Power to the $DIMO: DIMO Governance Explained
TL;DR: If you are a $DIMO token holder, make sure your vote is counted in the upcoming governance vote by delegating your voting power to yourself or someone else by 5PM UTC (12pm EST), on Tuesday, January 10th. At that time, these proposals will be up for voting for one week. Delegated tokens stay in your possession and you can re-delegate to someone else whenever you’d like.
DIMO is designed to be a global, reliable, secure, and open base layer for connected devices. The only way to achieve these goals is to build DIMO as a platform where control is vested in a diverse collection of users and stakeholders who all have skin in the game.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and connected vehicle platforms like Wejo are "walled garden" platforms. Developers have seen how they will extort you if you become successful on their platform to the extent they even allow you to build on it in the first place. There are no clear rules on access and censorship, and ownership of user data rests with a company that only cares about extracting maximum profits from users.
These companies aren’t necessarily evil, it’s just that traditional business models systematically create these incentives.
Part of the vision for DIMO is to make user-owned digital ecosystems the norm. This is a better model.
So how does this work in practice?
Today, holders of the $DIMO token can create and vote on proposals that control how the network operates and invests its resources. These DIMO Improvement Proposals ("DIPs" for short) can upgrade the way the DIMO smart contracts and token work, can grant privileges (e.g., a vote to issue a license to make DIMO Miners to a hardware manufacturer), set tokens aside for grants, and more.
The DIMO Foundation has written the first six proposals, which are going up for a vote tomorrow, January 10th. These help to illustrate the types of things that can be voted on. They are:
DIP-1: Governance Guidelines — how proposals are introduced, voted on, and enacted
DIP-2: Baseline Issuance — how users earn $DIMO each week
DIP-3: Marketplace Issuance & Token Burn — how users earn more $DIMO when they use apps
DIP-4: Device Integrations — requirements to produce DIMO compatible hardware and software connection methods
DIP-5: App Ecosystem — requirements to build DIMO applications
DIP-6: The DIMO Foundation — establishing the role of the DIMO legal entity and its directors
To read the proposals in detail, click here. They can be discussed in the #🗳️governance forum in the Discord.
Awesome! How do I participate?
All $DIMO token holders are able to vote themselves or can delegate their vote to other people. Since reading proposals and engaging in debate can be time consuming, we actually recommend that most users choose to delegate to someone else.
To have your tokens counted you must "delegate" your voting power to yourself or someone else prior to time that the voting goes live for a given proposal. Think of it like registering to vote.
In order to participate in this upcoming vote, you must delegate by 12pm EST on January 10th. At that time, voting will begin and you or your delegate will have seven days to vote.
When you delegate, your tokens stay securely in your wallet. You always retain full control and can still transfer them. You can change who you've delegated to at any time. Once you delegate, the person you delegate to will be able to vote with your tokens in all future votes until you redelegate to someone else.
We recommend using this website to easily delegate to yourself or others. On this page click "Connect Wallet" and sign in with a wallet that contains $DIMO. We recommend using a mobile wallet (Metamask desktop is not supported). Then:
To be able to vote on a proposal yourself using the wallet you just connected, click "Delegate to myself" in the top right and execute the transaction in your wallet
To delegate your voting power to someone we recommend, click the "Delegate" button under that person name on their card, click "Confirm", then execute the transaction in your wallet
To delegate your voting power to anyone else, enter their wallet address in the large input field at the top, click the "Delegate" button right next to it, then execute the transaction in your wallet
Rob is a cofounder at DIMO, an open connected vehicle platform. Rob’s background is in finance, investing, and organizational design. Most recently, he worked at Consensys, the largest Ethereum focused development company, with a focus on finance, internal economics, and decentralizing the organization. Prior to that, he was at Vroom, a pioneer in the online used-car marketplace sector. He started his career at the Downtown Project in Las Vegas (a spinoff of Zappos.com) working on corporate finance, investments, and implementing Holacracy.