Over the course of Season 1 and 2, there have been well-documented issues with our voting infrastructure. Eliminating these constraints and moving to an on-chain voting system is a top priority for delegates and something the Foundation has spent much time considering given the need to move to a reliable, future proof alternative. We thank you for your patience.
The Foundation ran a competitive process to select a vendor to fulfill this contract and we are excited to announce that the Foundation has contracted Agora, a Gov Fund grant recipient, to build an on-chain voting MVP for Season 3! In future Seasons, we plan to move to a more transparent and community-led vendor selection process.
While we are excited to see Agoraās MVP up and running for Season 3, several votes will occur between now and then (Special Voting Cycle #9a, Token House badgeholder elections, and Special Voting Cycle #9b.) While we will continue to use Snapshot for these votes, the Foundation may manually count votes in the event of third-party application errors, as specified in the operating manual.
In order to help our last few cycles on Snapshot run as smoothly as possible, we recommend the following:
Voters should avoid using the ābatchā submission option in SAFEās snapshot UI. Snapshot has a known issue where only the last vote in a batch will be recorded.
Anyone whoās experienced issues with Snapshot in the past should consider voting well before the end of a voting period to avoid a last-minute scramble.
If you do experience issues voting with Snapshot, please let the Foundation know as soon as possible by messaging #lavande3900 or bmd#6461 on Discord. Please be ready to provide as much information about the bug or issue as possible, including screenshots, console errors, or block explorer links. Keep in mind that votes will only be manually added to a Snapshot vote when the expected, bug-free outcome is unambiguous (for example, votes that are verifiable on-chain, but which did not propagate to the off-chain Snapshot tool).
This a big day for the forum, and greater Optimism governance.
We are deeply supportive of the transition to an on-chain voting model. While Snapshot is a great tool, chain voting allows for the further decentralization of the ecosystem and signals maturity.
And it seems to welcome more delegates who previously reported problemsā¦
We are excited to see continued development with Agora, using their infrastructure and grant from the Governance Fund to further the OP ecosytem. This a model of continued ROI and value-add.
Hi, Iām Nathan, delegate in Optimism governance and the ecosystem lead at Snapshot. Though as a delegate, I am excited about the Foundationās move to on-chain voting, I find it disappointing that we havenāt been included in that discussion. Snapshot has worked very hard to fix the issues that faced delegates voting with Safes on L2. Today we havenāt seen any reports that such issues were still ongoing except for batch submissions, a known issue, and @millie who is using a forked version of the Safe contract that hasnāt been updated. A lot of the complaints about Snapshot date from late October, prior to our fix.
I am perplexed that we werenāt included in the discussion about building an on-chain voting framework for Optimism. A public request for proposal wouldāve been a fair and transparent way to debate options, and I hope that the Foundation will consider it for such an important step in their development. Creating voting infrastructure that scales is quite complex, and while I wish the best of luck to Agora, I think choosing battle-tested options for such an important matter makes sense.
The transition to on-chain voting is good and necessary, but itās not as clear-cut as it is currently made to be. Without taking into account the logical risks of trustless execution, Snapshot has been focusing for two years on increasing participation and fostering community engagement. If we take the example of Uniswap, which uses Snapshot to perform temperature checks and consensus checks before bringing the matter to a final vote, even though the final vote has a larger impact we see much lower participation numbers. Cost is not a factor here as the uni.vote interface allows voters to cast their vote for free. To take the numbers of the last proposal:
We are also releasing Boost in a few weeks (a bit of an alpha leak here) which will allow communities to reward their users for participating in governance. Boost will be another way to improve participation and decentralization. We are also open to discussing building an on-chain voting solution for Optimism, integrated into Snapshot, that should allow for the best of both worlds. We love Optimism at Snapshot, and weāve always developed our platform as an open-source public good. This alignment with Optimism is something we value immensely, and we hope we can further cooperate on a solution that is on-chain, on Optimism, and committed to the right values.
This is wonderful news, and thank you, @lavande, for bringing it! Many of Optimismās delegates ā including several very large ones such as GFX Labs ā are excited to see what @zcf and the rest of the Agora team can provide.
On-chain voting will ensure a safe, fair, reliable ballot box for decentralized governance. We fully support this goal, and cannot wait to try Agoraās solution as soon as is practicable.
We are really excited to see the transition to On-Chain governance. Weāve been an advocate of Optimism for awhile now, even building RollCall for cross chain governance using Optimism!
We are excited to support Optimism governance on Tally and wanted to see if there is anything we can do to help the Optimism or Agora team and if there is any information we could have access to be sure to support OP Governance on day one.
I love this feature on On-Chain Voting coz every OP supporter are entitled to have a vote!