Update (Sept 24)

We have an amazing set of candidates for the Aave Guardian. We want to move the process faster to deploy 19 Aave Protocol on Avalanche. Interested candidates should respond to this post by 10 am UTC on Saturday, Sept 25. After this, we will put up a Snapshot vote for the community to elect 10 Guardian members.

Summary

• Allow the Guardian to temporarily hold keys of new deployments of the Aave Protocol on L2 (or otherwise) while the technical implementations for Aave Governance to control such deployment on those networks is finalized (i.e., a protocol governance bridge).
• Rel-elect 10 members of the Aave Guardian. If you are interested in being a member of Aave Guardian, please respond to this post with your background, involvement in Aave, and interest in the role.

Proposer

@HelloShreyas and Aave Grants DAO

Rationale

What Is the Guardian:

As discussed here 60, the Guardian was established as a community multisig to protect against potential governance takeovers by centralized actors.

It was always intended that Aave governance would replace the current members through a vote, but no such proposal for this replacement vote has been made to date. Given the community’s interest in ensuring deployments of the Aave Protocol on various other networks (e.g., Polygon) and that bridges must be built from bridges to Aave governance 14, we believe it is an ideal time for governance to elect new Guardian members to be part of the Guardian multisig.

Enhanced responsibilities of the Guardian:

Currently, the Guardian only is intended to act as a “veto” on malicious attacks on the Aave Protocol through governance votes by centralized actors.

However, the Guardian — comprised of community members — also should have the ability to hold the admin keys to any new deployment of the Aave Protocol on other networks while technical solutions are being built to ensure that Aave Governance can control all deployments of the protocol, regardless of the network on which they’re running.

This additional responsibility is necessary because governance bridge infrastructure (i.e., cross-chain governance smart contracts) to control the Aave Protocol on other networks may not be ready at deployment time. Any deployment of the requires an Ethereum address to hold certain permissions on the pool, to later on be transferred to the Aave Governance on Ethereum. Considering that the Aave community actively supports expansion of the protocol to other networks, it will be useful for all future deployments to have a community multi-sig composed by reputable members of the Aave community as holders of the different permissions of the deployment.

New Members:

There are currently 10 members of the Guardian multisig, but we would like to re-elect all 10 positions from among the community. If existing members want to be part of the multisig, they need to re-apply.

We believe community members should come forward to express their interest in being a member of the Guardian multisig and should make a case for why they are well-situated to take on this role.

Any community member can respond publicly to this forum post to express interest in taking on this role. Please share your background, your involvement with Aave, and why you would be a fit for this responsibility. The community member should also provide a proposal regarding their ability and interest in being a member of the Guardian multisig.

To encourage censorship resistance we recommend the community to not have more than 3 key holders from the same jurisdiction.

Process for voting in New Guardian Members:

Once all proposals for new Guardian members have been submitted, the Grants DAO will publish a Snapshot highlighting interested members and providing background on the proposal submitted by those individuals.

Governance can then vote to elect the next members of the Guardian through the Snapshot.