[READY] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Boardroom

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions Governance Fund: Phase 1
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Project Name: Boardroom

Author Name: Michael at Boardroom

Number of OP tokens requested: 100,000 OP

L2 Recipient Address: 0xF6a4475a006b28b9996c92bEE27DEEDc38032cDe

Relevant Usage Metrics:

  • Boardroom Deployment on Optimism: June 20, 2022
    • Boardroom formally deployed on Optimism on June 20th, we will be announcing the integration week-after-next, and would ideally like to announce in conjunction with the initiative outlined below
  • Votes on Optimism through Boardroom: 74
  • Unique Voters on Optimism through Boardroom: 22

Optimism alignment:

Boardroom is pursuing a mission to increase delegate engagement and participation in our partner DAOs’ governance processes. Optimism Governance is now live on Boardroom.io - a dashboard built to drive greater governance and delegation engagement and improve Delegate’s overall voting and management experience.

  • OP tokenholders can now track, analyze, and vote on proposals through the Optimism Governance Page for free, forever
  • Delegates can now manage their upcoming governance votes, sign up for notifications, and track their activity through their personal Dashboard
  • Delegators can now search, filter, and delegate their voting power using the Delegate Discovery page
    • Delegates can create profiles, post delegation pitches, and display their vote and proposal history across 170+ DAOs

Proposal for token distribution:

A significant pain point for protocol decentralization is lack of governance engagement and more importantly, a lack of accountability for decision-makers. Delegation enables less-engaged Optimism community members to participate in governance via an active governor that represents their interests. This governance-via-proxy enables stakeholders to be represented without following a protocol’s governance minutiae, but it’s important that the small specialized minority of Delegates be transparent and accountable to the broader community.

Boardroom Delegate Discovery enables OP holders to track, research, and delegate to Optimism delegates. The Delegate Discovery page allows OP holders to easily find a delegate that matches and aligns with their interests:

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Optimism Delegate Discovery (Card View)

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Optimism Delegate Discovery (List View)

How will the OP tokens be distributed?

  • 80% of tokens will be distributed to OP holders that delegate or re-delegate their voting power through the Optimism Delegate Discovery page to drive awareness of delegate profiles, stats, and reputation, and increase engagement with Optimism governance.
  • 20% of the tokens will be used to subsidize the cost of an analyst to maintain Optimism delegate pages and pitches, as well as adjacent and relevant information about the project on the Optimism Project Page.

How will this distribution incentivize usage and liquidity on Optimism?

GOAL: Increase governance participation and re-delegation activity

Delegation enables broader tokenholder representation in DAO governance. The token distribution will be used to incentivize delegation of voting power through the Boardroom dashboard natively on Optimism, and introduce current Boardroom users to Optimism Governance.

Why will the incentivized users and liquidity remain after incentives dry up?

Boardroom Delegate Discovery surface governance activities that are vital for tokenholder governance participation. Once engaged and familiarized with our products, Optimism tokenholders will continue to rely on Boardroom to vote, redelegate, and stay informed.

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed?

We do not intend to set a hard timeline for $OP distribution. Instead, we plan to understand the utilization rate of the delegation rewards during the first week of deployment on Optimism, and re-assess the distribution strategy.

Starting the week we receive the funding, we will be distributing a set number of tokens to unique addresses that delegate or re-delegate a minimum of 271 OP tokens, so long as the tokens haven’t moved wallets since the start of the campaign. Based on utilization from this week, we will have clearer guidance on the full distribution timeline.

How much will your project match in co-incentives?

We will not be able to provide co-incentives as Boardroom does not have a token

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I do believe we can use already existing tool for delegate or re-delegate. Optimism Gateway .

Also, I have seen that team is quite active on discord helping users with their queries along with sharing knowledge article from their twitter handle.

Dont have the link ready, but I believe OP Team is also working on creating a dashboard where we do the delegate or re-delegate.

With all that, I would like to see these fund used somewhere else.

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Boardroom does a lot more than just provide a FE for delegating. In addition to that, they provide value as a common place where folks can find communities that align with their interest or unique cases. Would be good to help Boardroom get involved in the Optimism ecosystem I think. It is a very strong project with a great development team.

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I agree, there are couple of others things that we can do on your platform.

There are two main ways to help grow OP ecosystem, new users and/or liquidity. Liquidity we can measure by TVL and new users we can validate by new addresses on that chain.

Now, I believe this proposal is towards user on-boarding, which I have mentioned could be done on many other places.

And related to other function of your application, they are really cool but it does not require interaction with the chain, all we need is a wallet and i can use your platform, on any chain. Does this explanation help ?

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I’m sorry but this is wrong. TVL and users are the by-product of something (metrics showing demand for products/services/networks/apps/whatever). If we don’t have interesting products and services to help and/or provide revenue to users there’s no way to grow. We can’t just focus on what brings more active users on the network since there’s plenty of quite relevant services that don’t provide any on-chain activity but they are very important for the whole ecosystem.

Using an extreme example, gov.optimism.io and Snapshot are currently quite relevant for Optimism future/growth but they provide zero on-chain activity (at least using this metrics they would be rated useless tools).

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You have made some really good point and I really like this way of thinking.

Each statement in your comment encourage discussion which I am reading after long time so let me explain my side as well.
We all the different way to measure a proposal, liquidity, user on-boarding, co-incentives, project team and so on, some give value of one point than others. I can only share my side here, at this stage I am mostly focused on; whether proposal might be able to bring on-chain activity, liquidity, co-incentives or and a new innovative product and I see this proposal missing couple of them. Of course, ignoring co-incentives factor as this project does have a token which is just fine.

I hope this give you some insights on my decision.

One question suggestion which others might ask,

  1. 80% will be distributed to users using the platform to delegate or re-delegate, how are they planning to stop the miss use of this, one transaction will cost $0.10-0.20 and reward for each change would be 271 OP. You see, its easy for me just run a script and keep calling the smart contract or even automate the UI. $0.20 to spend and $100 as reward. Is there any limit how many time a user can do this ?
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I guess the answer is:

To be fair, I assume people may not even get rewards more than once (who knows for sure since rules can change over time). Anyway, 80k OP for this main goal, doesn’t look so bad to me:

That said, I always delegate to myself so I’m not even a candidate user or delegate for this platform/service but It can be something interesting to explore. Not exactly sure, what I’m sure is that we need to be careful with metrics and the meaning they have. Not everything relevant to a network happens on-chain, much of the off-chain participation/activity can be as much (or more) relevant.

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After trying it out, Boardroom is a good UX. In some ways, it simply duplicates existing functions, but it’s also decentralizing in some regard by doing that. At the end of the day, however, providing access to the OP forum, delegation, voting, delegates and their voting record, and the governance calendar is simply a low-friction experience. Our experience with governance across many venues is that anything that lowers the bandwidth required to collect information or interact with a DAO, the better.

The request is quite modest at 100,000 OP, and the funds are largely earmarked to reward those who participate in governance.

As a delegate, we would like to see this proposal advance to a vote when the applicants are ready.

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Thanks all for the comments thus far. Addressing concerns flagged, below:

The Optimism Gateway is a fantastic tool, and while the basic functionality of surfacing delegates is similar between the two, there are a few differences where Boardroom Delegate Discovery adds values.

  1. Delegate Discovery users can view delegate voter and proposal history (as well as view delegate pitches), Optimism Gateway only surfaces a delegate pitch, but doesn’t seem to show any on- or off-chain governance history to help contextualize a delegate’s decision making
  2. Delegate Discovery users can explore a delegate’s governance decisions on other protocols to inform their decisions (roughly half of the top 20 OP delegates by voting power are also active delegates in other protocols or chains)

Outside of delegation, the dashboard interacts onchain to allow wallet-connected users to vote on proposals, which is why we currently only have DAOs on ETH and Optimism integrated at the moment, as these are the only chains we support.

We plan to prevent misuse of the incentive by ensuring that a minimum of 271 OP tokens from a unique address are re/delegated to be eligible for the distribution, as long as the tokens haven’t been moved wallets since the start of the campaign.

The exploit you outlined above would not be feasible because a unique address could only receive the distribution once. If the exploit above was slightly modified so that a user tried to move funds to a new wallet and then redelegate, they would also not receive a distribution either because only tokens “that have not moved wallets since the start of the campaign” are eligible.

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This is a big overlook on my side, I misread this sentence initially when reading proposal and made the comment. Apologies. I only realize my mistake after reading your explanation, so thank you for that.

as long as the tokens haven’t been moved wallets since the start of the campaign.

Could you please help me with line? why only to those addresses that havent moved yet ? What would be a problem if you allow everyone ? like any new user buying token from market and delegate it ?

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just realized, do know perhaps how many addresses are there where token havent moved yet, this is just for my knowledge.

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I can’t speak to the quality of the final implementation, but in principle it seems like a straightforwardly good thing to incentivize broader participation in governance. Think this is absolutely worth a look.

@MichaelAtBoardroom - why do you need 20k for an analyst to maintain these pages, though? Relatively speaking this seems like a modest amount, just trying to get a sense of what the requirements here are.

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We are solving for users potentially sybil-ing the distribution (e.g. users moving their OP to new wallets, to redelegate and claim the reward). By only allowing addresses that have not moved tokens during the campaign, we prevent this type of exploit. Happy to incorporate a different mechanism if you have any suggestions!

Of course, thanks for the question. The analyst will be scraping delegate pitches from forums, maintaining and QAing profiles, getting in touch with large delegates to ensure profile accuracy, and creating content on Optimism governance and delegation to feature alongside the Delegate Discovery page.

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couldn’t agree more with this, the incentives are very reasonable and will get more users involved in governance. Having everything in one spot is also very convenient. props to boardroom team for building this out for free.

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Thanks for sharing your proposal. I tried using Boardroom and personally found it to have really useful info and think this would be useful for the Optimism community. I signed up for email notifications as well which is a feature I’m glad to see. My own feedback on the product is the pages load really slowly for me so would love to see some optimizations there.

I’ll be voting yes on this proposal. I think the amount requested is reasonable, I’m not sure I believe that 80% of tokens should be distributed to holders delegating or re-delegating but I agree that it would be good to make users more aware of delegate profiles, stats, and engagement. I hope though that there are some basic fraud efforts in place to catch anyone who is farming these tokens even right before the campaign starts (since this post is now public) by creating many addresses and delegating from them.

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Penn Blockchain uses Boardroom quite often to view and understand the delegate landscape for protocols like Uniswap where it’s not as transparent on the native UI. Boardroom helps us understand who the major delegates are and how they’ve voted.

Seeing some of the other protocols requesting grants, we think the 100k, 80% of which is for delegate incentives is something definitely worth approving. It’s basically another 80k OP airdrop for users who had an airdrop beforehand.

And finally, Boardroom is one of the few protocols in the governance space that have reached out and been very communicative with us internally. (wya @ Tally, @ Commonwealth, @ Messari Governor :eyes:)

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Voted:- Yes

Reason:-

  1. We do need such platform, I am not sure if OP team is building such platform or but we cant just wait for them.
  2. Token allocation is good, I was concerned about users misusing the incentives but reading this

We are solving for users potentially sybil-ing the distribution (e.g. users moving their OP to new wallets, to redelegate and claim the reward). By only allowing addresses that have not moved tokens during the campaign, we prevent this type of exploit. Happy to incorporate a different mechanism if you have any suggestions!

team has a good plan.

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Is there a good place to see the undelegated vs delegated mix of tokens over time? I’m curious how much of an issue this is at this point in time. I would expect most token holders this early in the Optimism story are pretty leaned in and on top of delegating.

That said, I do broadly think that curating the delegate ecosystem and amplifying good actor delegate voices which may not have a lot of disposable capital is a noble cause the Optimism community will benefit from long term.

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Voted yes - This is a useful governance tool and I’m a big fan of delegation incentives, the amount requested is also very reasonable. Love to see this, thank you for the great proposal!

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Vot yes, thank you for your proposal