Fairness doesn’t enter into this. That this is an arbitrary judgment of fairness is probably beside the point.
Let me explain:
I was an early, conspicuous, and hopefully consequential proponent of enfranchising protocols as crucial, often overlooked stakeholders directly shaping Optimism’s ecosystem. I won’t rehash all the arguments I’ve made on this point, but I do want to emphasize two major things.
We want to give protocols votepower because they have unmatched, necessary perspective on the current needs of Optimism from development, strategic, and bizdev standpoints, and because they represent the existing and future developer community’s interests. This is logic similar to why we encourage users to delegate their votepower to others who best reflect their priorities.
Getting the most invested, most plugged-in, and most impactful of these voices involved is good for Optimism, and we want to design this delegation program to maximize that outcome. That’s why we’re doing this in the first place – to make Optimism succeed as an ecosystem and as an organization through active, informed collaboration.
What I haven’t been saying is that protocols or projects are owed votepower simply by deploying on Optimism or being native to Optimism, nor have I been saying that protocols signal more value to governance by operating effectively or providing existing utility to users. Remember that several major protocols are immutable and autonomous – their function doesn’t even require an active team!
So weighting votes by a blunt protocol-level operating metric such as volume or otherwise appealing to the notion of the biggest and best protocols having the biggest voice is missing the entire point of this exercise. Let’s say a bridge protocol deployed everywhere had twice as much volume as all other protocols. What does giving them votepower have to do with why we are giving protocols a vote? What would Optimism possibly have to gain by giving this bridge an outsized voice, and why should we consider them the best representative of developers as a stakeholder class? What opinion can we really expect them to have about where to take Optimism?
Now, where protocols’ effectiveness, operating scale, etc. do become relevant is in grants. A good grant-issuing team would understand the relative strengths of different protocols and know to allocate grants to those protocols.
So if some protocol like that major bridge provides the best means of meeting some objective outlined in a grant, we want to make sure our resources are going toward it more than toward other protocols. That’s when we care about, e.g., whether Uniswap gets more volume than Kyber on a pool.
And guess who we want to help make this determination – and make sure that we’re chasing the right things in general: that’s right, protocols that are heavily involved in the ecosystem, not necessarily those protocols that happen to be the best means to particular ends. An incumbent multichain defi app may be a default option in a nascent ecosystem and a great grantee – but if there’s no active team to attend to Optimism’s development, it simply doesn’t make sense to give them outsized power over it. It’s not like we owe them anything.
Regarding what sorts of criteria to incorporate, I agree with @millie that it’s clearly appropriate to have a multifactorial approach, and I agree with @StrategicReserve that it can, however, be sticky to introduce subjective factors. I don’t have any strong specific recommendations at the moment.
But I do want to remind people what we’re aiming for in doing this and encourage more thinking along these lines. The question to be asking is: “what sorts of measures can we use to identify the most representative, most beneficial, and most impactful voices among the protocols?” Certainly scale is meaningful here, but there’s much more to it than that.
