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✅ Master Proposal Management

Understand drafting, voting periods, and timelock execution

Follow a proposal from draft to execution

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🎯 Key Takeaways: Proposal Lifecycle

You've learned the complete DAO proposal journey. From initial draft to final execution takes 2-4 weeks minimum. This isn't bureaucracy—it's intentional friction that prevents governance attacks, rushed decisions, and minority rule. Let's review the critical insights from each stage.

📝

1. Draft & Discussion (3-7 days)

  • •60% of proposals die here—not voted down, just withdrawn after weak temperature check
  • •Forum engagement predicts success: well-discussed proposals pass at 80%+ rate
  • •Temperature checks show 85-90% correlation with on-chain votes
📊

2. Snapshot Vote (5-7 days)

  • •Off-chain signaling, free voting, tests community sentiment before costly on-chain vote
  • •Not binding but heavily influences final decision—saves gas on unpopular proposals
  • •If < 50% support in Snapshot, rarely moves to on-chain
🗳️

3. On-Chain Vote (3-7 days)

  • •Binding governance, costs $10-50 gas per vote, typical participation 5-15%
  • •Requires BOTH quorum (e.g., 4% participation) AND threshold (e.g., 66% approval)
  • •Most voting happens Day 1 and final day—middle period is dead zone
⏳

4. Timelock (1-14 days)

  • •Mandatory delay gives exit rights—disagree? Sell tokens before execution
  • •Duration scales with risk: 1-2 days for treasury grants, 14 days for protocol upgrades
  • •Trade-off: security vs. agility—DAOs optimize for security, accept slow speed
⚡

5. Execution (Instant)

  • •Permissionless—anyone can call execute() after timelock expires, usually bots do it in minutes
  • •Smart contract automatically implements changes: transfer funds, update parameters, upgrade contracts
  • •Irreversible—no undo button, only way to reverse is new proposal through full lifecycle

🎓 Master Insight

The proposal lifecycle is not a bug, it's the feature. Traditional companies iterate in days. DAOs take weeks. This is the price of decentralization. Each stage adds friction but prevents catastrophic failures: discussion filters bad ideas, timelock prevents governance attacks, quorum prevents minority rule. The 2-4 week minimum is OPTIMAL for protocols managing billions—fast enough to adapt, slow enough to be secure. DAOs that tried to move faster (0-1 day timelock) mostly got exploited or attacked. The lifecycle isn't perfect (can't respond to emergencies quickly), but it's the best solution we have for trustless coordination at scale.