Bribe Protocol Bags $4m Funding, Brings Voter Extractable Value (VEV) to DAO

The crypto world continues to be acknowledged and supported by companies around the world. This is because of its never-ending development that provides great use cases to all its users in the space.

Recently, Bribe Protocol officially announced the success of its seed and strategic funding round that raised $4 million. The fund will be used to incentivize voting in DAO governance with Voter Extractable Value (VEV).

Spartan Group leads the funding event with participants interested in DAO infrastructure tooling. The participants include Dragonfly, Hypersphere, Fundamental Labs, IOSG, Fenbushi Capital, Rarestone Capital, GravityX, Shima Capital, and Figment. In addition, AAVE also joined the round for the Aave Bribe pool. Composable Labs and Advanced Blockchain AG developed the Bribe protocol. Bribe founder Condorcet said,

Our early backers have joined us to formalize this essential mechanism by which DAOs come to decisions and reach quorums: voting markets. By moving this activity on-chain, we are ensuring that retail users can also participate, as well as providing data and case studies necessary to really understand what is going on ‘under-the-hood’ in DAO ecosystems.

The Bribe network will release its first VEV product for staking governance tokens — the Aave Bribe pool later this month. Furthermore, another pool will be announced — the Tokemak Bribe pool after the launch of the Aave Bribe pool.

In terms of technology, VEV works by coordinating and auctioning powerful coalitions of DAO votes. In detail, the depositors stake their governance tokens in DAO-specific Bribe pools. Then, the Bidders borrow the voting power of their chosen Bribe pool with USDC, rather than accumulating large amounts of DAO tokens over time, to support or reject one governance proposal within a certain timeframe. Hence, the highest bid is then distributed through the pool as income. Sanat Kapur, an Investment Analyst at Spartan Group explained,

We are excited to support Bribe as it builds out infrastructure to incentivize governance participation for protocols. We think that an open, fair, and transparent marketplace to coordinate auctions for voting power is a powerful new DeFi primitive that will lead to increased governance participation while also creating a new source of yield for tokenholders.

On the other hand, the funding will allow Bribe to enter as a key player in Aave’s governance and ramp up activity in the Aave DAO, using the raised AAVE to bootstrap participation. The Bribe pool for Aave takes the form of a staking contract on Ethereum. It is currently being audited by Trail of Bits and Stela Labs.