Hey ShapeShift community,
My name is Ann, I’m the Lead Governance Researcher on the StableLab team.
StableLab is a governance advisory firm specializing in professional delegation and governance framework design at some of the leading DeFi DAOs.
We recently launched DAOmeter, a maturity rating system for DAOs. The goal of DAOmeter is to serve as a public good by providing an effective method of evaluating and benchmarking the maturity levels of various protocols. This is achieved through a scoring system that encompasses key categories within protocols, such as Community, Voting, Documentation, Security, and more.
Based on our evaluation, we have assigned ShapeShift a maturity score of 82%.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/QIWk5DKMCsMoDhsyxGxbAEFry15jUgS4Bt2flwwPeHO0XMXtQdYiiK9-GVbnHxaAl6R34Z5WLNT8iA4DmfAK9flRnM0h_vWqD_i9Ku_dlONK1XbqwuFzZg71rrtriA3cdI-xV30zJcE0ybyO-SMlNA
We identified several areas of improvement. ShapeShift received a 58% in the Voting category because:
- There is no established framework for delegate compensation
I’d like to clarify that DAO maturity doesn’t equal “decentralization”. We provide a 40 page report on the breakdown of the score as well as the research methods behind DAOmeter, which you can find here.
As we’re committed to the continuous improvement and development of this tool, we’d love to hear from the broader community. Please feel free to share your thoughts, suggestions, and insights with us as we work to improve the DAOmeter scoring system.
If you want to try it, visit here.
Cheers,
Ann
I did not know that delegates are compensated at all. Not sure i like that thought. Anyone know if thats true? I was thinking of being a delegate, but not sure now.
Some errors in the report i noticed at first glance. who has voting power - token owners true, but also if token is staked. (same response with next point : how is voting accessed)
(compensation for delegates score should be reversed, imo)
Overall Cool, thanks for the report!
Hello Giantkin,
Thanks for the feedback! Can you elaborate on what you mean by “compensation for delegates score should be reversed, imo” ?
Sure. I dont think delegates should be compensated. As it would attract users that just want to be paid, and not care about the vote. I would delegate to someone thats doing it, as they are heavily interested (and align with my thoughts) so to me, a score of 10 , should be if the delegates are NOT compensated. 
Thanks for asking
I think for many, delegation is almost like a full-time job that requires people to stay up to date on everything that’s happening in the protocol and as the protocol scales, it becomes even more taxing to keep up. I think compensating actually can lead to higher quality candidates when there are certain expectations and performance standards set in place. If high quality devs get paid, why shouldn’t high quality delegates?
hm. to me it feels more like Paying to vote. Politics etc entering the space.
There are already politics in the space, why not improve on those politics with qualified and competent people?
I would rather work toward having less Politics. Just cuz someone is getting paid, def does NOT make them competent. lol
I think the idea is that you would only pay someone you trust, just like you’d only delegate your vote to someone you trust. The compensation is an incentive for the time they spend doing the due diligence in your place for each vote.
My question is, is it really something the DAO should define or is it something that usually people who choose to delegate their vote will handle on a one-to-one basis with the delegate they trust and have chosen?
Also, do you have examples of other DAO’s policies about this? I don’t think I’ve read any yet while exploring other DAOs.
EDIT: To answer my second question, seems like MarkerDAO does it: https://mips.makerdao.com/mips/details/MIP61