Understanding Governor Bravo

Previously, we’ve discussed the strengths and benefits of Governor Alpha, Compound’s initial governance framework that is powering much of the defi and DAO ecosystem. Since that time, Compound has migrated to an upgraded contract implementation — Governor Bravo. The two systems are largely similar, but Bravo includes a few key changes.

In this post, we offer a comparison of the Governor Alpha and Bravo frameworks. In light of Uniswap’s recent governance upgrade and a continuing stream of newly launched DAOs, it’s more important than ever for protocols to build on a sound governance foundation. We believe Bravo offers a strong value proposition and is worth considering for both new and existing protocols.

Alpha vs. Bravo

Let’s look at some concrete changes from the Alpha to Bravo contracts, and their potential impact on community governance.

Vote Choices

The Governor Alpha contract allows for only yes or no votes. This is all that is required for functioning governance, but can be limiting from a participation perspective. For example, many protocols have a large share of voting power concentrated in early investors who may want to demonstrate engagement without dictating vote results.

Governor Bravo includes abstention as a third voting choice. In addition to supporting greater vote turnout, the option to abstain is an important prerequisite for introducing voting rewards or other participation incentives; token holders should be able to claim rewards without being forced to affect vote outcomes or quorum.

Freeform Comments

Voters in Governor Bravo can enter an optional text string with their vote, allowing users to convey deeper or more nuanced information. Considering that many participants are partly or fully anonymous, this can be a valuable method of communication for governance communities.

Governance Upgradability

Governor Alpha contracts are deployed with fixed values for all of the key governance parameters including proposal submission threshold, quorum threshold, voting delay and voting periods. In contrast, Governor Bravo uses a proxy upgradability pattern to allow for governance to adjust parameters after deployment.

This begs the question, is upgradability safe?

Protocols using Governor Alpha have the power to transfer admin privileges, treasury balances, or even ownership of the governance timelock itself to a new address; this is how Compound and Uniswap have upgraded their governance systems in the past. Given that Governor Alpha already gives a path to upgrade through transferring assets, Bravo’s upgradability doesn’t seem to meaningfully increase governance risk. In fact it may bring some distinct safety benefits, which we discuss below.

Advantages of Upgradability

Governor Bravo maintains a fixed contract address and proposal numbering scheme regardless of any changes to governance parameters or implementation. This offers important benefits for several types of integrators.

Autonomous Proposals

Sites like fish.vote use a proposal factory contract to allow users to start autonomous proposals. The factory contract typically refers to a specific governor address, so any changes may require deploying a new factory contract and updating linked front end interfaces.

Voting Interfaces

Front ends like Tally and Sybil point to specific contract addresses for each governance when submitting users’ votes. Governance contract migrations force interfaces to update their site to continue supporting voting on new proposals. Moving from one Governor Alpha contract to another also resets proposal numbers to 0, which can cause significant difficulty to interfaces who need to handle number collisions manually.

Custody Providers

Many of the largest token holders keep their funds with custody service providers. Similarly to voting interfaces, custody providers have to upgrade their systems to support voting through a new contract, and may also face periods of downtime where voting is effectively disabled.

Final Thoughts

Most token holders rely on some form of interface to participate in governance, whether this is a voting app or a custody service. Each governance contract transition increases complexity for integrators, and has the potential to cause downtime which could allow a malicious proposal to slip through unchallenged.

Governor Bravo’s native upgradability reduces the impact of these changes, helping ensure continuous access to voting systems. This makes Governor Bravo arguably less risky than Alpha, despite the typical stigmas against contract upgradability.

With the Uniswap community considering another governance change to increase quorum requirements, now may be the right time to switch to a Governor Bravo implementation. This would limit the impact on interfaces and other key integrations, while giving governance the ability to freely change parameters as needed in the future.

Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only, and is not financial advice. Author is a stakeholder in various protocols mentioned.