The stewards will be responsible for the Meta-Governance, ENS ecosystem, and the Public Goods working groups for 2023.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) members voted to elect stewards for three working groups for the forthcoming year.

Voting ended on Dec. 15 at 09:00 UTC, when DAO members elected the stewards that will handle responsibilities for the Meta-Governance, the ENS ecosystem and the Public Goods working groups for the first two quarters of 2023.

ENS working groups are a type of subgroup that tackle specific issues within the DAO. These smaller groups have stewards, which are members chosen by ENS voters who make decisions for the DAO.

Each working group oversees different matters. The meta-governance working group is in charge of oversight and governance issues, while the ENS ecosystem working group supports members and their issues affiliated with the domain service. The public goods working group is in charge of organizing and funding ENS projects within the wider web3 ecosystem.

Voters were tasked to select three stewards for each working group. These stewards nominated themselves and DAO members voted by choosing their three favorite candidates from a pool of nominees.

For the Meta-Governance group, Nick Johnson, the co-founder and lead developer for ENS, and simona.eth were reelected (receiving 1.6 million ENS & 1.5 million ENS votes respectively). Katherine Wu was also elected for her first term with 1.4 million ENS votes.

The ENS Ecosystem group reelected Alex Slobodnik with 2.1 million votes, as well as limes.eth (1.9 million ENS votes) and yambo.eth (850,000 ENS votes) for their first terms.

Lastly, the Public Goods working group elected Alex Van de Sande, the co-founder of ENS, coltron.eth, and vegayp.eth with 2 million, 1.9 million, and 1.4 million ENS votes respectively.

The stewards will start their terms on Jan. 1, 2023 and they will be working in their new roles for a six-month term.

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The exchange denied using users’ token holding to vote on Uniswap governance.

Crypto exchange Binance denied allegations of misusing its users’ token holdings to exercise voting power on the Uniswap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

“Binance doesn’t vote with user’s tokens. In this case, there has been a misunderstanding of what happened during the transfer of a large balance of UNI (around 4.6 million) between wallets,” a Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk this morning.

“We’re currently in discussions to improve the process to prevent any further misunderstandings from happening again,” they added. Separately, Binance pointed out in a Thursday tweet that its wallet had never voted on any Uniswap governance proposal.

The statements were in response to Uniswap creator Hayden Adams claiming on Wednesday that Binance delegated some 13 million UNI, Uniswap’s native tokens, from its books, to become the second-largest UNI delegate.

A group of core developers maintains the Uniswap codebase, but key protocol decisions are governed by the Uniswap DAO, which grants users voting rights according to how many UNI tokens they hold.

Users may also “delegate” their tokens to other entities, thereby enabling those entities to vote on their behalf.
Binance currently retains 5.9% of the voting power on Uniswap, second only to venture capital giant a16z, which controls 6.7%, as reported.

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The exploiter had come forward and returned most of the stolen funds a few days ago.

Mango Markets, the decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) which suffered an exploit earlier this month, will soon start returning the funds stolen during the $114 million exploit.

The DEX had earlier said that its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), entities that are owned and governed by their members without any central leadership, would vote on how to return the funds to users.

“The program for depositors to recover funds is in audit and should be ready to go by tomorrow morning. Much thanks to all the Mango contributors working tirelessly to make this happen,” Mango Labs co-founder, Daffy Durairaj, said in a tweet.

A group of exploiters drained the marketplace of $114 million worth of crypto, by manipulating the price of the DEX’s native token MNGO.

DEXs like Mango rely on smart contracts to match trades between users. Smart contracts are wholly decentralized and are not overseen by a centralized party – which means a rogue trader can deploy enough money to exploit loopholes in any protocol without the risk of anyone stepping in to stop the attack before it takes place.

One of the apparent exploiter, Avraham Eisenberg, came forward last week and said that the group had returned $67 million to the Solana-based exchange.

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KurateDAO is looking to use “cryptoeconomic games to curate the world’s information”. “Play-to-earn,” meet “curate-to-earn.”

KurateDAO announced Tuesday a $6.85 million seed round led by blockchain investment firm Polychain Capital. The project looks to leverage “cryptoeconomic games to curate the world’s information,” according to the KurateDAO white paper.

“Paying people is an inherent part of what we’re doing, so crypto is a natural choice for that,” CEO Michael Fischer told CoinDesk in an interview.

In the current model of internet databases, there is one moderator who decides what information gets to be published to the database. KurateDAO’s technology provides an infrastructure for content curation, with the process being divvied up into three roles: curators, scouts and viewers. Together, the three roles decide what information is added to the database, Fischer said.

Each of the datasets operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governed by the KurateDAO’s native token.

Fischer said KurateDAO seeks to work alongside emerging Web 3 applications and other crowdsourced online information hubs, such as music curation and job board sites.

It currently operates on Ethereum but plans to use the $6.85 million funding round to hire developers to build out multi-chain solutions.

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Increased investor interest means that sustainability has become an important consideration for crypto, the bank said.

Mining for cryptocurrencies can be highly energy intensive with bitcoin mining alone requiring the same amount of electricity as the Netherlands’ annual total power generation or 0.5% of total global electricity consumption, Morgan Stanley said in a report entitled “ESG Considerations.”

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria are standards for a company’s operations that some investors use to screen potential investments.

The bank notes that publicly listed bitcoin mining companies have begun to promote sustainability goals and many buy carbon credits to offset their impact or aim to use cleaner forms of energy.

Bitcoin and ether approve transactions in a highly energy intensive way, known as proof of work (PoW). Proof of stake (PoS) is a more energy efficient alternative to PoW, which could reduce the climate impact, the bank said.

Ethereum hopes to move to PoS by late 2022, and while it requires much less energy than PoW, it brings its own challenges with risks of centralisation, analysts led by Sheena Shah wrote on Tuesday.

Morgan Stanley also sees a continued risk of governments restricting energy use for crypto mining, noting that as energy costs have risen, countries such as China and Kosova have banned mining, while others have restricted the activity.

With respect to social considerations, cryptocurrencies are often viewed as a “means of supporting financial inclusion due to relatively low costs, low barriers to entry relative to the traditional banking system and relatively fast transaction times for cross border payments,” the bank said.

But there is still the need for internet access, inherent volatility in fees and the cryptocurrencies themselves, and crypto doesn’t solve the key issue of unbanked individuals having insufficient money, it added.

Governance of crypto applications will be an important topic, the report said, as it is becoming apparent that they are not as decentralized as first promised.

New regulations will likely change the rules of investing in crypto-related products, but are unlikely to change the “core of how the underlying crypto is run,” the bank noted, adding that a new type of governance approach has emerged called a DAO or decentralized autonomous organization.

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