Wormhole, Tally, and ScopeLift are teaming up to build MultiGov: an industry-first multichain governance system soon available to DAOs on Solana, Ethereum mainnet, and EVM L2s. The Wormhole DAO will be the first to adopt MultiGov, enabling W holders to create, vote on, and execute governance proposals on any supported chain. Integrating this innovative governance model marks a significant shift towards a truly decentralized and inclusive decision-making process that operates at a level above the multiple underlying chains.

What is Multichain Governance?

Your DAO operated by users on any chain. Multichain governance lets DAOs meet token holders where they are. DAO members can raise proposals, delegate, vote, and generally participate in governance for an onchain DAO from whichever chain they hold tokens on. MultiGov will support multichain DAOs across Solana, Ethereum mainnet, and EVM-compatible L2s. As more projects expand to multiple chains, MultiGov will lower barriers to DAO participation and increase user reach in nearly all major ecosystems. Tally, Wormhole, and Scopelift are combining their expertise in state-of-the-art governance, delegation, and multichain infrastructure to build MultiGov.

Single-chain vs Multichain

Until now, DAOs have operated their governance on a single chain. Many of the oldest and largest DAOs keep their token, governance, and treasury all on Ethereum mainnet. However, rising L1 gas costs make managing and participating in governance increasingly expensive. In addition, with the growth of robust multichain infrastructure, DAO token holders are increasingly distributed across many chains. To maintain active, accessible, and decentralized governance, many existing DAOs are exploring options to expand their governance systems. Newer protocol DAOs often plan out their multichain strategy from day 1, launching on one network and then strategically expanding to other chains to grow their users and liquidity.

MultiGov aims to keep DAO governance:

• Active, by meeting community members where they are.
• Accessible to all token holders, by lowering gas costs.
• Decentralized, by enabling token holders to vote on any chain
• Flexible, by allowing DAOs to easily expand to new networks along with their protocol

Implementation: MultiGov’s hub-and-spoke model

MultiGov implements a hub-and-spoke governance model. This model combines well-understood building blocks – governor, timelock, cross-chain token transfers, and cross-chain messaging.

On the "hub" chain, a DAO using MultiGov has a standard ERC20Votes token and OpenZeppelin Governor with the Flexible Voting extension. The hub can be any supported EVM chain. Token holders can choose to natively transfer their hub governance tokens to spoke chains.

On each "spoke," there is a native governance token and a spoke Governor contract. The native governance token keeps track of voting power on that chain. When there is a proposal, token holders on that spoke chain submit votes to the spoke Governor. Votes on each spoke Governor can be aggregated and sent back to the hub chain via a cross-chain message. Users who are on the hub chain can submit votes directly to the hub chain Governor.

When the voting period is over, the hub chain will tally the votes it has collected from all the spoke chains and from users who submitted directly on the hub. If the proposal passes, it is executed on the hub chain, and sent to each of the spokes for execution via a cross-chain message. Creating new proposals to vote on follows a similar design, where proposals are created on the hub chain and then broadcast to each spoke chain.

To learn more about how DAOs can go multichain, watch Tally CTO Raf Solari’s ETH Denver 2024 talk on Multichain DAOs here.

The Wormhole DAO

The Wormhole DAO, governed by W holders, will be the first to use MultiGov’s pioneering multichain governance system. Wormhole's DAO will enable W token holders on any supported chain to participate in governance for the Wormhole protocol. This approach will provide users with a familiar interface for participating in Wormhole governance, whether they are on Ethereum, an EVM L2, or Solana. The Wormhole contributors hope that this will help maintain a vibrant and active Wormhole community while keeping governance completely decentralized and accessible to all.

DAOs interested in implementing MultiGov can reach out to contributors at Wormhole, Tally, and ScopeLift by submitting this form.