Hi NEAR community. Making a new account that is clearly not anon and reposting my info.
Reaching out to share a more public profile for consideration of the Head of Gov role now that I’m able to (this is following up to my anon post).
My name is Eugene Leventhal (twitter, linkedin). I’m a big govnerd and have been since 2016 (at least in a web3 context). I’m currently the outgoing Head of Governance at Scroll Foundation and a Research Director at Metagov, a governance research non-profit.
I see governance as being a fundamentally human endeavor. Humans are an inherently social creatures, and I see governance as the way that we collective set and work towards decisions. This can be in trivial contexts (what game do a group of friends play or what to eat for a group dinner), as well as in immensely impactful contexts (how to roll out new technologies, who gets a seat at the table, who holds those in power accountable and how).
I don’t want to write a full novella here, so I’ll keep it more focused on my professional background that seems relevant, especially as the anon post included some directions I’d want to explore. I will say that I was born in Moscow, my family immigrated to the States, and I grew up in and around NYC. Between the contrast of the USSR vs 'murica, and growing up in a place like NYC in the 90’s where organized crime was regularly talked about, I grew up around many gov related discussions though I didn’t frame them as such until much later in life. So working on and improving decentralized governance is deeply personal to me and it’s my biggest intellectual fascination.
Background
I did my undergrad in finance and psychology at NYU. Went into the corporate world from there and spent 7 (confused) years in professional services around the finance industry. During that time, I got into startups (mainly by attending Startup Weekends and hackathons), and got involved in two nonprofits (Equality Charter School - a charter school in the Bronx, and Transfernation - a food transfer nonprofit). These experiences gave me exposure to corporate and nonprofit governance.
Around 2015 I started hearing of bitcoin but didn’t seriously look into it until the beginning of 2016, when I officially went down the rabbithole. I got really excited by the DAO at the time as it was launching and decided to try working on eduDAO, a onchain crowdfunding platform meant to support schools and nonprofits where the governance overseeing proposal approval would live with the communities where they were meant to send funds. This was a very exciting opportunity, but was way to early - ETH wasn’t an asset class, no stables. So the nonprofits we wanted to work with were all unwilling to actually work with us due to the uncertainty so we decided to pause the project.
At that point, I had quit the corporate world and was heading to get a masters in Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. While there, I ran the blockchain club, got one blockchain course started, and launched a student podcast called Heinz Radio. Then, I convinced the uni to hire me to work on growing a blockchain research initiative and launching a podcast on the impact of tech on society. Keep in mind, I was only involved in the first few seasons of each podcast.
I also launched a podcast called the History of Drugs in Society while I was still working at the uni, which as a fully solo project. I’m mentioning these different podcasts because, in my opinion, they all explore governance in different ways, ranging from the governance of tech, the governance of illicit markets, and generally exploring what was changing society. So these 4ish years gave me the chance to learn about academic gov, political gov, illicit market gov, and the governance of technology.
Before taking on my next role, I did collab with NEAR and Metagov on a hackathon where I helped with the gov track for it. This would have been around May 2021.
From there, I joined the Smart Contract Research Forum, which was a not for profit project meant to help fill in gaps between researchers and practitioners in web3. I joined as ops lead and because the executive director. It was a great experience and while the forum itself has lapsed ownership and I wasn’t able to get it back up, the github does outline some of the various work that was done (we used it as our main project management platform towards the end). I was going to lead to the conversations we had hosted at SCRF with gov leaders but it seems we lost that because it was posted under a gmail account that has lapsed, 
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From there I joined Metagov as ops lead, but where I also became executive director. Important to note, Metagov isn’t specific to web3 gov, it’s about decentralized gov more broadly. My focus there was both supported a decentralized community of governance researchers as well as growing my own research group - Grant Innovation Lab (GIL), where we have produced papers such as the State of Web3 Grants 2023 and 2024. The GIL also hosted workshops for grant operators, and if I’m remembering correctly, 2 of them had at least one person from the NEAR ecosystem join.
Last September, I joined Scroll Foundation to lead gov. Note: a lot of initial design choices such as token allocation, gov token, one token one vote, progressive decentralization, etc. where all in place before my time. My first task was - what happens with the DAO once the token goes live. I led the design of a co-creation cycle (CCC) model, which was meant to be a form of using participatory co-design for a DAO. We ended up doing another CCC over the summer where we used Harmonica to experiment with the data input heading into it. I think this thread of co-design is an important one to delve deeper into.
More than happy to share anything about the Scroll experience. Just to be explicit about it - I resigned last week after leadership announced they wanted to pause the DAO and re-assess the future of gov. That was done without consulting the gov team and I generally see decentralization and governance as super important topics, so I felt that resigning was the right thing to do.
In the anon post that I did, I added a few priority areas:
I won’t regurgitate what’s there but happy to touch on any of those ideas as well. Let me know what else I can share for now.
I think there’s so much potential in both NEAR and the future of decentralized gov. It would be a really exciting opportunity to get to work with the community on where things could and should go from here. Please let me know if there’s any specific info I can share for now. Thanks!
