a16z responds to concerns: more than half of the voting rights have been delegated to external organizations, and decision-making is completely independent
"After we make the initial commission, they will be completely independent of us."Author: Gu Yu
At the beginning of July, the DeFi education fund funded by Uniswap sold 500,000 UNI, which sparked widespread discussion and attention in the crypto community. After investigation, Chain Catcher found that most of the votes supporting the proposal to fund this organization came from university blockchain organizations closely related to a16z. Since then, the Uniswap community has repeatedly called for a16z to respond to the specific relationship with these organizations, but no response has been received.
Today, a16z published an article titled "Open Sourcing Our Token Delegate Program" on its official website, stating that transferring on-chain governance rights to third-party organizations is one of the important ways to expand the participation of those with significant say in governance. This not only reduces apparent centralization but also improves the quality and diversity of managing organizations.
As a result, a16z has delegated more than half of its voting rights in protocols such as Compound, Uniswap, and Celo to a broad network of qualified representatives. This includes non-profit organizations like Kiva and Mercy Corps, international companies like Deutsche Telekom, crypto startups like Gauntlet, Argent, and Dharma, university organizations from Stanford University and Columbia University, as well as community leaders like Getty Hill.
Regarding delegation standards, a16z stated that its judgment criteria include commitment to the protocol, subject matter expertise, history of governance participation, absence of conflicts, alignment with the protocol's success, independence from a16z, and the impact on decentralization of power. Whether delegating to candidates helps further decentralize governance power in the network, diversity of viewpoints, and overall stewardship awareness is also considered.
At the same time, a16z will score candidates in each category on a 0-2 scale (based on a complete set of questions included in the scoring criteria) and generally looks for scores of 70% or higher for candidates to advance.
Additionally, a16z will sign agreements with delegated representatives that include basic terms and has published specific templates on GitHub. "Once representatives join, they are free to participate in governance as they see fit. We occasionally reach out to our representatives, but apart from that, they will be completely independent of us after we make the initial delegation," a16z stated.
