With the advent of the autonomous and permissionless PoolTogether V5, some of the community have been asking what will become of PoolTogether Governance.
Up until now, the POOL token was used exclusively for voting on governance proposals. The governance system controls smart contracts on Ethereum and holds a treasury of tokens. This meant that token holders had two key roles. They could:
- Vote on changes to smart contracts
- Spend the treasury
PoolTogether V5 does not have any parameters that can be changed, and there is no administrator. The system runs entirely autonomously, so there are no smart contracts to control. The new protocol uses POOL as a utility to consolidate yield from across many assets and yield sources. This deeply simplifies the management of the system across chains, and the permissionless nature of the system will foster experimentation.
Once V5 is fully launched and running, we’ll begin to sunset PoolTogether V4 and governance will focus exclusively on funding ecosystem efforts.
In fact, governance has largely already made this transition. If one reviews our history of PoolTogether Budget Requests and PoolTogether Improvement Proposals, they can see that the proposals are almost entirely about spending money on PoolTogether initiatives and incentives. Adjusting parameters is difficult and requires domain expertise, so the community has already delegated most of the challenges of management and focused instead on treasury spend.
In this way, nothing will change when V5 is launched. Governance will still determine how best to spend the PoolTogether treasury, so its role as a non-profit foundation will become its sole focus.