Overview and progress through roadmap
Q1 has been super exciting for DXgov. We were technically live with DAVI before Q1 but properly launching and having our guilds used for daily operations has been fantastic for feedback and very rewarding. The application has matured a lot even over 3 months. I think I speak for all the DXgov team as well as the other squads we have been working closely with in the Q1 period that everyone is really excited at both our progress as well as the plans for what is to come in the next quarter as well as beyond!
We’ve had 4 releases over the Q1 period which is slightly behind the goal of a release every 2 weeks but we gave additional QA time for our major v3 release as well as subgraph support testing to ensure everything was working smoothly. The additional QA time has worked in our favour as we have had very little activity with bug reports or support. Each release was done via our mainnet guild using our ENS actions. You can view the releases and changelogs here:
https://discord.com/channels/795724884763738173/1014217927324606464
https://github.com/DXgovernance/davi-monorepo/releases
The largest change we made was to the underlying data fetching architecture of DAVI. This did what most refactors aim to do, simplifying code for the developers working on it, however this time we also have tangible direct features we were able to ship because of the well architected model. First we managed to integrate a subgraph in addition to existing RPC calls that now act as a fallback for guilds which enables a bunch of core features we had as major requests from users. But more importantly we have also been able to very quickly integrate governance 1.5 (~4 weeks) as our second governance implementation in DAVI. This will enable DXdao to move to gov 2.0 as well as improving current governance but has also revealed more paths for DAVI and the flagship product going forward 
For anyone unaware you can follow DXgov technical progress on our roadmap at https://dxgov.info
The technical roadmap was put together at the start of Q1 and went up till mid-Q2. We had to extend a couple of tasks and delivered some faster than expected so overall just a slight delay to the optimistic estimates of the original roadmap. We also built the estimations with a lot of buffer on the end and so we are looking on track for completing all the deliverables highlighted in our budget as well as finding time for additional planning beyond H1.
What we’ve accomplished from our OKRs already
Healthy / On track
Not started but planned for Q2
Falling behind - need to focus on in Q2
Complete
Objective: Improve DXdao’s governance system
KR1: Governance 2.0 contracts should be implemented with full tests
KR2: Governance 2.0 contracts should be sent away for audit
This was a goal that was fully expected to take the entire quarter which is still the case but at the same time, the progress has been awesome to see with Federico and Milton working hard on it with Augusto overseeing the 2.0 voting power contracts. For more details on this progress, there is a great presentation by the contracts team here The Road to Gov 2.0
Audits, of course, cannot be started until we have at least a full draft but the 1.5 audit just came to a close and we’ll start looking at scheduling the 2.0 audit.
Objective: Support multiple governance systems in DAVI
KR1: Have a Gov >1.5 (forked daostack architecture) DAO working in DAVI production
KR2: Explore, publish research and if decided important begin support for more governance systems in DAVI
Gov 1.5 support in DAVI is what the team has most recently been working on most recently with most of the work complete as we finish up Q1. The plans as of writing are to deploy the contracts and begin testing them in DAVI before starting the migration of DXdao over to this new DAO. We’ll begin with gnosis chain and arbitrum as the networks with least risk and then mainnet after. We’ll start to move funds per use case where things can be done faster, more efficiently and more securely on the new contracts. We expect the migration to begin very early Q2 and be well under way by the end of H1.
A lot of research has also been done into additional support for other governance systems inside DAVI which is enabled by a major data architecture change in DAVI that happened during Q1. In Q2 we’ll aim to publish this as more formal research as well as beginning support of some systems that will be key for DAVI’s strategy going forward.
Objective: Bring external communities into DAVI
KR1: Onboard at least 1 external community onto DAVI
KR2: Write and maintain non-technical documentation
KR3: Release a DAO launcher UI in DAVI
Less focus has been spent here as we aim to mature DAVI more as a product before leaning harder on this. We did ship a major v3 update to DAVI which includes some core features we identified as required before onboarding any external communities. In addition, we have DAOTokyo in Q2 as a great opportunity to begin pushing more into this objective. It remains an incredibly important objective, especially in consideration of the flagship product and DXdao’s vision.
In regards to documentation, some were started for DXdao to use guilds inside DAVI at the start of Q1 and this builds a good base for us to continue in Q2. https://dxgov.info
Work on the DAO launcher is also underway and planned to be completed as an MVP sometime early in Q2.
Objective: Provide the best DAO UX in the space
KR1: Implement v2 of rich contract data (a key UX system in DAVI)
KR2: Integrate the social aspect of governance (currently a forum) inside DAVI
KR3: Conduct user surveys that aim to answer whether non-technical users can utilise autonomy in DAVI DAOs
Rich contracts V2 remains planned for Q2 and we would likely aim to do user surveys after this is complete as it solves some major issues. Rich contracts is the system that powers on chain accessible autonomy in DAVI and the V2 makes major upgrades to support more contracts and with more easily understood inputs and outputs for users. This remains a core feature that makes DAVI unique in its goal to make on-chain actions as clear and accessible as possible. We have actually seen more projects highlighting this as an issue but still no one tackling it as seriously as us.
The social aspect of DAVI has had great progress in Q1 as one of the first major features we shipped in time for guilds to use. So far all guilds have been making use of their forums/discussions and we have seen updates that enable better flow between discussion to on-chain proposals really highlighting the DAO UX in DAVI that no other platform has. Using it in production has been a great way of iterating and improving the social part of DAVI also.
Recently we began looking into how we’ll conduct user surveys and so planning to have those executed in Q2 once we have some more UX centric features like rich contracts V2 complete. Specifically we’ll be aiming to get answers in regards to our UX for creating proposals and reading on chain actions of autonomous proposals.
Objective: Support DXdao ecosystem
KR1: Identify, communicate and work with other development guilds on potential integrations with DAVI
KR2: Support at least one integration to another DXdao product (action in DAVI proposal builder)
KR3: DAVI should be used by DXdao contributors almost daily as their main governance interface
In Q1 we have thankfully saw very little in major issues related to current DXdao governance. This was helped by the alchemy bounty which saw the old daostack UI running as an alternative to DXvote. We had a few fixes and cache refreshes done to DXvote to keep it running also. The security bot from 3ac was migrated over to DXgov in Q1 also and has so far gone smoothly not taking too much time to occasionally run maintenance on. The improved experience with multiple ways of viewing DAO proposals has helped reduce the support effort from the DXgov team increasing our productivity in building the new tools to help DXdao grow past its current pains long term.
We have been working a lot more closely with the voice guild this quarter which I’ll go into more detail about in the last section of this update. Certainly, we can still improve our collaboration as DXgov.
We identified a great opportunity to have swapr integration as a core feature inside DAVI, more details in this document:
Portals - Swapr Swap box in DAVI
Internal to DXgov we have been using guilds and DAVI exclusively for governance payments and have not had any issues. You can take a look through our guild to see exactly but we have had great participation and managed to:
- Make payments for contributions
- Stream payments via llama pay
- Mint rep for work done each month
- Deploy products via ENS
- Update permissions
- Wrap native assets
The goal will be to continue to expand this list of autonomous actions we can take as well as get other guilds to use DAVI as their main interface. As of Q1, most guilds use DAVI mainly for the social forum aspect but we have seen the operations guild begin using it for real on-chain actions. Moving DXdao over to DAVI with gov 1.5 should also provide the perfect opportunity to further achieve this goal as well as expanding the list of autonomous DAO actions we can do with DAVI.
Budget spending so far
H1 spending so far can be viewed in this spreadsheet and here is a reminder of our H1 budget.
So far we have passed quite a few contingency budget proposals as anyone watching governance has likely seen.
From our $10,000 bounty&contractor contingency budget, we have used $2500 between alchemy work by 3ac and the translation bounties that just recently went live. Alchemy going live again has been a great spend as it allows the DXgov team less stress and overhead of having just one frontend to support the legacy governance we are trying to move away from. The translations haven’t fully played out yet but it’s exciting to have our first proper bounty live as well as our first internationalised product from DXdao.
We also used both of our contingency costs claimed for new contributors to DXgov. This came in the form of Federico filling the smart contract dev role at level 6 which has been a huge reason we can report such great progress on the contract side. Especially with Augusto offboarding at the end of Q1, it’s confidence inspiring knowing that we have such a competent team of smart contract developers now with Federico and Milton. We also onboarded Yathindra as a referral from Madusha to help us reach our goals on the DAVI product frontend side and although still very new he is making great progress and already contributing value that is shipped in production.
On top of this, we have all our regular costs for contributors and although not based on solid numbers I can say with confidence the team has been working at an incredibly high level and delivering great work with very little friction.
Flagship and going forward
Overall, we have been performing well and are on track to meet our ambitious H1 targets. The next quarter appears to be even more exciting. In addition to achieving all our goals, we are looking forward to publishing more information about our plans for DAVI as a flagship product of DXdao. DXvoice will provide more details in their Q1 update, with further communication going into Q2. We are currently in the research phase and are working on proper product lifecycle planning before presenting our plans, as discussed last year.
It’s also exciting seeing more people pay attention to DAVI and be interested in what we are building.
The architecture changes have been our most exciting development and we are looking forward to the integration of multiple governance systems into DAVI with UX like they have never had before and all the product opportunities that opens up to us.