[GCP-009] - Upgrading Gitcoin’s Governance Contracts

[dcictalireza]

Vote Yes to upgrade the Governor Contract to the contracts ScopeLift has deployed

[bendi]

The upgrade proposal is now live onchain. We have done two additional security/safety checks since the proposal was put onchain by @kyle.

First, we updated our tests & simulations to run with actual deployed proposal data, to ensure no errors were introduced when the proposal was put onchain. See results here.

Secondly, we modified Seatbelt to simulate the proposal and analyze its effects. You can see the report here.

Both checks indicate that the proposal will behave as expected, that Gitcoin’s Governor will be properly upgraded, and that the DAO’s onchain governance will continue to function as expected afterwards.

Given all this, we encourage DAO Delegates to vote in favor of the proposal. Tally | Gitcoin Proposal

Thanks again to the Gitcoin community for entrusting ScopeLift with this sensitive work. We look forward to seeing the upgrade completed and what will get built on top of it afterwards.

As always, I’m happy to answer any additional questions anyone has.

[garm]

Excited to see the proposal going live @bendi ! Appreciate I’m late to the party, but I was wondering if you could share the links to the audits of the GitcoinGovernor contracts? I’m probably overlooking something obvious, but can’t find them myself

[bendi]

Hey @garm, thanks! And no worries at all for the late question.

The final Gitcoin Governor contract is assembled from fully audited components, namely: ScopeLift’s Flexible Voting extension and the battle tested OpenZeppelin Governor implementation.

Flexible Voting was audited twice, but only one of the audits was made public, which you can see here. The code was audited a second time by Trail of Bits as part of that projects Governance system audit. We have seen the final report but it has not (yet?) been published.

As you can see by looking at the Gitcoin Governor, there is no new code—only the inheriting of audited contracts and the configuration of parameters as appropriate for Gitcoin.

Most of the work for the upgrade actually comes from the tests/simulations we wrote to ensure the upgrade would execute properly and that the new Governor contract we put in place would function as expected afterwards.

Please let me know if you have any further questions! We are also excited to see this upgrade coming to fruition.

[bendi]

Hi all, as most of you have no doubt seen, the upgrade has now executed successfully. The new Governor is available on Tally and one new proposal has already been submitted to it. I again reiterate my thanks to the Gitcoin community for trusting ScopeLift with this work. We’re excited to see what comes next, and eager for the opportunity for continued collaboration. Congrats to Gitcoin!

[owocki]

Kudos on the successful upgrade. (err seemingly successful? Does the new Tally proposal have to pass and successfully execute to 100% prove it works?)

@kyle

Flexible Voting provides a permissionless interface for integration and experimentation via voting contracts, enabling a host of new use cases to eventually be built (layer 2 voting, shielded voting, new delegation schemes, etc…).

Looking forward to seeing what kind of things are built here. I’d love to wrap my mind around the possibilities enabled.

@kyle

The Alpha contracts we have work and are reliable, but we feel they are restrictive in our ability to explore, and upgrade components of our governance process. We would like to give the community the ability to decide the proposal threshold, voting delay, voting duration, and also introduce novel mechanisms via Flexible Voting strategies.

Kyle teased some possibilities here.

[bendi]

@owocki

Does the new Tally proposal have to pass and successfully execute to 100% prove it works?

Hey Kevin, good question. We can say with high confidence that the Governor is working based on the execution of the proposal and the queuing of a new one. But you’re right. We’ll be able to say with total confidence that it worked only after the first proposal clears through it!

[bendi]

Excited to say that one proposal has now executed through the new Governor, with several others lined up to do so soon. It is now possible to say with full confidence that the upgrade has gone as expected. Once more, thanks to the Gitcoin community for entrusting us with this work!

[kyle]

As Ben mentioned, the Upgrade has been successful!

We are going to spend a bit of time outlining where there are opportunities to introduce novel voting schemes in the future.

Just a heads up, Tally will continue to show the details for the old governor, and now also the new governor. All voting and on-chain interaction will happen using the new page and new governor.

Let us know if you have any questions

[owocki]

Kudos to everyone who worked on this on a successful upgrade.