[Mission Request] Research and develop a framework to measure potential capture of the Token House

Governance Fund Missions 🏹
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Delegate Mission Request Summary:

Research and develop a framework to identify the potential capture of the Token House in Optimism. The framework should introduce measurable threat levels using at least 5 metrics to signal risk of capture. One use case of this framework would be to identify capture that enables malicious protocol upgrades.

The executing teams should include a detailed recommendation on how this evaluation would be conducted on a regular basis and what the report of this evaluation should look like for it to be consumed by the ACC and the Citizens House.

S6 Intent: Intent 1: Progress towards Decentralization

Proposing Citizen: @LauNaMu @amy

Total grant amount: 90K OP (30K OP to up to 3 applicants)

Should this Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Up to 3 (more than one).

How will this Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

The outcome will develop metrics and potential implementation plans for Citizen House to assess whether protocol upgrades and other proposals should be flagged for veto.

What is required to execute this Mission Request?

Responsibilities:

  1. Applicants must have a record of having previously and successfully conducted governance research.
  2. Transparent Reporting: Regular updates to the community and stakeholders about the progress and impact of the applications.
  3. Collaboration with Governance Bodies: Working closely with Optimism’s governance system for alignment and support.
  4. Sharing learnings on the research and development process.
  5. Ensure that this framework can be implemented.
  6. Applicants must conduct desk and user research that is optimized to specifically serve the Optimism ecosystem.

Expected deliverables:

  1. Research plan and execution roadmap
  2. Document detailing the research findings on how the framework was developed including: assumptions being used, hypothesis being tested and reasoning behind the selection of the chosen metrics.
  3. Document describing the threat levels.
  4. Document on how an evaluation using this framework would be conducted.
  5. Template of the Evaluation Report to be generated for the ACC and the Citizens House.

How should governance participants measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

Milestones:

  1. Submission of the Research Plan
  2. Submission of the metrics being explored for the framework
  3. Submission of the Framework to be used
  4. Implementation roadmap of the developed framework

Metrics:

  • Increase participation in Citizen House veto votes (captured by voting UI)
  • Ease of implementation: framework should allow for it to be applied more than once per season.

Impact:

  • Improvement in the operational process of the ACC to identify and flag capture to the Citizens House
  • Emergence of new strategies to prevent capture of the Token House.

Has anyone other than the proposer contributed to this Mission Request? No

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Measuring the capture or risk of capture of the Token House is really important and I’m generally supportive of work towards this end. I wanted to share a few points of feedback on the specifics of this mission request:

There is a Foundation Mission currently underway to develop a metric of concentration of power of the Collective. Two teams of data scientists are currently working on this:
Optimism Ecosystem Contributions 🔴✨ · GitHub

There is considerable overlap in the outcomes of these mission requests - both are seeking a way to measure the signals that the Token House or governance system as a whole are prone to capture. The primary difference is that the Foundation Mission Request specifies a data-driven approach. There are certainly other valuable methodologies for tackling this problem and I don’t think the existence of a similar Foundation mission is necessarily a reason to not incentivise other research in this space.

However, I do think that there are some things that would make this Mission Request stronger. I think that the suggested OP amount is very high (3x that of the existing Mission Request). It may also be helpful to outline some suggested approaches/methodologies and some ideas for how this framework might be used in practice by the Citizen’s House. One risk I see is that the framework developed under this mission is impractical, too abstract or doesn’t lead to meaningful impact because it isn’t used.

Disclaimer: I work for the Optimism Foundation but comments are my own

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