Thanks for providing your perspective as a protocol participating in the program! To address the areas for improvement you cited:
Lack of protocol-significant votes in the Token House:
As you mentioned, this season, protocol delegates only had two votes: one for suspending a delegate and a ratification of the Bedrock upgrade.
The Bedrock Upgrade, and all other Protocol Upgrades, are of critical relevance to the protocols building on Optimism.
Since your concerns seem primarily related to lack of involvement in funding votes, this should be addressed in the upcoming Reflection Period and Season 4, as outlined below.
In this Reflection Period, delegates will be asked to vote on:
- Protocol Delegation Program Renewal
- Intent Budgets (including Grants Council Renewal)
- Inflation Adjustment
- Treasury Appropriations (annual Foundation budget approval)
In Season 4, delegates will be asked to approval rank Proposed Missions, a new mechanism to allocate the Governance Fund.
No significant benefits for protocol delegates outside of idealistic ones:
Since this concern seems to be primarily about incentives, I’d like to clarify that protocols participating in the Protocol Delegation Program were not outright excluded from receiving retroactive delegation rewards. All delegates receiving delegation at >0.25% voting power were eligible. We excluded delegations made by the Foundation in this calculation (so as to not disadvantage other delegates), but you’ll see that both 0x and PoolCollective still qualified for rewards based on their delegation levels excluding Foundation delegations.