SIP-159: Formalize Thales Governance

Author	farmwell
Status	Implemented
Type	Governance
Implementor	TBD
Release	TBD
Discussions-To	https://research.synthetix.io/t/formalizing-the-thales-council/428
Created	2021-09-07

Simple Summary

This SIP proposes to establish Thales Council by means of SNX tokenholders voting in members of the Thales Council. Once this SIP is implemented SNX tokenholders will be able to participate directly in Thales governance, at least until such time as Thales Council can be elected by Thales DAO token holders.

Abstract

SNX token holders will be able to vote in four members comprising the Thales Council. For the first epoch, the Thales Council will serve until the new Thales DAO tokens are live. After the first epoch of Thales Council, it’s expected Thales token holders will elect the Thales Council. The Thales Council will then be able to approve Thales Improvement Proposals, where Thales Improvement Proposals would inherit the legitimacy of decentralized governance. Decentralized governance of Thales is therefore preserved until such time as holders of Thales DAO tokens can elect members of the Thales Council.

Motivation

With the introduction of SIP-149 the binary options contracts were deprecated from the Synthetix code base. In accordance with SIP-149, SNX tokenholders are slated to receive 35% of native tokens in the emergent protocol, Thales, in exchange for the intellectual property of the binary options contracts.

The ongoing governance of Thales requires formalized governance to preserve the legitimacy of Thales governance. The Thales Council maintains legitimacy by virtue of being elected by a distributed base of SNX token holders. Since the Thales DAO has not launched a token, SNX tokenholders are the most legitimate group to elect Thales Council.

If the Thales DAO tokens were already live on mainnet this SIP would not be required. Many members of the SNX community have suggested they are keen to use Thales as soon as possible, and the Thales DAO token is not slated to launch until later in 2021 due to constraints with developer resources. A legitimately elected Thales Council will enable the protocol to go live and pass Thales governance and meta-governance measures (Thales Improvement Proposals, or TIPs).

By voting in a Thales Council, SNX token holders are electing a governance body to create and pass rules to govern the Thales protocol.

Synthetix already has a robust distribution of tokenholders and a well-defined decentralized governance framework. ThalesDAO is spun out from the synthetixDAO so this SIP formalizes how governance powers will be transferred.

Specification

This SIP requires a few components for implementation:

A Snapshot site for SNX token holders to elect members of the Thales Council.
A framework for Thales Improvement Proposals (TIPs) is added to the Thales Markets codebase here: https://github.com/thales-markets.
A TIP-specific website containing all the TIPs that is relatively simple to read and access for a non-technical audience. This website would be similar to https://aave.github.io/aip/ or https://sips.synthetix.io/.
At least 3 out of the four Thales Council members should vote in favor of a new TIP for the TIP to be implemented. If a proposal does not have ¾ support, the proposal will not have required support for implementation.
Once the Thales DAO tokens are circulating, a fresh SIP should propose Thales token holders become the valid electors of the Thales Council.

Configurable Values

N/A