Project name: Karma Delegate Registry
Author name and contact info (please provide a reliable point of contact for the project): Mahesh Murthy, mahesh@karmahq.xyz
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes
I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: Yes
L2 recipient address: 0x627f84bb4bBA3333f253F09fe22A445F195bCF34
Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 10
Which sub-committee should review your proposal? (Builders Grants, Growth Experiment Grants): Builders Grants
Project description (please explain how your project works):
Problem:
A number of DAOs have started utilizing delegation to improve governance and solve the problem of voter apathy. There are a number of teams including us at Karma who have built interfaces to make it easy for token holders to find a suitable delegate based on various criteria and delegate their tokens. However, after working on this for over a year, we have seen a number of challenges with how the delegation systems work today.
1. When a delegate wants to move on, there is no way for them to withdraw their nomination. None of the contracts support withdrawal functionality.
2. There is no good place to look up a delegate’s interests and skills, it’s either non-existent or locked in centralized databases.
3. Today, delegates post their commitment message on the forum and everyone has to scrape that info and display it in their systems. There is no global shared place where this data is stored.
4. Delegates can receive attestations from other delegates and DAO core teams but these are not stored in a centralized place for all the UIs to interpret and display.
5. There is no way for delegates to broadcast a message and for all the frontend interfaces to listen to their message.
Solution:
We would like to build a DAO delegate registry on Optimism network to store the following
about each Delegate mapped to the DAO they belong to
1. Delegate address
2. Delegate interests
3. Delegate statement (not on IPFS but store the entire blob of text on-chain possibly)
4. Delegate status (active, withdrawn, recognized etc.)
All of this information would be written to the chain by delegates themselves. We are exploring two ways to accomplish this.
Gasless execution: The user simply signs a message and we store it on-chain on behalf of them. This will be low friction and the user doesn’t need to have OP tokens to interact.
Standard execution: This user has to execute transactions themselves and will need OP tokens.
By building a global registry, various teams in the ecosystem can utilize this data on a decentralized store and display it in their interfaces. By putting the registry on blockchain, it will always be accessible, will become a single source of truth, make delegations efficient and will open up more innovation. The registry can be used for discovering delegates, integrate with different types of on-chain voting systems and so on.
Website: www.karmahq.xyz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/karmahq_
Discord/Discourse/Community: Karma
Other relevant links (including any demos):
Additional team member info (please link): Kathleen Olstedt - https://twitter.com/KatOlstedt
Andre Mury - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andremury/
Arthur Ulhoa - https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurulhoa/
Amaury Magalhaes - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaurymagalhaes/
Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to: We built and have been managing Optimism delegate dashboard for few months: https://optimism.karmahq.xyz/
We built and manage Gitcoin dashboard - https://daostewards.xyz/
We have built similar dashboards for Element Finance, dYdX, AAVE and many others.
Relevant usage metrics (TVL, transactions, volume, unique addresses, etc. Optimism metrics preferred; please link to public sources such as Dune Analytics, etc.): We have around 100,000 governance participants in our dashboard spanning 55 DAOs. It’s all sitting in our database. One of the goals of this project is starting moving all this data on to the Optimism network.
Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link): https://deepdao.io/, https://boardroom.io/, Nouns Agora
Is/will this project be open sourced?: Yes
Optimism native?: Yes
Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: 3/15/2023
What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?: DAO delegate information is spread across different centralized databases and there is no global, decentralized registry everyone can rely on.
How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?: By building a global registry, various teams in the ecosystem can utilize this data on a decentralized store and display it in their interfaces. By putting the registry on blockchain, it will always be accessible, will become a single source of truth, make delegations efficient and will open up more innovation. The registry can be used for discovering delegates, integrate with different types of on-chain voting systems and so on.
Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?: DAOs who opt-in to this solution will have all their delegates interacting with the Optimism network to register and manage their information. As we onboard more DAOs, the number of delegates interacting with the Optimism network grows. We have plans to extend this functionality to many more usecases and this will result in sustained growth of the Optimism network.
Has your project previously applied for an OP grant?: Yes, here is the link to the proposal [READY][GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Karma discourse forum plugin. We successfully built the dashboard and have been maintaining it and have even added additional features to the dashboard. We even started an accountability thread on the forum here Karma - Grantee accountability+feedback thread to hold ourselves accountable.
Number of OP tokens requested: 50,000
Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No
If OP tokens were requested from the Foundation Partner Fund, what was the amount?: N/A
How much will your project match in co-incentives? (not required but recommended, when applicable): N/A
How will the OP tokens be distributed? (please include % allocated to different initiatives such as user rewards/marketing/liquidity mining. Please also include a justification as to why each of these initiatives align with the problem statement this proposal is solving.): OP tokens will primarily be used for 2 purposes
1. Cover the gas cost - 50% of tokens will be used for gasless execution (if we do decide on gasless route) or compensate delegates for executing transactions.
2. Team - 50% of the tokens will be used to compensate our team. We will not sell the tokens for a year per the agreement.
We have already listed all the benefits of having a global shared registry. The biggest friction is in getting users to acquire tokens and use it for transactions. Rewarding users with OP tokens for using the system is not scalable and is short term and unsustainable solution. Instead, we will strive to have gasless execution or retroactively compensate for the transactions the delegates perform on-chain.
This is a major undertaking and we would like the remaining 50% of the tokens to be used to compensate our team.
Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative? Shorter timelines are preferable to longer timelines. Shorter timelines (on the order of weeks) allow teams to quickly demonstrate achievement of milestones, better facilitating additional grants via subsequent proposals: We plan to use the tokens over a period of 2 months which will give us enough time to determine how the initiative is working.
Please clearly define the milestones you expect to achieve in order to receive milestone based installments. Please consider how each milestone relates to incentivizing sustainable usage and liquidity on Optimism. Progress towards each milestone must be trackable: Milestone 1: 2 months to build and launch the product
Milestone 2: 2 months of running the registry and getting delegates to sign up. We will continue to enhance the product over this 2 months based on our learnings.
Why will incentivized users and liquidity on Optimism remain after incentives dry up?: We don’t plan to incentivize users directly.
Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability (smart contracts addresses relevant to the proposal, relevant organizational wallet addresses, etc.): Organization wallet address: 0x627f84bb4bBA3333f253F09fe22A445F195bCF34
Confirm you have read and agree to the Eligibility Restrictions (here): I have read the Eligibility Restrictions and agree to abide by their conditions
