This proposal seeks a slight increase in BSQ fees (to go from a 90% reduction over BTC fees to an 80% reduction over BTC fees). It resulted in 2 formal DAO proposals to change the BSQ trading fee parameters were made, one for the taker fee and the other for the maker fee.

DAO voting approved these increases (see them listed above).

This is how the BSQ fee schedule changed:

Couple of notes:

1. Note the combined fee percentages. Calculations assume an 8 000 USD/BTC rate. The long-term target for combined fees is 0.4%.
   
   Also notice: BTC fees have been 0.4% combined for years. At this stage, despite the increase, BSQ fees are still far away from that target.
2. BTC fees did not change.
3. DAO voting takes place at the end of DAO cycles, so the fee changes above went into effect in Cycle 3. The sharp increase in BSQ burned in Cycle 2 was primarily the result of a sharp increase in Bisq network trading volume.
4. BSQ fees are set manually, and are sensitive to the BSQ/BTC rate. As the BTC price increases, BSQ fees need to be adjusted to follow. In this case, the BTC price had increased from around 6 000 USD to 8 000 USD. So a BSQ fee increase was needed anyway to offset that increase.
   
   At a price of 8 000 USD, BTC trading fees to make a 1 BTC offer would be 1 * 0.001 * 8 000 = 8 USD. If the BSQ maker fee rate remained at 0.5, BSQ fees for that same offer would be 1 * 0.5 ≈ 0.5 USD. This would put BSQ fees at a 93.75% discount ([8 - 0.5] / 8 = 0.9375). The initial target was a 90% discount. So BSQ fees had to be increased anyway, but moving to an 80% discount meant a slightly bigger increase was needed.

This proposal was made to increase the maximum trade limit for new accounts to 0.02 BTC from 0.01 BTC. The limit was placed on new payment accounts created after March 01 2019 as a temporary measure against stolen bank account scammers while protection mechanisms are conceived and implemented.

Although DAO voting approved this proposal, the change was not ultimately implemented, presumably because of concerns over backward compatibility.

This outcome highlights an important distinction between DAO proposal types: proposals to change DAO parameters go into effect immediately upon approval (e.g., trading fees). Other proposals, like this 0.02 trade size increase request, require developers to manually make changes, which means there’s a chance an approved measure might not actually make it into the software. Of course, there are incentives to discourage developers from defying DAO vote results (e.g., voters could reject a rogue developer’s compensation requests, discouraging them from continuing to contribute altogether) but it’s interesting to note the dynamic. Even though it’s called a decentralized autonomous organization, humans can still be responsible for imposing the will of the DAO’s stakeholders.