Request for Information - Recent Upgrades to Governor Contract

🏛 Token House Governance
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As the Lead of the Anticapture Commission, I wish to start by stating that this message aims solely to gather information and enhance transparency.

In our inaugural Office Hours, several Anticapture Commission members expressed concerns regarding the recent upgrades to the Optimism Governor contract. While we acknowledge and appreciate Agora’s significant contributions to the governance infrastructure of the Optimism Collective, this message is intended to facilitate open dialogue about our concerns, specifically focusing on areas where communication could be improved. Key concerns include:

  1. The upgrade has resulted in functional issues on various analytics websites, excluding Agora. Currently, Agora is the sole platform displaying accurate voting power data. Other platforms like Tally, Dune dashboards (including the official Optimism Foundation dashboard), Boardroom, Curia, Opdelegate, and Rotki have some features broken.
  2. The requirement of signing twice for voting, was unexpected for the community members.
  3. While discussions are ongoing about getting data through an API run by Agora, in the spirit of decentralization (Intent #1), this data should be easily accessible from neutral on-chain sources.

As engaged community members, we request more involvement in decision-making processes, particularly those involving significant upgrades that impact multiple stakeholders within the Collective. We suggest implementing a notification system or a more inclusive approach to these updates.

Regarding our journey towards greater decentralization and focusing on Governance, what are the steps needed to turn over ownership of the governance contract to OP governance itself? We are eager to participate actively in these decisions. As part of an experiment enhancing coordination among high-context delegates, we seek clarity on how this process might unfold and the subsequent steps.

We look forward to a constructive and transparent dialogue to address these concerns and collaboratively work towards refining our governance processes. Thank you! :sparkles:

cc. @zcf @lavande

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Hey @brichis, appreciate you flagging this. Also tagging @GFXlabs, who brought this up with us as well.

First, I want to first express that this was a miss on our part. We’ve been heads down building and have not done a good job of communicating with the broader community and especially developers who are building on top of the Optimism Governor.

We had originally been updating the Github thread, but realize that that’s definitely not sufficient for comms.

As for the decentralization roadmap, I will leave that for the Foundation. However, as one of the governance builders in the Optimism Ecosystem, this is a great call out on our communications and update cadence.

Context for this upgrade

Sharing more about this change: this upgrade has been the most recent in a series of planned upgrades we’ve been making to the token house governor. The original RFP was posted in May 2023. It introduces:

  1. Upgrades to approval threshold and quorum to support a growing number of proposal types
  2. Optimistic proposals, the first of which was just completed.
  3. And crucially upgrades to make delegation much more powerful: enabling partial delegation and re-delegation.

You can find the code here along with documentation, and an audit report by Open Zeppelin.

For devs integrating with the governor and wanting to display delegation data – check out the documentation here. To be clear: you don’t need an API to consume this data. We’re working on an API because the delegation functionality is significantly more powerful now – and want to help any dev integrate it’s functionality without integrating directly with the contract. If you’re already familiar with pulling data from contracts, you can get everything you need directly onchain today.

That being said, we’re fully aware that because we didn’t provide the community a heads up, devs had no time to integrate the new contract – leading to broken community tooling. We’re very sorry about this :man_bowing:t2:

Our commitment to clear communication going forward

We want to continue supporting the vibrant ecosystem in Optimism and are excited to continue building for Optimism governance. If any other suggestions around how best to keep folks in the loop, we’d love to hear them. I think to start off, we’re thinking of 4 action items:

  1. We are working with ecosystem builders right now to help them integrate the new delegation functionality. If we’ve missed anyone, please feel free to reach out.
  2. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing a longer write up on the rationale behind this upgrade and more technical documentation to further provide context to the community
  3. We will be regularly providing updates on this forum, on Discord, and in our changelog about upcoming changes and communicating major changes to the governor and interface of governance.
  4. Whenever there’s a governor upgrade, we will give as much advance notice as possible to builders, and provide support as they integrate the new version

We’re incredibly excited to keep contributing to the Optimism governance roadmap alongside this amazing community. We would love to discuss these future changes together and look forward to getting more of the community participating in governance as we build this together! :red_circle::sparkles:

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Hi ACC! First of all, it’s really encouraging to see the ACC actively engaging and holding all stakeholders of the Collective accountable :heart:

I believe Agora has addressed the concerns regarding communications on their side above and we’ve committed to coordinating with them on more proactive delegate communications going forward. We will address the questions (paraphrased) specifically for the Foundation below.

[We request a more] inclusive approach to…significant upgrades that impact multiple stakeholders within the Collective.

Agreed! We are committed to putting any future governance contract upgrades through the protocol upgrade governance process. However, we believe proposal rights related to changes to the governance contract should continue to sit with the Foundation until the protocol and voting processes are more battle tested, and we view reaching stage 2 decentralization as the right target date for that.

[We want to understand] the steps needed to turn over ownership of the governance contract to OP governance… [and] seek clarity on how this process might unfold and the subsequent steps.

Any future governance contract changes will now go through governance, so this question really becomes “when will the proposal process for this type of upgrade will be permissionless?” We agree that it’s important to get there, but this timeline is based on several factors including the votable supply, the maturity of the Security Council, and the capture resistance of the overall system.

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Hey folks! Dennison from Tally here. We’re excited about these updates and we’re reviewing this governance upgrade and scoping in what way Tally could potentially support it to maximise value and impact for the community

We believe in a multi-client approach to governance tooling in which many teams and providers can add value to the ecosystem. With that in mind, I have a couple of suggestions that I think would help Tally and potentially other teams increase our positive impact on the Optimism Collective.

It would be helpful to have a public roadmap and public development process in place for Optimism governance contracts. This would help us get ahead of the ball in terms of support for future contract upgrades. It would also help us architect Tally in a way that is compatible with the future direction of Optimism governance. We find that public roadmaps for critical software is incredibly helpful and can help give certainty for teams that the solutions they implement will be useful and relevant for a meaningful amount of time.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to propose a working group for Optimism governance tooling providers. We are interested in collaborating with the Foundation, Agora, and other teams to identify the areas where everyone can maximize their positive impact on the Optimism Collective.

In addition to improving coordination around support for governance contracts upgrades, we think a working group would help us identify new opportunities to support the Optimism community.

Financially, while Tally is fortunate to be a RGPF recipient, not all other front ends and tools in the ecosystem are in the same place. We think it would be appropriate to establish some funding for the working group to support teams who need it to continue building for the Collective to ensure that teams have resources to support the vision and ambition of Optimism

Dennison

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