friendly, accessible and transparent organization that is accepting of all races, genders or other classes.
3. Establishes a communication strategy by which the DAO Council is kept apprised of project tasks, resourcing, schedule and budget. The bylaws also outline how the DAO Council provides updates to the community, when there are updates to provide. The goal is to have a minimum of weekly intervals for community updates.
4. Outlines the process for nomination and ratification of yAxis Improvement Proposals (YIP). This enables a DAO investor’s right to participate in a governance process. The DAO Council, as elected officials, will provide a layer of quality control and certification for potential YIPs. They will lead community discussions in the official yAxis forums to gather broad community feedback and consensus before certifying a YIP for a vote.
5. Other roles and responsibilities, both for the DAO Council and yAxis Champions are outlined in the bylaws, but are not comprehensive. This provides foundational expectations for all paid contributors and DAO Council Representatives.

Now that the bylaws are published, the DAO Council is focused on implementing them in the day-to-day operations of the project. We are moving quickly to get things into place, like the additional multi-sig members from the Council, or the weekly reporting and deliverables to the community. The goal for the Council is to have everything in place no later than the end of February.

Next up, we look toward our next milestone. The first step along the road to a multi-chain, multi-product future will be the launch of yAxis v3 on Avalanche. Our new borrowing/lending feature will launch soon after that, followed by the leveraged trading product.

Exciting times ahead of the yAxis DAO. We hope you’ll join us on this journey!

Here’s the link again to the full DAO Governance document in case you missed it earlier:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kzPneH_G5oLDcBXjw-qSj9dTpmLliFAW/view