DAO Discussion: Vote Buying Services

General
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Thanks for facilitating this discussion. Our two cents on Lobbyfi and voting-as-a-service. I think there’s two main questions:

Can we get bad outcomes having vote buying services?
I think it’s obvious that it can have bad outcomes in vote buying . So its more productive to focus on the second question.

a simple example

Hiding this example in the toggle to keep it shorter.

Say some individual person nominated themselves to become a OpCo OAT member, disclosing no financial, personal or professional COI and complying with the KYC agreement. Their motivation simply to generate adverse effects in governance by occupation of a key role and not fulfilling its mandate. Then, asking someone to buy the 19.2M votes from Lobbyfi and casting a full vote for them. It is obvious then we have a bad outcome facilitated by vote buying.

An example like the above one can be facilitated without the existence of a platform like lobbyfi by simply applying pressure/agreeing/bribing a large delegator to vote for yourself .

Can we control outcomes? Do something to mitigate/prevent it?
As many have said: we can’t control the existence of vote buying markets and banning won’t control it either. So we would not support this. Also we can’t control the external personal motivators driving the buy/vote mechanism.

A more productive discussion can be how can we can better engage with Lobbyfi and how to better align incentives.

These are more general comments as we don’t have a formed opinion on these:

  • Engage with lobbyfi “embracing it as a part of governance” as paulo stated above and suggesting a better way for pricing votes to prevent governance capture when it applies. We can’t control pricing but Lobbyfi have been active in the chat and in the forum, maybe we can suggest other improvements beyond pricing.

  • It would be interesting to assess the outcomes of the ARDC report if it has some recommendations. But also we should be looking into what other economic incentives can we present to those simply looking to generate yield for ARB other than staking.

  • Ideally all delegates would engage with governance. How can we engage with large holders to make them more active or delegate their vp? Can we explore delegation to active delegates increasing representation of delegates engaging with governance?

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