In a mail today on their governance and research forums, the team behind decentralized finance (DeFi) DEX protocol 0x announced initial plans to decentralize their governance by creating a "community-owned treasury seed-funded past 0x Labs."

"As we go on our mission to create a tokenized world where all value can flow freely, 0x Labs intends to experiment with seed-funding a community treasury managed by a DAO," reads the post. "To establish the DAO, 0x Labs will identify a ready of bootstrap delegates that volition shepherd the initial steps of governance decentralization."

According to Theo Gonella, platform product manager at 0x Labs and the author of the "Introducing the 0x DAO" post, longtime community members shouldn't be surprised past the motion to initiate decentralization.

"Nosotros originally shared our vision effectually the protocol's progressive decentralization in 2017, when we introduced ZRX, 0x's governance token," he said. "We have always envisioned that ZRX holders would one mean solar day be in full control of all aspects of the project - from managing the Customs Treasury to driving protocol upgrades."

The movement comes during an particularly productive menses for the project. A v4 update to their mainnet led to a rally in price for the native ZRX token last month, and concluding week 0x Labs closed a $xv million fundraising round led by Pantera Upper-case letter. ZRX currently sits at $1.81, upwardly over 300% on the month.

Governance isn't taking a backseat to protocol development, however, as Gonella says fully open governance could be in identify "by the end of the year."

"Managing a customs treasury is the natural first pace. Information technology will enable ZRX holders to go familiar with the governance organization and fully experiment while still having some safe boundaries in place," he said. "The adjacent stride is to expand the system's reach to all aspects of the protocol, including upgrades that accept just been fabricated easier with the recent 0x v4 launch."

In moving to establish a DAO structure, 0x joins an industry-wide effort towards decentralized governance.

Rival aggregator and AMM 1inch transitioned to DAO governance late last year, and today appear a second round of airdropped governance tokens in a novel vampire attack on Uniswap. Also, Balancer Labs recently opened up discussion on the AMM'due south V2 yield farming plans to the community, part of a larger endeavour to better decentralize their governance through governance token distribution.

Gonella says that this was of community ownership overtaking DeFi is an heady one:

"We are collectively walking into the uncharted territory of human coordination. The biggest collective challenge will exist transitioning from "engaged" to "answerable" communities. With the incredible growth in public blockchain adoption and blossoming interest in open projection governance, we are confident that 0x's customs will transition to a fully answerable one in the years to come up."