The Philosophy of Bounce Governance

Note: this article only discusses the structure and philosophy of Bounce governance. The rules and on-chain votings for governance will be written in a separate article before the launch of the governance board.

Before you read on

What does governance mean in DeFi? To be honest, I do not think everything can be and should be done on-chain. In the realm of DeFi, Many players lack the basic understanding of finance to maintain the goodwill of the projects, and many governance schemes are excuses for pumping up the platform token prices. Forgive me if I am being too cynical; I am just trying to be honest. If you feel offended, please stop here.

Regulators and life keepers

Bounce has gone live for two weeks and I experienced a lot of dramas including questions on the purpose of Bounce and scammy activities on the Bounce platform. To maintain the Bounce platform, I think we do need some experienced people and organizations to join the governance board. Traditional finance is boring, but it does have regulations to enforce good manners. Therefore, carving out a professional system in the early days is important to the success of Bounce.

Community voting has been great! I respect any compliments, comments, and of course, criticisms. However, as our community keeps growing and thriving, I worry the future of Bounce is in the hands of only a small group of people whose sole interest is to cheat/hack the system for its own benefits. I am currently in talks with some experienced DeFi people to have them join the governance board and I will share updates with the community. Conclusion on this topic: finance is a serious matter, decentralized finance is an even more serious matter. Distribution of power is good, but It should not end up with being a casino board. All are welcome to govern, but we need leaders in the early days.

Automated + Manual

I think many underestimate the word “governance” in DeFi. It sounds refreshing, enlightening, and even cool. But it is a lot more complicated than one may think. I admit that things such as voting and coding proposals can be done on-chain, but there are more things that cannot be done on-chain. Therefore, I have the following proposals.

Bounce governance will be operated in two ways:

1. The automated part is similar to existing governance structures in which a person submits a proposal and people vote for it.
2. The manual part will be based on community voice. If many community members find some drawbacks about auction types and find potential scams, there is no time to submit a proposal to resolve problems. That is why I think community voices are more efficient in most cases. So, the approach to Bounce governance will be dynamic and more realistic.

Potential Governance Topics

I think Bounce has more governance topics to decide than most DeFi projects. It should be more interesting since you can participate in different topics when the governance board is live.

1. Product: right now we are only building the frameworks for auctions. This means many features and rules can be added to auctions. For example, many community members request to enforce a “quota” on each address for the fixed swap auction. The product proposals are things around auction types, features, and rules.
2. Token utility: this is what the current community cares about most. The ideology of bounce token economics is that the original team will not put a lot of restrictions into token utility and token economics because I believe token utilities should be added along the way instead of me breathing some fancy air on the token utility. Some good proposals were made in the last two weeks and many of them made total sense. I will let the community fill in this token utility page in the near future.
3. Auction quality: Bounce was created for everyone and it means everyone can create a bounce pool whenever they want without permission. There had been some auctions from projects on Bounce and I want to emphasize that my team has no financial interest in their auctions. We are only responsible for building Bounce’s framework. So, please, stop asking me which project is good or bad. In the future, there will be a reporting system in which the governance board can give credibility to some auctions or put some malicious auctions in detention. For now, I will not comment on those projects until the governance is in place.
4. Parameter: There will be important parameters for Bounce including transaction fees and distribution of staking revenue. The parameter governance will focus on tuning the numerical heuristics on Bounce.
5. Interface: Interface is important since it directly affects user experiences. We have done some community votings on the interface and made improvements. I think this section is also essential.
6. I can write more but I would leave this to every community member to contribute.

See you soon.