Executive Summary
Hi I’m Kent, CTO of Agora. Agora is the governance software company contributing to the Optimism token house governor and its frontend at vote.optimism.io. We provide some services to, but do not represent or speak on behalf of, the Optimism Foundation.
This Governor upgrade introduces improvements to the Alligator allowance storage system that enabled partial delegation and sub delegation for OP voters. Since it’s launch in December of 2023, delegates using advanced delegation, especially those who received delegation using absolute and relative amounts, could have ended up with less voting power than they should have had. We identified this and other related cases where recorded votes were preventing correct calculation of voting power, which resulted in the additional tests and the logic refactor being proposed.
If this vote passes, the Optimism foundation will upgrade the governor contract to the new implementation Agora deployed shortly after the end of the veto period.
Motivation
As part of the v2 upgrade of the token housewe shipped in December, we enabled a new feature called “advanced delegation”, which allows token holders to delegate their voting power to multiple delegates without splitting their balance. This facilitates governance participation for large funds, partners and the foundation, who have complex token storage requirements.
This improvement builds on the real world experience of using advanced delegation and Alligator in the wild and covers scenarios that we did not capture during testing, especially situations such as:
A partially delegates to B and C
C partially delegates to D and E
E partially delegates to F
Y partially delegates to W and Z
Z partially delegates to A and F
Without this change, depending on how these votes were partially delegated either via absolute or relative weights, there is a chance that F’s voting power would have been less than it should have been. It’s important to note that this hasn’t happened in production, and this update to make sure it doesn’t.
We identified this and other related cases where recorded votes were preventing correct calculation of voting power, which resulted in the additional tests and the logic refactor being proposed.
Impact to voters:
Delegates with advanced voting power will have a better user experience especially if they find themselves in complex delegation states where some users delegated to them with relative power, and other delegated to them with absolute power.
Note on timing:
We’re aware that delegates were previously asked to vote on another advanced delegation upgrade proposal, so some may be wondering why these updates were not batched. The reason for this is that, due to auditor availability, we could only ship the full scope of changes several weeks after they were completed. Some of the changes included improvements to the voting experience – so we worked out a deal with the audit team to audit that part first so that voters may benefit from that change asap. This current vote is for the rest of the changes.
Specifications
Contract Changed
The Optimism Governor would be changed as part of this upgrade. Please review the pull request here:
The deployed code can be found here: https://optimistic.etherscan.io/address/0xb7b1c8d8cc590b91623f493af3ee8c0a0a282b74. There are no state changes to any governance contracts in this upgrade.
Security Considerations
This change has been audited by Open Zeppelin. There were no issues identified given that it’s a minimal change which doesn’t affect the rest of the contract logic. In the unlikely scenario that we’ll need to make any changes to address issues, we’ll update this thread to inform the community on next steps.
The OpenZeppelin Audit Report is attached here. Password to view is: 1jw2KTKDdJ356UMb
Impact Summary
Agora does not anticipate any downtime due to this upgrade. As of this proposal there is a small number of users with advanced voting power, therefore the potential exposure is minimal.
Action Plan
If approved by governance, the Optimism Foundation admin will set the new implementation of governor proxy at 0xcDF27F107725988f2261Ce2256bDfCdE8B382B10 to new implementation deployed at 0xb7b1c8d8cc590b91623f493af3ee8c0a0a282b74
If a critical security issue is discovered before upgrading, Agora will collaborate with the community to extensively communicate that the upgrade will no longer occur.
Conclusion
This proposal outlines changes to the governor that will allow for more complex delegation states to be achieved by OP voters using the Alligator contract. These improvements have been audited and no issues have been found.