Constitution

The Cortex DAO Constitution defines our mission and principles, and makes operating as a decentralized community possible.

Mission Statement

Create and maintain index protocols useful for building portfolios, such as the Convex Index.

Principles

Tokenomics first

Tokenomics is what turns a product into a protocol. Without healthy tokenomics, a DeFi product will struggle to gain traction and struggle to decentralize. Design should start with tokenomics.

Stewardship

We evaluate decisions by considering the best interest of protocol participants (ie. users, downstream protocols, and DAO contributors).

Own the work

We expect decision making at every level. When tasks aren’t fully formed, we make decisions on how to execute and fill in the gaps.

Work with Urgency

Time is the most valuable resource we have. We must diligently prioritize our tasks to capitalize our use of time and act on a bias for action

Pursue Innovation

Look for answers that are outside of the box, and prepare us for today and the future

Seek Alignment

Take action when we see behaviors that aren’t aligned with our operating principles

Entities

The DAO uses a two entity structure similar to the framework defined by David Kerr (Principal, Cowrie LLC) and Miles Jennings (General Counsel, Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz).

The DAO will receive income from the protocol, with a portion of the yield earned going into the treasury. The treasury will fund the development and day to day operation of the protocol.

DAO members can signal a desire to make changes to the protocol via governance voting.

Protocol

• Regimeless entity

• Operated by a 2 of 6 protocol multisig

Treasury Entity

• Wrapped by a Foundation entity

• Operated by a 2 of 6 treasury multisig

Roles

The following roles and responsibilities outline who participants in the DAO and what their actions are:

• Member: A person who has been onboarded to the Cortex DAO community.

• Contributor: A person/entity actively contributing to Cortex DAO.

• Core Contributor: A person/entity with decision making authority.

• Voter: A person/entity with the ability to vote on governance proposals using locked CXD tokens.

• Administrator: A person/entity with access to the Administrator Multisig(s).

Governance

Actions within the DAO are completed via two processes, direct governance and representative governance.

Direct governance is the result of passing governance proposals by DAO contributors. Decisions resulting from direct governance are submitted via governance proposals to the community, once passed, are actioned by the Administrator using the protocol multisig:

Contributors → Governance Proposal → Administrator → Protocol Multisig

Representative governance includes the responsibilities and charter of action given to Working Groups or the Administrator.

Direct Governance Proposal Process

Governance proposals must follow the following process and timeline.

1. Formal forum discussion Forum proposals are permitted by any member of the DAO Link to forum: forum.cortexdao.io Can be submitted at anytime Proposals must use the Cortex Improvement Proposal (CIP) format.

2. Temp check post on forum w/polling Temp check must reach 50% to result in a governance proposal At least 10 community members must be in favor of the proposal Polling must be open for a minimum of 72 Hours

3. Formal submission to working groups for implementation Submitted to the working group’s task management system, ie. github, trello Format to be determined by individual working groups

4. Vote via Snapshot Quorum format: 4% of locked CXD Greater than 50% must be in favor of the proposal Voting must be open for a minimum of 72 Hours Link to Snapshot.

Working Groups

Working Group	Charter
Core	The core working groups is responsible for 1) Product development 2) DAO development 3) Day to day product operations
Convex Index Construction	This working group is responsible for: 1) Analysis of assets 2) Creation of governance proposals related to the addition of assets to the Cortex DAO 3) Basket selection 4) Weight setting
Tokenomics	This working group is responsible for: 1) Setting fees for yield aggregation 2) Tokenomic feature development 3) Creation of governance proposals related to the expansion of Cortex DAO tokenomics
Growth	This working group is responsible for: 1) Content marketing 2) Impression mining 3) Project ambassadors 4) Community controlled grant program 5) Community Moderation 6) Design 7) Documentation

Code of Conduct

The code of conduct for the DAO will be stored in GitHub.