GovNFT and Governance Participation Curriculum

[Michael]

GovNFT Pilot Program

Hi Everyone,

The purpose of this post is to seek feedback on a general curriculum for participation in Optimism Governance.

Specifically, this curriculum will be used to create incentive-based activities for GovNFT holders as part of this grant. The goal is to design a “curriculum” for the best way for new governance participants to engage in meaningful governance activities, which can hopefully be expanded in the future.

What are GovNFTs?
GovNFTs are a general-purpose governance primitive built by the Velodrome team. As many of you know, tokens for builders’ grants have a 1-year lock. Delegations have been made on these locked tokens in the past but require manual work from the foundation to do so. GovNFTs are an audited smart contract that can keep the tokens “locked” while at the same time allowing the builder to fluidly participate in Optimism Governance.

What is this program?
To test this primitive before expanding to the broader set of Optimism builder’s grantees, we are creating a pilot program as outlined in this grant. This pilot program makes available 25K OP to incentivize and reward existing GovNFT holders for valuable participation in Optimism governance. The initial set of users is 200+ users and protocols who have previously earned GovNFTs through previous grants on Velodrome. A series of activities will be assigned a point value. The 25k OP will be distributed among participants in the pilot based on a weighted average of points. The activities and their potential point values are as follows.

This is a draft; the goal is to improve the following based on feedback from the community. If you have any ideas for changing or adding activities, please outline them in this thread.

Incentivized Activities:

Delegation

• Delegate to an active delegate on-chain (3 points)
• Post in a program-specific “delegate selection thread” and answer the following questions on why you chose that delegate (12 points)
  • Example questions
    • What delegate did you choose?
    • Why do you think this is a good delegate?
    • In what ways is this delegate aligned with you?
    • What about their delegate profile/statement do you like?
    • What is this delegate’s voting percentage in the last 10 votes?

Forum Participation

• Make a thoughtful post in our “bi-weekly governance topic thread” (6 points)
  • This thread will be created every two weeks by the GovNFT champion and cover a current topic in governance.
  • The idea is that it is a governance “sandbox” for this pilot to avoid spam in other threads, however, all governance community members are encouraged to participate.
  • “Spam” responses as judged by the GovNFT Champion will have 6 points deducted.
  • The most thoughtful response in each thread, as judged by the GovNFT Champion, will be awarded an additional 20 points.

Community Calls

• Attend a community call (10 points)
• Post in a program-specific GovNFT thread after the call (10 points)

Becoming a Delegate
This path will only be available to those who already have 7,500 OP or more in their GovNFT.

• Tasks:
  • Post a delegate statement (25 points)
  • Delegate to yourself (15 points)
  • Introduce yourself in a community call (25 points)
  • Vote in an election cycle (25 points)

Guiding Principles

Ideally, the activities outlined directly contribute to the governance intents of Season 6 and also Season 5, such as meaningfully driving delegation and distribution of votable supply among a broad set of specific stakeholders, increasing the delegated supply of OP, and increasing the average OP voted per governance proposal.

We explicitly want to disincentivize any low-effort behavior that would reduce the quality of discussion on the forums. For that reason, much of the forum participation outlined above is based on participation in program-specific threads.

We also want to keep in mind the potential for these activities to become a template for new participants in governance. For example, a new builder in the ecosystem may receive a builder’s grant. They can use the activities outlined above as a guide for the best way to get started in governance.

I’m looking forward to your feedback!
Michael

[Jrocki]

Very well thought out activity incentive structure. Not sure if there is much I can add but I will think.

What is the timeline for this?

[Michael]

Finalize and roll out the program in the next few weeks and then 6 months from the grant approval to finish the program (~4.5 months from now).

[jackanorak]

This is great. What I like about this is that it’s not just worked out to encourage more participation among the potential grantees here but also going to lead to some good data gathering for us as we determine what’s going to be important to people who are being thoughtful about their governance participation decisions

[Marcus01]

I would like to know how to get GovNFT, We are currently a top 100 delegate on agora and I don’t know the way to get GovNFT or apply for it at the moment, can anyone tell me?
Thank you