TLDR: Go to the bottom to participate in the poll

About one week ago the Tornado.cash community successfully passed its first governance proposal. I am really impressed by the growth and the excitement within the Tornado community. I am looking forward to what’s next.

On the 3rd of February we started 2 proposals. Proposal #1 to enable TORN transfers which was highly awaited and Proposal #2 to lower the vote quorum from 25k to 15k tokens. Proposal #1 succeeded and proposal #2 failed. I don’t think there was a strong opposition in the community for proposal #2 but it failed due to low participation. Here are the reasons why I think it failed:

• Lack of interest (Getting TORN transferable was the priority)
• High gas prices (extra $40 of fee for something secondary)
• People not knowing that you could vote on 2 proposals with the same tokens

I am worried that now it will be harder to reach the 25k quorum to pass new proposals because of the following reasons:

• People are getting high yields in LP pools and are unlikely to move out given the APY. In total, there are 47k tokens or 17% of the circulating supply in 1inch, Uni and Sushi pools.
• Prior to proposal #1, the only thing that people could do was to vote. Now that the token is tradable people might be less interested in voting.
• Upcoming governance proposals, while important, will create less interest in the community than proposal #1 (More minor upgrades)

Therefore we might be facing a governance deadlock because of the 25k quorum.
We have currently a few proposals being discussed in the community:

• New Tornado pools with incentive plan (AP mining). Very likely 10k and 100k DAI but also some more exotic pools are currently being discuss such as WBTC/renBTC and SUSHI-LP/1INCH-LP/UNI-LP
• ZKP tree updater to enable mining. Currently, mining is stuck because of the high gas costs to update the tree that nobody wants to pay. @poma came up with a solution that would make the update 10x cheaper. However, we would need to wait 2 weeks for the smart-contract audit to finish.
• Remunerate key contributors from the community. (Only possible starting from mid-March when the cliff period of the DAO treasury will have passed)
• Create a simple staking pool for TORN SUSHI-LP/1INCH-LP/UNI-LP tokens to incentivise liquidity while earning TORN (This is NOT an anonymity pool, just a simple yield farm). This would also only be possible after mid-March since it would need DAO treasury funds.
• New relayer election mechanism (A more decentralized way of electing relayers)
• Attempt Proposal #2 again to lower the vote quorum from 25k to 15k

Among all of these key developments some are susceptible to draw more interest than others. For example, the tree updater would broadly mobilize the community to vote, since many of us are accumulating AP, and AP can’t be swapped for TORN because of the Tree updates. That’s why I think we would have more chances of the vote passing if we wait for that vote next.

But I might be wrong and the 25k quorum can easily be reached. That’s why I will setup a Snapshot page where people can vote off-chain with a signature using Metamask. In this way we could measure how many tokens are in for the vote.

Poll 1

Poll 2

(Options that need to wait for DAO treasury funds to be availble mid-March were removed)

Remunerate key contributors from the community. (Only possible starting from mid-March when the cliff period of the DAO treasury will have passed)

How would we define key contributors?

• Developers who deploy passed proposal code only?
• ZKP tree updaters?
• Heavily active forum participants?

I strongly support this, but it would be good to define the scope of “contributor” so as to better set community expectations

These are good questions. We should debate them in a dedicated post at some point in the future.

Sure

Let’s see how the poll results end up. If it’s a top voted proposal, then we can discuss further then

This could be done on a smart contract level (but is not implemented yet). Tree update smart contract could just reward anyone who uploads an update with TORN.

I think it’s better to start discussing this earlier, it could take a while to form community consensus on this topic

Agreed. Created a thread

Cool, so this should probably be a proposal of its own

Replying just to keep proposal on top of the home page

ren assets are too centralized with multisig wallet custody of locked btc.

For trustless wrapped btc assets, what about vBtc?

Strudel.finance has a trustless btc -> vbtc bridge by making the conversion one way.

I don’t think lowering the quorum is good. As time passes, the quantity of tornado token is going to increase and 25k should be nothing. The problem is gas prices. I am sure setting up a snapshot for tornado will do just fine. Or if the devs think snapshot is too “centralized model”, set up a on chain voting governance on L2 or bnb chain. I dont want to pay 100 dollars to vote on something unless i really want that to pass.

So we are just not going to update the protocol until there are more tokens in circulation? That doesn’t seem too smart from a business prospective.

I agree and I don’t think gas prices will go down any time soon so we will need to adapt one way or another.

Could someone ELI5 me what “Simple staking contract for 1inch-LP…” means? Is this a “zap”?

!!! Raising awareness for governance participation here, gas prices are a real issue for all TORN Holders - Stakeholders don’t feel comfortable paying 50$ for a simple vote on mainnet.

Snapshot - is a half-baked solution, can be gamed with flash loans and has no on-chain finality, just avoid for mature governance.

We are making progress setting up a trustless Rollup for Governance, a full proposal will follow here in forum once MVP is ready.

How is Strudel.Finance actually keeping the peg?

We scanned through it, you can’t burn something on the one hand and create value on the other.

vBTC is only backed by new liquidity of steady new degens throwing money into this ponzi - use with caution.

I suggest using snapshot until L2 solution or any other solution is in place. We cant just wait forever

ZKP tree updaters should be incentivised with $TORN

Just a simple yield farm where you stake for example UNI-V2-ETH/TORN tokens and get TORN reward (also known as “pool 2”). This would incentivise greater TORN liquidity. However, I don’t think it’s really necessary… 1Inch and Sushi are already offering liquidity incentives and TORN looks liquid enough to me (1inch pool has 15% of the circ supply).

Other than the auctions mentioned below, the purpose of the TRDL protocol is to create several mechanisms to generate demand for vBTC and provide enough liquidity so arbitrage creates a stable peg

Out of these we can also add stabilizer measures such as integration with protocols who focus on that such as crv finance meta pools and metastable mBTC integration, which would allow vBTC to be interchangable with other 2 way wrappers.