Orca Has Launches Their v0 Governance

ORCA tokenholders can now share their ideas in our brand-new Forums and submit proposals on-chain at governance.orca.so!

Why governance matters

They believe that Orca brings unique value to the ecosystem in various ways, including:

• Refreshingly simple UX
• Composability through Whirlpools: A capital-efficient, well-architected, and soon-to-be-open-source primitive that others in the ecosystem can build upon
• A better world through the Impact Fund

However, Orca will not be able to offer that value if it does not evolve to adapt to the needs of a continuously changing ecosystem.

Governance is the answer to that problem: The way to align a decentralized community around shared goals through (1) the sharing of ideas and (2) incentive alignment (rewarding the contributors who actually implement those ideas).

Governance, in other words, ensures Orca’s longevity. They want Orca to be able to continue providing its unique value far into the future, which requires incentivizing contributors other than the core team to dedicate their time and ingenuity to the development of the protocol. This is hard work, but they believe that through trial, error, and a dash of human-centered design, it is possible.

Why with “v0”

In preparation for launching governance on Orca, they have conducted extensive user research with major participants and designers of existing governance systems. The results were clear: No one’s figured out the perfect way to organize a DAO.

They don’t claim to have all the answers, either. However, what they do expect is for Orca’s governance to continuously evolve as a result of real-world learning. By deploying the simplest available form of governance, they aim to kickstart that learning process as quickly as possible: V0 is a direct deployment of Realms, Solana Labs’s open-source governance UI. Long-term, they plan to use these learnings to build a custom governance platform on top of the open-source SPL governance smart contracts.

As governance evolves, they’ll be experimenting with all sorts of governance parameters, like proposal thresholds, discussion periods, and anything else that the community brings to the table. This will be a team effort, and we’ll appreciate any and all feedback that you may have!