Oxytocin ( ox.ytocin.eth ) Delegation Thread
(Delegate commitment)
Onchain voting station
I’ve found that Delegate Communication threads are some of the most interesting threads to follow in the forums, as it not only allows me to see the reasoning of other delegates, but the discussion delegates have with other users are also super insightful.
I’m looking to make this delegate communication follow along these lines, and make it not only a noticeboard of my votes , but also a place to discuss the reasoning behind these votes and maybe a bit of metagovernance.
Feel free to join in, and if you enjoy the discussion don’t hesitate to delegate some OP!
In addition to here, due to also being part of the ParaSwap protocol delegates, I will be communicating my thoughts over the ParaSwap Discord, which I recommend to join if you want to chat on how the ParaSwap delegation should vote! ParaSwap
Season 3 - Cycle 10
This is the first cycle that I am actively involved it as a Delegate instead of just a grantee on behalf of ParaSwap, so I apologise if any of this information has been discussed before extensively. I’m separating my thoughts on grants metagovernance (no comments on the grants application themselves as the council is handling those) and the other governance points.
Trends in Growth Experiments
I’ve had a brief look at the grants that have qualified for the Preliminary Review , and I personally find it worrying how most of these plans don’t extend beyond instant rewards for using the application on either Liquidity Mining or LPing their token. I leave this decision to the council of course, but I personally worry on how sustainable these rewards might be to keep users for the long term.
I personally suggest incentivising the allocation of OP for the projects that keep the rewards for actions that are more likely to keep the capital locked in the longer term, or lead to better synergies with the rest of the ecosystem.
One example of this I really liked from this round is Giveth. I’m not very familiar with the project, but them requesting most of their grant to give to other Optimism projects as well as building protocol-owned liquidity feels a lot stickier than instantly claimable rewards.
Bedrock Update
From my understanding, this is the only major vote for non-council non-badgeholder delegates this cycle, and I see little reason not to vote for.
Of course, as somebody less tech based this comes with a massive assumption of trust that Bedrock has all the features described like lower fees. However, the biggest reason to vote for in my opinion is how this sets the foundation for better Fraud Proofs.
I really believe that, after Bedrock, the next Protocol Upgrades should be focussing on deploying decentralised sequencers and fraud proofs as soon as possible. It would also be neat to start brainstorming of ways that OP and the Protocol can be more closely tied together, but that’s not nearly as urgent as the last point.
Onchain Voting Beta and Delegate Centralisation
Gonna keep this one short as this post has already been going for a while, but I’ve submitted my onchain vote on Agora, and here’s some general thoughts on the experience:
- The creation process for the Delegate Commitment page was enjoyable. I like how much easier it is to modify than the legacy version, and how it keeps track of voter stats.
- Voting itself was also fairly painless, the interface is pretty, and I enjoy how easy it is to read the justifications on the page.
- Finally, one big concern for me is the Delegates page. Currently, the only two filters are sorting by number of votes delegated and number of delegations (both giving similar results).
Because of this last point, discoverability of new Delegates has now gone significantly down. Most of the visible votes are delegates which have been here from Season 0, with the most ‘recent’ delegates being from a month after that.
Of course, all of these people are incredible and have earned their top spots, but I worry that with the current system we will be encouraging new people entering the collective to delegate to the top ~20 delegates, snowballing their voting power. This could mean not only a significantly higher burden on those individual delegates, but a more difficult fight for new Delegates to acquire visibility and power. I’d love to discuss with others what ways we could avoid this centralisation, while also leading users to candidates to trustworthy and high-quality Delegates.
Some random ideas that come to mind:
- Allow delegates with more than x% supply to hide their delegation from results. This action could be rewarded in someway to encourage it on active delegates, or could be automatically enforced after a threshold is reached.
- Introduce the option to filter by delegate age (only allow delegates that have voted for either more or less than x months)
- Maybe allow citizen badgeholders to select ‘recommended delegates’ that currently have low delegation, but might be worth highlighting. This is my favourite idea, as it gives a further tie to the bicameral system, makes the selections flexible, and allows some critical curation.