Six Weeks of Operating the Tally Platform

Six weeks ago we announced ScopeLift had agreed to take over Tally's governance platform. We committed to stability and continuity. Have you noticed any dramatic changes? Hopefully not! And that's by design. We want the DAOs and delegates that rely on the Tally platform to know it's not going anywhere.

That doesn't mean we haven't been busy. While we aren't making any striking changes, we are absolutely aiming for continuous improvement. So far we've been mostly focused on that: optimizing the codebase, helping customers with critical proposals and talking to as many DAOs and delegates as possible.

At ScopeLift, we still believe in the "big vision" of DAOs. Effective onchain governance unlocks a world which mitigates the inherent weaknesses of the prevalent trust-based model. If we solve for that then there's space for alternative organizational structures to upend the status quo for the better.

But achieving the big vision will require executing excellently on lots of small-but-critically-important things on a day to day basis. Everything we build has to be lean, secure, resilient, and resistant to outside capture so that it can thrive in the current harsh market reality. That's how we've always built things at ScopeLift, and that's how we're approaching the governance platform as well.

Here's a small taste of what we've been up to since taking over, and what you can expect in the weeks and months ahead.

Codebase and proposal flows

To ensure continuity and stability our first priority was to improve and optimize performance. We've been on the hunt for ways to make the app more efficient and improve UX in the process.

For example, most public-facing pages were doing substantial work on every request that did not need to repeat for every user. We started by ensuring public proposal detail pages and DAO home pages could use cached page generation to load much faster.

Voting power accuracy was next. We migrated state reads from a backend aggregator to direct onchain RPC calls. Users with active delegations are now far less likely to see stale data or a misleading zero. Moreover, loading states and RPC error states are now handled explicitly, i.e. the platform tells users when voting power is loading or unavailable.

Voting flow correctness got the next pass. Multisig voting with Safe now resolves through the active connected wallet, with the real voter address recorded for both EOA and Safe transactions. Accounts with zero voting power are blocked from submitting onchain votes that could not have succeeded anyway. And when a proposal moves from pending to active, the page header, vote panel, and mobile CTA stay in sync without reloads.

Behind the scenes, in addition to specific requests from customers, we fixed a memory leak in the indexer, tightened ETL memory budgets and phased out networks without activity.

This kind of work isn't flashy, but it's critically important to the sustainability of the platform, and to the experience our users have.

DAO conversations

We have been in direct conversation with governance contributors from many DAOs and other members of the governance community. A few interesting patterns emerged:

Many are talking about AI-powered governance but few are doing it. The benefits are obvious even if human coordination will likely remain the bottleneck. Still, there's no clear implementation path apart from having delegates use tools individually. If you're building in this space we are keen to chat!

Delegate performance tracking is important. DAOs want actionable delegate activity: voting history, forum participation, monthly overviews, peer recognition scores and so forth. A few external scoring systems exist and more are on the way. We're exploring how to surface them in the UI while ensuring gamification risks are mitigated.

Vibe coded governance is here to stay, despite attacks going mainstream. Having multiple governance frontends is key for redundancy, but it's clear that solely relying on vibe coded experiments is not optimal. We're exploring ways to serve the long tail of DAOs that historically relied on Tally for support, as well as how to embed additional security monitoring and controls within the app.

The DAO meta is less polluted now. The Cambrian explosion of DAOs was partially motivated by VCs wanting to invest in tokens, and from projects aiming for regulatory protections. As that's changing, many projects are also moving away from decentralized models, which helps distinguish which really did require a DAO to operate and which didn't. Curiously, we're already seeing the EU MiCA Regulation impacting that landscape and it seems Clarity Act may pass over summer.

What's next

The platform's new name has been chosen. We're aiming to reveal the new brand this June. As mentioned, the tally.xyz domain will remain operational through the transition and will start redirecting sometime after the new domain launches.

We're continuing to work on platform improvements and are happy to engage with the DAO community at large, and not only Tally's existing customers, to inform the roadmap. There's a lot else to explore, from applied governance research to privacy features and integrations with other industry players!

If you're interested, reach out through the form linked in the announcement post.