Hey OP delegates 
Kent from Agora here and I wanted to share some updates on the rollout of the advanced delegation feature on vote.optimism.io.
Wanted to make a thread, place for feedback, and quick primer to the advance delegation rollout plan!
Why did we build advanced delegation?
The idea of a more powerful delegation functionality was brought up by many folks in the Discord and forms asking for “split votes” or “re-delegation” over the last few seasons. As a result, this request came up as a RPF during Season 4 Intent to improve governance accessibility.
As governance builders, we believe this idea will help both:
- Increase in votable supply, and
- Increase the number and diversity of delegates in the ecosystem.
Ultimately, advanced delegation allows an OP token holder to delegate their vote to more than one address with the click of a few buttons. Instead of forcing people to pick A or B to delegate to, we have a more fluid form of delegation here.
Functionally, the advanced delegation enables:
- Partial delegation - delegate to multiple addresses
- And redelegation - allow delegates you delegate to, to delegate again or, in turn delegate to multiple addresses.
This will help solve many of the issues brought forth in the forms and community, enabling folks to not only delegate to multiple parties at once, but also allow delegates to “retire” or “pass on the baton” gracefully without reducing the active votable supply or causing that chunk of tokens to be frozen as their tenure ends.
How does advanced delegation work?
All of our code is open-sourced and you can see all the details on: github.com/voteagora/optimism-gov. It’s also been audited by OpenZeppelin.
But here’s the quick summary:
- First, you delegate to your own proxy via a contract called Alligator
- From there, you are able to set allowances for others to receive voting power and ultimately vote with that power
- This means that your voting power now comes from two places, the standard OP token contract and the advanced delegation voting power via Alligator.
The Governor has been upgraded to accept and count each of these when you vote, and https://vote.optimism.io has been upgraded to handle all of this on the front-end to create a simple and smooth voting experience for everyone.
Once delegated, it will look something like this on your delegate profile page!
When can I get access to advanced delegation?
We launched partial delegation back on December 18th, 2023 to a limited beta group. On January 18th, we had our first voting cycle with advanced delegation and advanced voting. On Feb 8th (today), we plan to expand that group to anyone with over 100,000 OP, with the goal to progressively decentralize and battle test this new functionality over the next several voting periods.
Given how big of a change this is both culturally and technically, we want to make sure that we iron out all of the kinks before releasing to everyone. In fact, during our first round we identified a few edge cases are currently auditing a few changes to Alligator to make it even easier to vote in subsequent rounds.
Rollout plan
| Date | Voting Period | Rollout details |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 18th, 2024 | Voting Cycle #17 | Limited beta group  |
| Feb 8, 2024 | Voting Cycle #18 | Delegates with over 100,000 OP |
| Feb 29, 2024 | Voting Cycle #19 | Delegates with over 10,000 OP |
| ~April 2024 | Delegates with over 1,000 OP | |
| ~May 2024 | Delegates with over 100 OP | |
| ~June 2024 | All remaining delegates |
How to get involved
If you are interested in contributing and willing to fill out bug reports, we’d love your support!
Join the #gov-general on the Optimism Discord and tag @kent or @yitong and we’ll will add you to the beta list. If you’re below the threshold of the rollout plan and still want to participate, we’d love to hear from you as well, just DM us – we have a capacity cap of ~500 for this voting period’s advance delegation usage during this beta/rollout phase, but we love folks willing to help us test and will try to get as many as we can in! 
Please don’t hesitate to DM us or comment here directly. We look forward to bringing this feature to the masses and can’t wait to hear your thoughts and feedback!
Back to building 
Best,
The Agora Team