Oxytocin - Delegate Communication Thread

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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.
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To confirm the communications of my previous post, I am voting FOR the Bedrock vote. Again, for me this feels like a mostly symbolic vote, as the code is developed and ready to deploy and there isn’t much a non-tech delegate like me can provide. I support the ideas communicated on the bedrock proposal, and the safety measures seem resilient enough, but that’s about all the input that can be provided.

Regarding the delegate suspension, I have decided it’s best to abstain from this one as I am also representing a protocol, and it feels weird for a DeFi protocol to state their opinion on individual delegates, especially when these are not DeFi related.

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Summarising the last Special Cycle Votes before moving to this cycle’s votes, as I noticed I kept my reasoning in Agora only

Protocol Delegation Programme Renewal : FOR

I previously discussed in the thread my concerns of how the Protocol Delegation programme went on its first cycle, mainly concerning lack of participation and time-related concerns. I have seen a lot more communication to protocols this cycle, which is promising.

Since the programme is set to end this Season, I am interested to see what the next steps for protocol representation are going to be present starting from the next one (if any)

Intents 1/2/3/4 budget proposals - FOR

Not much to add here, the intents all seemed like they could be productive and interesting, with apporpriate budgets defined. Saving my thoughts on how the missions and intents are doing for the Season 4 feedback thread for once the voting cycle is done.

Treasury Appropriation - ABSTAIN

For my complete thoughts, see this post. . I agree with this year’s budget not adding anything more, but completely disagree with having symbolic votes like this on an onchain voting system. Every vote costs gas, and votes like this simply create a lot of wasted gas and time , reducing governance accessibility by a lot.

Grants Council Elections
Finally, I abstained from the Builder’s election for obvious reasons (was a candidate) and voted for my personal candidates for the growth experiments. I believe both of these councils are doing a tremendously good job so far, and are by far one of the strongest council reviewers I have seen in many DAOs. At the time I wrote my nomination some of the previous candidates did not nominate themselves, so I wanted to make sure this system kept running while helping in OP governance. Kudos to everyone working this cycle, especially considering the high volume of applications.

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Mission Intents Roundup

Intent 3 - ABSTAIN

Starting with the most obvious one, I abstained from Intent #3 as I am part of the Thank Optimism alliance. It’s been great working with them so far to figure out how to properly reward Ambassadors, and I look forward to seeing how we can help grow one of the backbones of the collective!

Intent 1

I have voted in favour of all of the missions. To summarise, these are the reasons I thought all of the proposed missions were suitable

  • 4/6 missions requested only between 1 and 5% of the budget for potentially very exciting aims
  • Spearbit and Immunefi might be requesting 100k OP, but it is for bug bounties.
  • For Scry Protocol (the 2nd high-budget proposal), 70k is also gong for bounties and running infrastructure. The remaining 130k might be a lot personally, but due to the one - year lock reliant on the success of the mission I am less ocncerned than in other proposal types.

Intent 4

Intent 4 was the hardest to vote at for me. My final roundup was:

  1. Proposal 4A: Multi-lingual Lesson on Optimism Governance, by Bankless Academy

  2. Proposal 4B: The RetroPGF Podcast

  3. Proposal 4C: Delegate Corner Podcast

  4. Proposal 4I: Velodrome: Fostering Inclusive Governance through Leading Optimism Builders and Long-term Users

  5. Proposal 4K: OP Governance Analytics Dashboard

  6. Proposal 4L: OPdelegate.com

  7. Proposal 4M: NumbaNERD Program

  8. Proposal 4N: Facilitate and empower community members to actively engage in governance through an educational course

These, in my opinion, are the missions that align the most with the Intent of Governance Accessibility. From the Collective Intents:

Governance accessibility includes enbaling a diversity of perspectives to participate in governance, facilitating better knowledge sharing to develop more informed voters, and lowering barriers to participation for more culturally diverse involvement in the governance process. Increasing the votable supply and reducing the concentration of voting power should be important bi-products of improved accessibility.

There were other very exciting proposals, but I think that they relate to the above Intent only indirectly. This is not to say that I do not endorse those proposals, but simply that we need to ensure that missions adhere to the intents.

Finally, I have shared some feedback about Agora’s current vote lock feature, and how I believe this should feature needs to be re-explored.

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Protocol Delegate Programme Update - Please Re-Delegate!

As many know, this Season marks the end of the current version of the Protocol Delegation Programme. As one of the delegates participating on this, it was a great experience seeing so many protocols share their thoughts on governance, and is something that I really hope we start seeing happen more in DAOs in the future.

Going forward, I will continue to vote using the ParaSwap delegate profile to make sure all the delegated addresses still have a say, but I’m going to start using my Personal Delegate Profileto voice opinions that might not be relevant to representing a protocol, such as supporting missions or the future of Optimism, while abstaining from this wallet on votes that ParaSwap should not necessarily have an opinion in.

You can delegate your OP if you want to HERE!

Special Cycle - 16a Communications

While both of these votes look like are going to pass, I would like to share my thoughts on the reasoning behind some of my votes:

  • Budget Votes (Code of Conduct/Grants Council/Developer Board): FOR. The Grants Council has been performing greatly from what I see, and I think both the Developer Board and CoC Council to be interesting experiments worth implementing in the Token House.
  • CoC Violation: While the Code of Conduct is not fuly fledged out yet, this vote shows the importance of having a token-delegate vote for every one of these. The lack of evidence (for obvious reasons) makes it very difficult to asses the validity of the claims.
  • Developer Advisory Board Members: Abstaining as I am not familiar with the board members.
  • Anticapture Commission: Against. I was initially going to vote for it , but @GFXlabs raised some very compelling points which made me re-examine the need for such a commission. Most of the major responsibilities seem to be mostly organisational (attending office hours, providing approvals, receive a delegation), but if the idea is to have a symbolic entity hoping for higher delegate participation and coordination, why do we have to put this to a vote? See my previous thoughts on the Treasury Appropriation Vote . I personally really dislike these votes that are mostly symbolic rubberstamping, and would like to see these kinds of votes be less present as long as we don’t have fully gasless voting for these.

Season 5 Misc Thoughts

Finally , I wanted to share some general thoughts on a few changes for Season 5, especially regarding the new Missions (exciting!) and Chain Delegation. I’ll probably edit this post once I share my thoughts on these, so keep an eye out :eyes:

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Glad to see you will stay active as a delegate following the Protocol Delegation Program <3

On the anticapture commission - I just want to clarify that the vote is not symbolic, the vote is to delegate 10M OP from the Governance Fund to the members of the commission for Season 5 and Season 6.

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Sorry, completely missed that somehow! Too late to amend the vote now, but that starts adding more weight, I’ve now caught up with @kaereste 's comments and fully agree that in that case the delegation amount should be much higher, they suggested 30M, but I would suggest an adjusted amount per season equivalent to the ~top 10 delegates (will share my thoughts there as well now)

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A few QoL updates to prepare ahead of Season 6

  • I have set an ENS for easier recognition, currenlty using vote.ytocin.eth (though open for other suggestions!). For other delegates using Safe to vote, have a look at SmolDapp , it allowed me to clone my Safe to mainnet and other L2s, finally letting me have an ENS linked.
  • I have also updated my delegate profile to go along with the new ENS. Once again, I would like to thank everyone that has deelgated to me, and would like to invite any of my delegators to reach out whenever they have any doubts about governance or any particular votes!

I have left the reasoning of most of my votes directly on Agora, as most of these were ratifications or budget amendments.

Code of Conduct Council Season 5 Participation

Season 5 was the first time that I have participated in one of the Token House councils. I decided to nominate myself for the Code of Conduct council since most of the nominations were not active delegates, which could easily lead to lack of context within council members.

My initial impressions of this Council are those of difficulty enforcing within the niche they were granted power to operate in. Most of the most serious reports would involve incidents that happened outside the operating scope of the council, like in other DAOs, Citizens House, or Earlier Seasons. This lead to frustration from both within and without, as reportees would feel inaction and the Council would wonder how far they can operate.

Despite this, I still believe that the Code of Conduct council is an important addition to the Token House . The main reason for this is action accountability. When thinking about alternative enforcement methods for the Code of Conduct, all of them involve either passing the decision making to an entity that the Token House has no direct control over or subjecting the token houses to vote. I believe the latest rescoping to be a good iteration, and look forward to see how these changes make the council evolve.