Introducing the Governance Voting UI for the Maker Foundational Vote

September 12, 2018

The vote for the Maker Foundation Proposal v2 marks the first time MKR Governors will vote using an application UI. Until now, participation in Dai Credit System governance has only been available via command line tools.

It is a tall order to create a great user experience that truly enables decentralized governance, so the voting application will be an iterative work in progress. Some keywords that we use as guides for our work to make your vote count are; Inclusion, Dialogue, Transparency, Neutral facilitation, Encouraging participation, Knowledge transfer, Conflict resolution, Efficiency, Usability and Security. We are aware that we need a lot of dialogue with, and input from, the community to evolve the Governance Voting application, and we will seek it actively.

For our first iteration of the user-friendly voting tool, our main focus has been on security. As MKR owners need to lock up their MKR in a smart contract to participate in the voting, a suite of smart contracts that allow MKR holders to vote with an easily accessible “hot wallet” was needed, while ensuring that their MKR tokens can never be transferred without approval from their “cold wallet”. This means that the private key that fully controls the MKR will only be used in the setup step, making it less exposed to potentially malicious behavior. Note that as an MKR owner you are able to withdraw MKR back to the wallet you originally had your MKR stored on at any point in time. The MakerDAO Voting Proxy Contract post explain what happens under the hood in this voting setup process.

Below you can see examples of the voting UI and one of the setup screens.

The MKR voter setup process was extensively tested both internally and with a wide selection of usability testers. Combining security with usability can be hard, and though this first release has room for usability improvements, there already are plans for improvements in the coming versions.

Making your vote count

To be sure you’re ready to vote on September 12, we support a number of wallet types including Ledger, Trezor, Metamask and Paper wallets which will allow you to participate in the vote.

In order to meet the needs of as many MKR holders as possible, we surveyed MKR holders to understand where they hold their MKR and what wallets we should support. Over 75% said they use Ledger Nano S and Trezor hardware wallets, with most of the rest using either Metamask or a paper wallet. Below you will find a link to a guide and video showing how to use each wallet to setup your voting contract. Based on this, we have produced videos showing the setup for scenarios where the MKR is held in these HW and paper wallets as well as a video for using MetaMask. The links for the videos are: