Hello Collective, here is the Anticapture Commission’s Retrospective for Season 6.
Reference: Season 6 - Anticapture Commission Amendment
1. What is your assessment of the impact KPIs that were set in your Budget Proposal at the start of the Season?
Have you made progress towards, or achieved, these milestones or KPIs?
If not, why?
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Goal: Vote on all proposals that are subject to a Citizens’ House veto.
Assessment: During the season, the ACC utilized the 10 million OP tokens delegated to the Commission’s multisig, and voted on all proposals that were subject to a Citizens’ House veto. While casting the vote, the members of the ACC did not flag any instances of capture as a result of these governance proposals, that would put the governance at risk of capture to the benefit of any one individual or group. -
Goal: Provide alerts to the Citizens’ House when capture occurs in the token house or during any proposal.
Assessment: During the Season, the ACC did not receive any concern flagged by any member of the community indicating that a capture is likely to occur in the Token House governance. During the governance proposals of the Season, there were no instances where a risk was identified of any entity or group capturing governance.
Apart from any flagged concerns, the ACC was active in discussing governance proposals that would eventually require the Citizen’s House inputs. One such proposal was the Accelerated Decentralization Proposal For Optimism, and the ACC initiated a discussion on this proposal with member Delegates, as well as the Foundation and the author of the proposal GFX labs.
Additional and Aligned Goals:
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Goal: Increase votable supply - The ACC does not have a budget proposal, however one of the identified goals of the ACC was to increase the votable supply.
Assessment: Since the Start of S6, the votable supply has increased by 18.5%, from 89.4m OP to 106m OP. This represents that the ACC has been able to achieve its KPI goal in terms of increased votable supply. -
Goal: Advocate for the continued decentralization
Assessment: The ACC initiated calls and discussions on furthering decentralization of various elements of Optimism. One suggestion was to have have additional voting UI/portals, so that the voting interface isn’t entirely dependent on Agora.
2. Impact assessment - how well did your team’s outputs support the Intent they were authorized under?
The ACC’s charter is to identify points of capture across the ecosystem, and utilize the OP delegated to the ACC to prevent the capture of Token Housetoken house by any one entity or group. To this extent, the output of the ACC’s members was able to support the overriding goals and charter of the ACC.
Utilizing the OP tokens delegated to the ACC’s Multisig, the ACC voted on the Granite Network Upgrade Proposal and the Governor Update Proposal #3: Enable Onchain Treasury Execution, as these were the proposals in this Season of governance that were Subject to a Citizen’s House Veto, involving protocol and governance contract upgrades.
3. What are the major problems you ran into over the course of the Season?
During the Granite Network Upgrade, the members of ACC had flagged technical concerns with the way the proposal had been initiated, with the fallback mechanism being activated to disable fraud proofs. The Delegate members of ACC provided a suggestion to minimize such risks during network upgrade proposals. Although this did not involve a capture of the Token House, it was felt that the sudden introduction of the fall back mechanism could potentially lead to an attack or an incident, resulting in a compromise to the integrity of the network and requiring emergency remedial actions by the Security Council.
During the season, ACC members also reported issues with the Agora voting portal, which were then outlined to the Agora team and subsequently resolved. Among the suggestions made to Agora was to allow voting delegates a brief period to change their cast votes if they notice an error, thereby providing an option for Delegates to revise or override their vote in cases of erroneous vote or UI malfunction.
4. What are possible solutions that could be explored next Season?
Some of the solutions that could be explored next season are:
- Apart from the current goals, the ACC could additionally help with the Milestone based Decentralization Model proposed by Foundation by being responsible to evaluate progress of decentralization across the layer and ensuring the various decentralization objectives are met. Also, the ACC can play a role in shepherding Phase II & Phase III, as outlined in the Accelerating Decentralization Proposal.
- Since the ACC serves as a system of checks and balances during critical situations that require Delegates to act on an emergency basis, if ACC members repeatedly abstain from voting on multiple proposals, a reprimand could be considered.
- If governance bandwidth permits, a dry-run for a capture situation could be experimented with.
5. What improvements to the team’s mandate would you suggest for next Season?If you don’t believe the team’s operations should continue next Season, please explain why here.
I recommend continuing the ACC for the next Season, with the similar identified goals of preventing capture in governance. The ACC given its limited scope, will likely continue to be a minimized governance meta-structure that can step in during emergency situations where there is a risk of capture in the Token House.
Thank you to all Delegate Members of the ACC for their contributions, Members of the Foundation, and especially to Brichis and Max for their guidance throughout the Season.
- Web3magnetic.eth, ACC Season 6 Lead.