[Sponsorship Request] Empowering small active delegates

Governance Fund Missions 🏹
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Delegate Mission Request Summary: Delegate unallocated tokens to active but underrepresented delegates for six months, aiming to boost participation from 55% to 80%

S6 Intent 1: Progress Towards Decentralization, Driving Delegation

Proposing Delegate/Citizen: DAOplomats

Total grant amount: 0 OP

Should this Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants? Multiple

How will this Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

According to the Governance dashboard, 38 out of the top 100 delegates are inactive or ghost, representing 23M VP, or 25% of the votable supply. The retro governance incentive program currently incentivizes active delegates in the top 100 but can only target 62% of the delegate base. This leads to a significant portion of the governance power being underutilized, reducing the incentive program’s effectiveness. The high inactivity rate among delegates suggests a need for improved strategies and possibly reevaluating the mechanisms to ensure more comprehensive and active participation.

Incentives have failed to motivate inactive and ghost delegates; at the same time, many delegates in the top 1000 are more active and can increase the participation rate from 55% to much higher if delegated a future votable supply.

To test this hypothesis, we suggest delegating 23M tokens equally between 38 delegates for a period of 6 months. These tokens can either come from the unallocated portion or the Governance portion of the Ecosystem fund and will be delegated to delegates who have been active but are underrepresented and do not receive governance rewards. Other DAOs, such as Uniswap, Arbitrum, Gnosis, and 1inch, also experiment with this approach.

Below is our suggestion for the rubric:

  1. Delegate statement created: 1 point
  2. 70% + voting participation in the last 3 months: 7 points (-1 point for each 10% reduction in voting)
  3. Has contributed to optimism as verified via RPGF, Councils, Citizens, etc: 1 point
  4. Active delegation thread: 1 point
  5. Other bonus criteria only for tie-breaking: 3 points

Process:

  • If approved, we will open a 3-week application period for delegates who are not in the top 100 to apply for the program via a forum thread.
  • Delegates will be ranked based on the points they receive according to the rubric and the tokens already delegated to them.
  • The top 38 delegates will be selected to participate in the program and will receive delegation

What is required to execute this Mission Request?

DAOplomats are responsible for:

  • Open applications
  • Provide feedback and support
  • Work with relevant stakeholders to deliver this mission

How should governance participants measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

Milestones:

  1. Selection of eligible delegates
  2. Tokens delegated

Metrics:

  • #active delegates
  • #active votable supply

Impact:

  • Increase participation rate from 55% to 80%
  • More visibility in the way delegates make decisions, thus helping the proposer to make better decisions.

Has anyone other than the proposer contributed to this Mission Request? If so, who, and what parts of this application did they contribute to? If you sponsored another community member’s idea, please credit them here.

No

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For the benefit of others - this post has been moved to the appropriate post to request sponsorship from the Grants Council

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The top 38 delegates will be selected to participate in the program and will receive delegation

why only 38 ?

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This is a suggestion based on the number of inactive/ghost delegates in the top 100 now. Choosing 38 will allow all 100 delegates to be fully participate. We are open to suggestions for other numbers as well

1 Like
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Thanks, happy to support this.

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Why 23M OP? I do like the idea of giving smaller but active delegates more voice, but this proposal would give them more voting power than long term council contributors like gonna.eth…

2 Likes
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This proposal will penalize most of the current top 100 delegates without huge voting power, since as per this proposal delegates outside the top 100 will get 736,000 voting weight each thus pushing them artificially into the top 50 and many of the current top 100 will be replaced including smaller delegates.

23M split by 38 will give 736,000 voting power to each, this will put all of them in the top 50 by voting power.

Like pointed out, these delegates will replace many regular contributors like Gonna.eth who has only 476k weight and is ranked 40th.

If this proposal is activated, 38 new delegates will suddenly rank above Gonna.eth
Even Grants Council Mission Reviewer members like Jrocki.eth have only 162k OP voting power, they may be completely replaced by these newly picked delegates.
Other Grants Council member Curia have 152k OP who will also suddenly be replaced.

So this is not a good idea for the governance at this stage to artificially pick certain delegates as winners, especially without much study about the long term impact of such proposals.

Also can grants council direct delegation of tokens this way? The proposal has requested 0 grants. Where does the unallocated token come from? Grants Council has 5M OP to give to grants to various projects to build based on the intents, not to delegate the tokens to others.

1 Like
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I would be in favor of an even distribution of OP delegation to active delegates (top 100 or not). This won’t change any of the top 100 delegates, if they are active, but reaching a quorum will be much easier.

We can’t, is not in our mandate.

Striving to grow, yet content outside the top 20, a delicate balance of humble persistence and ambitious motivation.