Addressing Voting Apathy in Optimism Governance

Delegates 🏛 Delegate Updates
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Hey everyone,

I’ve been taking some time to dig into participation in Optimism governance, and I wanted to share what I found. Active participation is essential for us to realize Optimism’s vision, but from my observations, there’s a noticeable issue: low engagement among many delegates and token holders.

Here’s what I discovered and a few ideas I think we should explore to address this. I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts!

Findings:

After reviewing delegate activity and overall voting participation, here are the key patterns I noticed:

  1. Delegate Engagement:

    • Optimism has over 900+ registered delegates, but participation varies widely.
    • Among the top 100 delegates, here’s what I found:
    • 40 delegates (40%) show 0% participation—they haven’t voted on any proposals.
    • 11 delegates (11%) show low participation (10–30%), voting only occasionally.
    • 7 delegates (7%) are moderately active (40–70%), contributing somewhat regularly.
    • 15 delegates (15%) are highly active (80–90%), showing consistent engagement.
    • 27 delegates (27%) demonstrate 100% participation, actively voting on all proposals.

You can dive further into this by checking out More delegates

  1. Inactive or Retired Delegates:

I also noticed several delegates who seem to have stopped participating altogether. These delegates still hold profiles, but they’re no longer voting, which misrepresents the interests of OP holders who delegated to them.

  1. General Voting Apathy:

A lot of OP token holders, even those who delegate their votes, don’t seem to monitor their delegate’s performance or engage in governance. Many also choose not to vote directly, leaving important decisions to a smaller group of active participants. This lack of engagement lowers voter turnout and weakens governance outcomes.

The Issue:

From what I’ve gathered, this low participation has three major impacts:
1. Misrepresentation: Inactive delegates fail to reflect the broader Optimism community’s interests.
2. Governance Inefficiency: Lower participation slows decision-making and weakens governance legitimacy.
3. Missed Opportunities: Apathy prevents Optimism from reaching its full potential in innovation and execution.

Proposed Solutions:

To tackle these challenges, here are some ideas I’d like us to discuss:

  1. Minimum Activity Standards for Delegates:

    • We could set a baseline for participation—maybe voting in at least 50% of governance cycles within 3-4 months.
    • Delegates who don’t meet this could lose their delegate status or be marked inactive.

  2. Clear Designation for Retired or Inactive Delegates:

    • Delegates who are no longer active could update their profiles to reflect their status.
    • These delegates could either:
    • Reassign their voting power to an active delegate, or
    • Close their delegate profile entirely.
    • This would help ensure token holders aren’t delegating to inactive representatives.

  3. Notifications for Inactive Delegates:

    • OP holders could get notified if their delegate becomes inactive or retires.
    • We could also provide tools to make it easier for them to reassign their votes to someone more active.

  4. Transparency and Reporting:

    • Active delegates could submit periodic updates summarizing their activity and voting rationale.
    • We could also highlight the most active delegates so OP holders can make better delegation decisions.

  5. Community Education and Incentives:

    • We could create educational campaigns to help token holders understand why governance participation matters.
    • Maybe we could explore rewards for active participation, like reputation boosts or ecosystem recognition.

  6. Enforce Governance Standards:

    • Should we consider a community-enforced system to monitor activity across both the Token House and Citizen House?

Call to Action:

What do you think about these ideas? Should we set minimum standards for delegate activity? How can we address inactive or retired delegates? Are there better ways to encourage token holders and delegates to stay engaged?

I’d really love to hear your feedback, suggestions, and any other thoughts you have on this. Together, I believe we can make governance stronger and more representative of the entire Optimism community.

@Gonna.eth , @optimistic_emily , @Michael

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Hey @Ugbuericsam ,

Thanks for the thread and for compiling a breakdown of delegate activity; it’s an important conversation! I agree that low engagement has a direct impact on the efficiency and legitimacy of Optimism governance. However, I think it’s crucial to address one of the core underlying issues: incentives.

The Role of Incentives in Governance

Active governance participation—whether it’s joining calls, contributing to forum discussions, or voting on proposals—requires time and effort. For many delegates, especially newer or smaller ones, the current structure doesn’t offer enough tangible motivation to prioritize these activities.

Key Questions:

  1. What incentives are there for new delegates to hop into governance calls, stay active in forum discussions, or ensure consistent voting? Right now, the incentive framework heavily favors the top 100 delegates, but even within this group, many lack engagement. What’s encouraging those outside this range to participate, grow their reputation, and stay involved?
  2. Is 4,000 OP enough? For top 100 delegates, 4,000 OP at the end of the season seems like a nice bonus, but it’s unlikely to offset the actual time and effort required for meaningful participation. Delegates outside the top 100, however, receive no direct compensation despite often being the ones striving to prove themselves. Should we explore a broader, more inclusive incentive system to support these “underdogs”?

Expanding Incentives:

Here are a few ideas that could complement your proposals:

  • Staggered Rewards: Introduce incentives that scale with activity rather than delegate size. For instance:
    • Forum contributions (e.g., active discussions, proposal suggestions) could earn recognition or small token rewards.
    • Delegates could receive rewards tied to their participation rate rather than their rank in voting power.
  • Milestone Bonuses: Offer additional OP rewards when delegates hit participation milestones (e.g., consistent attendance on calls, voting in 90%+ of cycles over a season).
  • Support for Non-Top 100 Delegates: Consider creating a fund to reward high-performing delegates who are outside the top 100 but actively contributing to the community.

Educating Token Holders:

Beyond incentivizing delegates, we also need to engage token holders. Many may not even realize they can reassign votes if their delegate is inactive. Educational efforts and notifications could be game-changing for governance participation.

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Thank you @0xDonPepe , as a new delegate and someone that has been very active in contributions towards the governance… I appreciate your view and I agree to them but I think we will have to leave this to those in the foundation to decide.

Would be great to here from the collective Leads on this too.

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Hey!

I’ve linked your discussion in the retro reward thread for governance participation , as I found it to be very important food for thought for future rewards.

I think an even more dangerous consequence of this lack of delegate participation is the low re-delegation momentum that seems to form after a delegate becomes inactive. Unfortunately, due to the nature of re-delegation I don’t think it’s possible to make expiring rewards onchain, so this is an issue that will become more and more important as time goes on, as we’re seeing a voting supply ’ burn’ the more delegates become inactive.

While it’s useful information, this is frontend specific, and I’m not sure will fix much. Curia already does both, and even for linda’s resigned position there is still a significant amount of voting power: Delegate | Optimism Governance Dashboard by curiaLab.

While nice, would this not increase the bar for participation, leading to potentially lower activity? It’s also worth noting that many delegates don’t report openly, but rather to specific groups, eg. other DAOs or projects, so this standard could punish them despite still particpating in governance.

I agree with @0xDonPepe 's of milestone and increased participation rewards (up to a certain limit), though I believe that forum contributions should not be actively rewarded, as based on what other delegate systems I’ve seen this lowers the discussion bar significantly.

I don’t have a silver bullet to solve this issue, but on very broad terms, I feel the collective should be providing longer-term participants with enough participation incentives to ensure they do not want to drop out anytime soon, especially considering much of the VP is lost when they become inactive. Delegates that have been around for 1+ years carry all the experience of previous seasons with them, and can detect discussions that have been brought up before.

I will try reaching out to some of the inactive delegates I know and ask why they are not engaging anymore. I feel they will provide the greatest insights of whether it’s a matter of workload, feeling outdated, or simply burnout.

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Maybe something like an app that will always notify the delegates and delegators about when there’s a new proposal, when voting round just kicked off, when it just ended, and one that often reminds the delegator about how active or inactive their delegate in governance has been would help… what do you of this? Maybe the agora website we use in voting can implement this and not necessarily an app.

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Around the week after I dropped this thread, I found Curia, a very good tool for governance and have been using it since then. Thank you!

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Thanks for creating this thread @Ugbuericsam, it’s an important topic! So important, that we’ve recently hired a Strategic Delegation Lead to focus solely on this problem space.

To respond to some of your ideas:

Minimum Activity Standards for Delegates: Delegates must maintain 70% voting participation to maintain delegation through governance programs and/or to receive governance participation rewards. Removing someone’s delegation as a result of voting participation would be a violation of tokenholder rights but they could be marked as “inactive” and would be ineligible for governance programs and participation rewards.

Clear Designation for Retired or Inactive Delegates: Agree! There is a process for this and Agora does show “inactive status” for these delegates (see Linda’s profile, who resigned.)

Notifications for Inactive Delegates: Agree! We are experimenting with Agora on different type of email notifications for voters. In terms of the ability for delegates to reassign their delegation if they resign or no longer wish to vote, it’s a functionality that requires an upgrade to the OP token contract, which should be a one-time event that will need to occur to enable interoperabliity.

On incentivizing participation: I would encourage everyone to think about whether this tactic is the most effective tactic to achieving the (assumed) ultimate goal of having an incentive aligned, highly knowledgable, and very active voter base. I think the work to be done is probably more related to finding participants that have those characteristics and non-monetary motivations to participate, but this is a harder problem to solve.

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Thank you for your feedback and opinion on this. Appreciate it!

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- “Probably the most important DAO for this new internet we’re trying to build.”
– “Yeah, but only 44 delegates actively voted in Season 6 (>70%).”
- “Harf. Is 44 really decentralized? (Imagine explaining that to a judge!)”
– “Come on, you’re exaggerating. Way more people took part in the votes—they’re just outside the Top100 delegates.”
- “So, you’re saying the active voting delegates outside the Top100 actually bring positive impact to the Collective?”
– “Of course they do!”
- “Then remind me—why are they the only group in the Optimism Collective that has never, not even symbolically, been recognized for their positive impact?”
– “Because… monetary motivations are fine for every other kind of contribution, but not for delegates outside the Top100 participating in the token house voting rounds! Clearly, they’re just grifters !”
- " :smiling_face_with_tear: Maybe one day, there won’t be anyone left to participate beyond those 44…"

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Maybe a lot of the issues delegates outside top 100 are angry about could be resolved by rewarding TOP 100 ACTIVE DELEGATES

This will expand the rewards to delegates out of top 100 by raw voting weight, but include several active delegate outside top 100 who are voting regularly.

Using the 70% voting participation yardstick to decide who is active delegate or not would be a good idea.

Using TOP 100 ACTIVE DELEGATES will immediately result in 56 of the top 100 delegates not getting rewarded because they are not so active, and instead other active delegates outside current top 100 getting rewarded.

For top 100 delegates who dont get rewarded, all they have to do to get rewarded is to be more active.

This solves all the issue…it is surprising it has not been adopted already!!

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This sounds great to me.

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Would suggest to check out Tribuni’s bot and x23.ai Gov Assistant Bot which send voting reminders and short summaries: https://x23.ai Telegram: Contact @Tribuni_Bot

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I think we should explore the “underdogs” per say. Im one of the 27 with 100% partipation , however im not a heavy token holder , i self delgate and vote my small share of op tokens accordingly. As stated above there is 40 inactive / retired top 100 delegates , thats sitting at 40% are inactive. I think we should make proportional incentives to people who are active in the voting process maybe the ones with the most participation from 70%-100% maybe make it a tiered delegate system or incentivise it for smaller holders to self delegate and participate more. I participate not looking for a reward but because optimism was nice enough to gift me these tokens way back when and i want there to be success within the ecosystem. But if im being honest theres no incentive for anyone out of the top 100 to participate and the sad thing was there was in the beginning. Maybe it would be better for the optimism ecosystem to be transparent to a point as to what would qualify people, give clear rules of the road and let people decide if they will participate or not. The calls are hard for me to make at times because i work midnight shift here in the states and i cant always attend. But i always come to discord and stay up on whats going on and participate when theres an active vote. I wish there was more ways for me to participate.

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Im outside of the top 100 and we have been rewarded in the past , i recieved tokens in the 1st 3 airdroos but none of the last 3. Since the 3rd one , your correct we have not been rewarded for participation. There needs to be a restructuring of the way the top 100 are counted. Whether thats through voting power , active voting percentage , or maybe it would be better to reward everyone who parti participates in the voting cycle that has a participation percentage above 75-80 %. They dont have to be huge rewards but base it percentage wise on that and there voting power. In the past , it was in the 2nd or 3rd one where they did something along those lines and it rewarded participation. I agree its not truly decentralized outside of the top 100, however giving tokens to.other chains or daos is not the right move imo either. Your not incentising small hokders that do participate. Your only adding large amounts of tokens to other chains that then become a top 100

1 Like