Delegate to a public access, public good citizen enfranchisement pool through Event Horizon

[EventHorizonDAO]

Introduction

With the aim of enfranchising the tens of thousands of small voters, this proposal suggests we delegate (not grant) 5,000,000 ARB to a public access-voter block subject to meeting emission timelines as well as participation/output-based KPIs outlined below and a clawback after 1 year if the DAO votes to do so. Arbitrum community members may mint a free, soul-bound Voter Pass which allows them to take part in mobilizing this voter pool. As detailed further below, this model:

1. Grants a clear and significant voice to retail voters regardless of their financial means
2. Incentives participation with additional governance authority, not inflationary rewards
3. Incentives participants interested in governance itself, not financial gain

To support this initiative, the Event Horizon team has offered a $3,000 ETH grant to reimburse the gas cost Arbitrum community members spend to mint voter access passes to a public good voter pool.

Rationale

5,000,000 ARB would place Event Horizon community as the 21st largest delegate. We think this places a fair amount of power into the 3rd pillar of governance, namely retail (the other two being team and individual delegates).

This proposal reflects two of Arbitrum’s core mission values:

1. Socially Inclusive: By constructing a dedicated block of governance authority with lower capital barriers, our community greatly expands who gets a seat at the table.

2. Neutral and Open: By making the thoughts and ideas of this broader swath of individuals heard, we further broaden the spectrum of possibilities for the evolution of our ecosystem.

Problem

Today, with only 7 of the top 15 top delegates, any proposal can be passed on chain. However, there are over thousands of individual voters who participate in each vote despite having effectively no meaningful say. This should be rewarded. Moreover, there are likely tens of thousands more incredibly talented community members who are very capable of adding to the collective cognition of the ecosystem, but simply lack the capital means to have a voice and are left discouraged from voting at all. Not voting when you only have $500 worth of ARB is a drop in the bucket. Sitting out governance proposals is unfortunately the rational decision, but collectively makes everyone worse off.

Background

Event Horizon is a public good. It is a public-access meta-governance block.

DAOs today rely exclusively on individuals and company entities to serve as network delegates. However, this isn’t the only option. While individual delegates certainly add incredible value to the Arbitrum Ecosystem, so would a governance allotment dedicated to the greater body of smaller retail participants.

In this regard, Event Horizon slots into the Arbitrum ecosystem in a similar fashion to a standard delegate, however, rather than the block voting based on the decision of one individual, it votes with the collective cognition of hundreds of individual voter pass holders.

This serves two functions:

1. It provides a clear and designated voice for smaller, retail voters.

2. It drives participation through a game-theoretic process called Implicit Delegation.
   One of the greatest barriers to participation is a lack of voice due to lack of capital. Implicit delegation and public access governance changes this.

Implicit Delegation is a model by which the full public governance block mobilizes in favor of the consensus of those who do vote, thereby implicitly delegating the authority of those who don’t vote.

When participation is low… each voter receives a larger slice of the public access pie. This means the fewer people there are voting, the more incentive there is for someone new to come and participate.

When participation is high… there are more voters splitting the same pie, however, retail participation is high, which is a win for the ecosystem.

Implicit Delegation represents an effort to offer a new paradigm around means of influence. A shift from today’s entirely capital-centric to a more retail-friendly participation-centric model.

Where Direct Governance allocates influence along the lines of capital, and Explicit Delegation allocates influence along the lines of popularity (which often reflects capital), Implicit Delegation allocates influence to those who care most: people showing up to vote. Because the carrot is influence, it attracts governance-interested retail, not capital-interested retail, more on that below.

Because the entirety of the block is always mobilized, those who are most vested are rewarded for their participation by having a larger share of the voting pie. In this regard, EventHorizon’s model leans into a systemic lack of participation to create a solution.

Benefits compared to Token Incentivized Governance:

While token rewards for participation hold legitimate merit and are an intuitive remedy for low turnout, it has limitations.

1. Misaligned Incentives: Token-based incentives attract returns-interested parties. However, when it comes to governance, participation is most valuable when it comes from those interested in participating not payout. Implicit delegation directly appeals to these individuals as it rewards those who participate, not with capital, but with greater voting power.

Added Thought Capital: in line with the notion above, there are likely thousands, of community members each holding both strong ideas and valuable contributions for the ecosystem, but simply lack enough voice to justify participation. Through Implicit Delegation, any community member of the Arbitrum ecosystem has an opportunity to have their voice heard, bringing thousands more minds and ideas to the surface.

2. Inflationary: While token rewards drive participation at the expense of inflation, Implicit delegation simply leverages its game theory model to increase incentive to vote in the form of a greater voting share. This does not cost the token any inflation, nor the treasury any ARB.

3. Non-scalable: Token-based rewards are finite and require a constant drain of ARB funds to continue driving participation. As the ecosystem scales, and more participants join, greater and greater sums of ARB will be needed to continue fueling growth. Implicit delegation has no cost, and its balanced game theory functions with no burn. As more retail voters join, more Arb could be delegated to the community block, however, again, this is not a cost as the ARB tokens are still retained by the treasury.

Specification

Past Performance:

The above is not just theory. The Event Horizon community is already active on Ethereum mainnet meta-governing Uniswap, AAVE, Compound, ShapeShift, and of course, Arbitrum. In fact, in 2 of the 3 latest Uniswap votes, the Event Horizon community was the 11th largest voter in the Uniswap Ecosystem, 18th in the other vote. Event Horizon has also recently voted as the XXth largest delegate in recent Aave votes. While there is still quite a gap between Event Horizon and 10th place, interestingly enough this position serves as a sort of DMZ between individual delegates above, and retail below. This dynamic does, however, highlight an issue we are addressing. Raise the long tail a bit. Individual, organization AND retail delegation are all valuable and mutually inclusive, three symbiotic pillars for a strong ecosystem.

Since its inception just a few months ago, the Event Horizon protocol has processed nearly 100 metagovernance proposals and placed over $5,000,000 of governance authority and enfranchisement directly into the hands of the retail voter, a feat not seen anywhere else in the DAO space. Across all proposals for which the Event Horizon Community has participated, the community’s cumulative voter footprint is on pace to exceed $10,000,000. Some more metrics worth highlighting:

Number of Meta-Proposals Passed >150
Our community members have participated in and passed over 100 meta-governance proposals, each corresponding to Uniswap or AAVE base layer proposals.

Voter Participation: >30%
Over thirty percent of our community members have participated in our meta-governance proposals. Some participants have voted as many as 63 times in under 5 months. Check out the latest info on our leaderboard: EventHorizon.vote/leaderboard

Average Authority Mobilized per Participating Passholder: >$100,000 (and counting)
For the cost of $3 in gas, each participating passholder has mobilized an average of just over $100,000 in Uniswap and AAVE authority governance authority across all meta-governance proposals passed.

Average Authority Mobilized Multiple: 33,333x (and growing)
The average pass holder minted their voter pass for ~$3 in gas. When compared to the $100,000 in average authority mobilized, each member has mobilized over 33,333x their gas cost of admission in blue-chip governance authority.

Notable metagovernance proposals:

1. ehUNI-1 – Deploy Uniswap V3 on Scroll: The Event Horizon Community voted to support the deployment of Uniswap on Scroll. 24 voters participated each mobilizing >$4,000 of Uniswap authority: https://x.com/BuildWithScroll/status/1738249059616592223?s=20

2. ehUNI-3 – Lower Onchain Proposal Threshold: The Event Horizon Community voted to support the University of Michigan Blockchain Club’s proposal to lower the Uniswap proposal threshold from 2.5M UNI to 1M UNI. The initiative is intended to make proposal creation more accessible. This metagovernance proposal mobilized >$175,000 of UNI and achieved a record-high vote multiple of 8758x for those retail voters who participated.

Mechanisms

1. Duplication: Event Horizon Automatically copies proposals published on the Snapshot of included DAOs, in this case Arbitrum, into its simplified UI meta-governance dashboard:

2. Meta-Governance: The Event Horizon voter pass holders conduct a meta-layer vote to assess the community’s desired base-layer proposal outcome. NOTE: voter passes are free to mint and the Event Horizon will subsidize the gas cost for Arbitrum community members. EventHorizon.vote/mint

3. Base-Layer Voting: The Event Horizon community wallet automatically votes in favor of the desired outcome determined by the passholders.

Steps to Implementation

The primary step to implementation would be the delegation of ARB to the EventHorizonCommunity.eth (0xabc…). From there, Event Horizon will facilitate the processing of metagovernance proposals as it has been for many other DAOs.

Again, this would not be a grant and funds would remain in the DAO-controlled wallet. Consider us a delegate like any of the other talented delegates currently supporting the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Delegation would occur according to the following KPIs and timelines:

1. Total Delegation: Cumulative ARB delegated to EventHorizonCommunity.eth
2. Earliest Date: Earliest date of ARB delegation
3. Passholder Count: Cumulative number of HVAX Voter Pass Holders
4. Proposal Participation: The percentage of proposals the community voter block participated in over the delegation period
5. Average Pass Participation: The average number of pass holders participating in each proposal. This has been set at 10%, over 3x higher than Arbitrum’s current wallet participation rate
6. Total Participation: The percent of total passes that have voted on at least one proposal

The earliest date and three of the four benchmark thresholds would have to be met before the vesting of a given ARB allotment.

Additional Considerations

The Arbitrum Event Horizon Oversight Committee: A committee of 5 existing, notable delegates will be voted on by the Arbitrum community to be given the ability to guide the Event Horizon voting pool on matters of Arbitrum meta-governance. A simple 3/5 majority would allow this committee to veto the decisions of the voter pool within the 24 hours between the closing of the Event Horizon proposal, and the underlying DAO’s proposal.

Sybil Considerations: it is important to note that the delegated ARB is by a large margin a minority voter amount. Any potential risk of Sybil influence over the public-access block would under almost all conditions not amount to a sum of authority that would be capable of passing a vote absent incredibly significant broader support from other delegates and the broader Arbitrum ecosystem participants. E.g. a rogue vote is virtually impossible.

That being said, we are open to heightening anti-sybil measures with Gitcoin Passport requirements for Arbitrum meta-governance.

Gitcoin Passports allow for the customization and weighting of proof-of-humanity criteria including:

• Captcha
• Discord Link
• Coinbase Verification
• ENS use
• Wallet Balance
• Wallet Age
• Facebook Link
• Gas Spent

Civic Uniqueness (https://support.civic.com/hc/en-us/articles/6855280050839-What-is-Civic-Uniqueness-Pass-)

Future considerations

A bonding mechanism may be implemented to increase the voter pool size from delegates and the broader community thereby allowing small retail and delegates to pool their voting power together to compete with larger delegates. The specific details of this implementation will be ironed out in conversation with various delegates and DAO stakeholders.

[juanbug]

We’re really interested in this idea of using the DAO to delegate more tokens into the active voting pool through community governance itself.

Have spoken with the Event Horizon team before on Uniswap related matters, I think this is definitely worth digging into. Personally, I think extrapolating this out and setting aside x million $ARB for underrepresented delegates is the operationally best move. Many delegates are in similar situations where they have lots of unique value add, yet with little to no delegation. However individual delegation posts seem unscalable, as if this passes, surely dozens of more underrepresented delegates will also attempt to go through governance.

A lot of this thought process is from the Stable Lab team’s Delegate to Underrepresented Delegates post that delegated a total 10m UNI to various active but underrepresented delegates. Tagging @Matt_StableLab from the Stable Lab team for thoughts? (I know Doo spearheaded the Uniswap post but couldn’t find his username here)

Would love to hear what people think?

[EventHorizonDAO]

Thank you for the feedback, mate!

1.) it’s important to note that this shouldn’t open any new process for standard delegations. Event Horizon isn’t a single delegate, nor even an institution, it’s tooling. It’s a protocol with automated structures already built and functioning to allow a large body of retail voters to collectively vote. To this end, we have to ask ourselves how much do we care about the long tail 99% of Arbitrum users and evaluate how we have calibrated the voice made available to them thus far.

2.) This serves a different function than an underrepresented delegates iniative.

A. It targets a much larger swath of individuals and retail voters. While the under rep. proposal offered delegation to five or so individuals. Event Horizon can scale to thousands of retailers.

B. It’s a strong avenue to attract new voters/future delegates. Where the under represented proposal exclusively targeted a handful of existing participants, voter enfranchisement pools are a perpetual pubic good and attractant for new entrants.

Both proposals have their merits, but when it comes to a dedicated pool with voting passes the number of vote participants is infinitely scalable, while a targeted under rep. initiative only captures a comparably small sum of existing (not new delegates)

[cp0x]

The proposal is interesting, but unfortunately I cannot support it.
Let’s go through the points.
1.

@EventHorizonDAO

Grants a clear and significant voice to retail voters regardless of their financial means

You can also, regardless of your financial capabilities, receive delegations from other users. Therefore, there is a way that does not involve delegation from the DAO itself.
2.

@EventHorizonDAO

Incentives participation with additional governance authority, not inflationary rewards

Delegation incentives are a good idea and can be considered separately from this proposal. In turn, I want to say that compensation only with voting rights is not suitable for everyone, since voting takes quite a lot of time for analysis and discussion, and there are also significant gas costs.
3.

@EventHorizonDAO

Incentives participants interested in governance itself, not financial gain

See point 1. In order to be trusted with their votes, you must somehow earn a reputation - either with money, or with your useful activity for the community.

[EventHorizonDAO]

We should underpin this discussion with the question of how much say does the retail community of Arbitrum deserve absent wealth or capital. If you believe the optimal native voting power is $0, then we may not come to an agreement. If we can agree that each member of this community should have some voice then it becomes a discussion of quantity

To your points:

1. You can also, regardless of your financial capabilities, receive delegations from other users. Therefore, there is a way that does not involve delegation from the DAO itself.

While it’s true that there is a way, that does not mean it is an efficient or the only way. This also isn’t an argument against a retail enfranchisement pool, both models can and should exist simultaneously.

The model you point to is status quo and has proven limited. Hardly any lower capital users participate. Back of the envelope calculations from 10 recent Snapshots shows an average voter participation rate of 2%. We don’t know what is optimal but it certainly isn’t 2%. Delegation does nothing to raise this figure.

We also have what we call ‘Satoshi Wallet’ delegations or delegations which have been placed long ago with an absent or inactive delegator. The wallet being delegated to is often inactive itself. This is complete entropy of governance potential. Through the EH model, delegation is mailable and 100% efficient/productive as EH votes 100% of the time.

It also adds unnecessarily high barriers for our community to explore the ideas of the majority of its members who are currently sidelined due to no meaningful say. Most people (despite potentially having great ideas) won’t contribute as they have no voice. Having to win a delegation popularity contest in order to have their ideas surfaced is sub-optimal. Delegation, while crucial, in practice isn’t a meritocracy. Further, under the current system, someone with $1m and no talent can buy and start voting in a serious way. In fact, in today’s model, even a single misaligned moderately wealthy agent poses a greater potential risk than the totality of all retail voters within the EH voter enfranchisement pool.

We see our retail enfranchisement public good voter pool as complementary to boosting individual underrepresented delegates. We’re simultaneously calling for an elevation of small to medium sized delegates in a parallel proposal we workshopped at the Arbitrum GovHack hackathon posted here.

Could you see how the EH vote gives smaller sums to many retail voices vs large sums to specific delegates? We view this as a slight boost to the little voices, and our GovHack proposal as a moderate boost to the medium sized voters. Both aim at elevating voices at all stages of the delegate pipeline.

Eg someone with $50 not voting at all today is encouraged to mint a free pass and start participating because they claim let’s say $10,000 of voice through the public enfranchisement pool. Their votes and thoughts allow them to stand out and qualify for an under represented delegation of 1m arb as an individual later on. At present the first step to meaningfully participating is so high it functions as a wall, not a stair step. We need to add progressive growth opportunities to effectively allow stair stepped onboarding from community member to meaningful vote participant. Our vision:

Forum —> Enfranchisement Pool —> Individual / Under Represented Delegation

Do you agree just because there is a single path today, this doesn’t mean there aren’t better or alternative paths?

2. Delegation incentives are a good idea and can be considered separately from this proposal. In turn, I want to say that compensation only with voting rights is not suitable for everyone, since voting takes quite a lot of time for analysis and discussion, and there are also significant gas costs.

While it is true that some delegates may be justified in receiving monetary compensation, that doesn’t mean that all voters should. Many are eager to just have a voice (we’re already seeing this).

So, while those seeking capital may not resonate with this opportunity, that doesn’t invalidate it for the many who are interested absent payment. In fact, those who are eager to have their voices heard in spite of not receiving capital, should be propped up.

We’d also argue those willing out of enthusiasm, not payment are some of the most ecosystem valuable. It also is significant to note that this adds participation directly, without inflationary rewards. This is also not mutually exclusive with alternative pay to vote model proposals.

Can you agree that just because some people require monetary compensation, that doesn’t mean all do?

3. In order to be trusted with their votes, you must somehow earn a reputation - either with money, or with your useful activity for the community.

Regarding trust, the oversight committee ensures safe alignment by well respected already existing delegates who have earned their reputation. Put another way, delegates who have earned trust in your preferred way, will have oversight over the EH voter enfranchisement pool.

In general, fears of trust and alignment should be addressed with oversight, delegation scaling, and constitutional systems, not by a broad stroke fear of retail enfranchisement.

Would you agree that a single misaligned, moderately wealthy agent (unbound by any oversight committee) is a more significant risk than the total sum of the enfranchisement pool bound by an oversight committee?

We encourage all to reflect on the following questions:

1. Do you believe that the optimal baseline authority of 99% of Arbitrum users should be $0?
2. If not, we no longer disagree. The question becomes how much authority should the 99% Arbitrum users have?
3. How effective do you feel the current mode of delegation is for increasing participation?

[akg72]

Posting for my support of this proposal. By using Event Horizon’s model to raise the voices of retail voters (and with high voter participation, >30%), I believe this proposal represents a step towards democratizing governance within the Arbitrum ecosystem. Personally, the important incentivization is through the idea of governance authority over financial rewards, which seem to introduce a novel approach to participation-centric governance. Also, this initiative has the potential to improve the collective decision-making process, and incorporates the larger spectrum of perspectives relative to the Arbitrum ecosystem.

[cp0x]

Hello!
Thanks for the detailed answers.
In many ways, I now support your desire to gain control in other ways.
I still have questions after your comment:

1. Will people who don’t have the finances buy/attract votes in existing ways be able to vote given the high cost of gas in a bull market?
2. How to understand the effective vote total for your proposal. Recent Tally polls averaged 150 million votes. Your proposal of 5 million votes is 3.33%, which cannot significantly affect the outcome of the vote. It may be worth considering increasing this amount?
3. I don’t really like in this scheme the presence of several, albeit respected, delegates who will have the opportunity to manage delegations, without any restrictions. It may be worth considering the principle of distribution of delegations so that the supervisor is not tempted to distribute all the votes to his acquaintances and friends.

[EventHorizonDAO]

Welcome aboard

1. Event Horizon subsidizes the cost of voting. Our community votes for free on our Snapshot, EH then votes on Snapshot and pays for the gas.
2. That’s the second time we’ve been asked to raise the delegation amount! We initially proposed 2m $ARB, but were asked to raise to 5m $ARB. That would place us as the 23rd largest delegate. In recent conversations with delegates at the ETH Denver GovHack hackathon, many expressed interest in placing us at 15 (7.3m $ARB). What do you think?
3. It’s worth noting that the only power the Oversight Committee has is whether to have the Event Horizon voter pool vote to abstain. No other delegation management would be granted to this committee, and these delegates would be elected by the DAO via Snapshot. That said, some delegates expressed interest in this as an initial step. But we appreciate your perspective and if enough community feedback asks for us to revise this requirement, we may do so.

[maxlomu]

This is a great initiative, I’ll support it.
Empowering lower capital users with a voice can allow us to diversify our views.

As discussed with the EventHorizon team, a key point here will be how to identify and involve other people so that we can get out of our DAO-bubble.

1 year seems also reasonable to decide if this initiative is worth continuing, I would expect the op to prepare a (bimonthly?) report on attendance, participation, analysis of votes etc

[dk3]

Okay, this may be a tangent, but bear with me.
“Quadratic Delegation”
For every individual who you get to redelegate to an event horizon pool, arbitrum dao matches in a quadratic manner. Karma has some good metrics on voter history, so seems like its pretty sybil resistant if they were active in the past, plus your gitcoin passport implementation. Maybe I’m overcomplicating things, but the idea of 20 people with 2500 arb banding together to get over the 50k threshold, then using a platform like EH to place votes and share delegate incentives excites me.

I am going to write up some thoughts on scholarship this weekend, after I think that through, I’ll come back with more ideas I’m sure.

Also you use the term “retail” but I don’t think that is the proper term in this setting, maybe citizen or individual are better fitting.

Nonetheless I am supportive of setting up a program to get more people involved in governance with enough delegation to give proposals a fighting chance, and this is a step in that direction, I really want to see more guilds or cohorts start banding together from all avenues of web3.

[cp0x]

And one more technical nuance:

Function: delegate(address delegatee)

This function has only 1 parameter, so it’s impossible to distribute votes to more than 1 address.

[jengajojo]

Thanks for the proposal @EventHorizonDAO I’d be interested in seeing the results of this trial in the ArbitrumDAO. Some questions:

a. Can you help us understand the rationale behind the 5M ARB ask?
b. Do you have any suggestions on how the technical implementation for delegating ARB would look like?
c. Would the community be starting a delegation thread and communicating rationale for it’s votes?
d. Would you apply for the delegate incentive program?

[SeriousTaylor]

Hey Arb frens

I am writing this response on behalf of the Serious People team; and we’re super excited about this public access voter block proposal! We’ve been digging into the details, and honestly, it feels like a game-changer for getting everyone involved in the governance game, no matter the size of their stake.

Here’s Why We’re All In:

• It’s all about inclusion: Lowering those participation barriers means we’re opening up the floor to a ton of fresh voices and ideas. That’s what Arbitrum’s all about, right? Bringing different perspectives into the mix is only going to make our community stronger and more vibrant.
• Participation over profit: The whole soul-bound Voter Pass thing is genius. It’s shifting the focus from making a quick buck to actually caring about where Arbitrum is headed. Plus, it’s a smart move to keep things sustainable by not just throwing tokens at the problem.
• Diverse voices, better choices: With this implicit delegation model, it’s not just about having a say; it’s about making that say count. Bringing untapped ideas and energy to the forefront is exactly what we need to keep evolving and stay ahead of the curve.
• Sustainable growth is key: We’re totally on board with the non-inflationary approach here. Boosting governance participation without diluting our precious ARB? Sign us up. It’s about smart growth, not just fast growth.

So, What’s the Verdict?

We’re backing this proposal 100%. It’s not just about giving everyone a seat at the table; it’s about making sure every voice can genuinely make an impact. Let’s rally behind this, get those Voter Passes minted, and show the world of DAOs what a truly democratic and inclusive ecosystem looks like.

Can’t wait to see where we go with this. Let’s make it happen, Arbitrum!

Cheers,

Team Serious People

[EventHorizonDAO]

We appreciate the questions, as it draws attention to some areas needing further explanation:

a. Can you help us understand the rationale behind the 5M ARB ask?

5M $ARB would make us the 23rd largest delegate. We initially requested 2m, but some delegates expressed concerns that if the delegation was too small to move the needle, there would be no point. Just recently @cp0x asked us to raise it again. Some delegates expressed interest in placing us as the 15th largest delegate (7.3m $ARB) as a sweet spot. We’ll await further feedback before moving up from 5m.

b. Do you have any suggestions on how the technical implementation for delegating ARB would look like?

in a similar vain @cp0x asks:

[Function: delegate(address delegate) has only 1 parameter, so it’s impossible to distribute votes to more than 1 address.

the DAO would only have to delegate to one address, the EH address so that won’t be an issue.

To answer @jengajojo’s question (b) about the technical details: Fractional delegation isn’t possible, and is one of the reasons why in Uniswap’s successful retroactive delegation proposal they spun up a Franchiser contract. So mirroring our GovHack Arbitrum hackathon proposal we will amend this proposal with the technical details as follows:

Technical Implementation

In order to implement this proposal, it is required that we create a DAO-controlled Franchiser contract. The contract owner would be the DAO timelock and it would allow the DAO the power to delegate and undelegate tokens that it sends from the treasury to the Franchiser. We suggest that the Foundation aids in the creation of this contract in order to create an official and safe implementation, though we can likely fork the Trail of Bits audited Uniswap Labs implementation [github] of the same concept. If this proposal passes Snapshot, we request that the Foundation take the time to fork the contract and hire an auditor to check the implementation.

The contract has simple functions:

-Fund: allows the DAO to send tokens to contract and delegate to a single address

-FundMany: allows the DAO to send tokens to contract and delegate any amount to multiple addresses

-Recall: allows DAO to pull back funds from Franchiser effectively undelegating and returning tokens to treasury from a single delegate.

-RecallMany: allows DAO to pull back funds from franchiser effectively undelegating and returning tokens to treasury from multiple delegates.

It is worth noting that all tokens sent to the Franchiser will remain a part of the DAO’s balance sheet as it has full-control over the contract. The delegated tokens never leave the DAO’s ownership.

Forking and auditing this franchiser contract would be useful for Arbitrum’s version of retroactive delegation (updated version to be posted shortly). Crucially, we view both this proposal (delegating to EH’s retail enfranchisement pool) and the above retroactive delegation proposal (boosting active delegates in the 50k-1m ARB range) as two sides of the same coin of the community’s call for creative ways to boost retail participation and governance decision making processes.

c. Would the community be starting a delegation thread and communicating rationale for its votes?

Given that the community is not 1 individual, this wouldn’t be clear cut. Conversations would be public in our discord (we just yesterday spun up the infrastructure to have each meta-governance proposal get its own forum post in our Discord). We could explore in the future having a community representative aim to summarize these debates as the community grows.

d. Would you apply for the delegate incentive program?

We don’t have any plans to, no.

A final point I want to add is how we view this proposal as fitting into the broader Arbitrum DAO strategy:

A good framing for this proposal is, EH serves as a sort of “delegate bootcamp” whereby small retail participants, enticed by a vote multiple, will finally come out of the woodwork to not only start voting, but to start debating these proposals to make their decision-making process more legible (h/t to @krst for this connection). Once reputation and a moderate delegation is built up, these delegates can get fed through the pipeline into the retroactive delegation program (50k-1m ARB). So both proposals aim to improve the leaky pipeline that is delegate onboarding. I hope this expansion of the overarching vision helps.

[cp0x]

I may not have expressed myself quite correctly regarding the number of delegated tokens.
The bottom line was what we want to achieve:

1. If you are just voting an additional number of votes, then this can be done with 1 ARB in your wallet.
2. If you want to influence decisions, then 3% of tokens will not help you much.
3. I didn’t see or maybe missed a comment about transaction fees that small owners won’t be able to afford.
4. We all want to build a fair, fair and transparent voting system. Do you think it would be fair if one user received 50k votes and spent $100,000, and another simply asked for it from the DAO? This is a question we need to answer.

[EventHorizonDAO]

1 & 2) We’re hearing that 5m ARB is too small from several people now but hesitate to ask for more. What do you think would be an amount of ARB that would make more of an impact?

3. As far as transaction fees are concerned, when you vote through Event Horizon, you vote via Snapshot which is free. Event Horizon votes on chain and pays with the protocol’s own ETH.

4. This point applies equally to all delegates. Large delegates can have tens of millions of dollars of voting power while spending $0. But that’s okay, we want people who care a lot about the protocol to have influence. EH is no different than any other delegate, except we vote 100% of the time and have no voter fatigue. While a traditional delegate can’t read every proposal forever, the EH delegation votes 100% of the time. But those who determine how the EH voter enfranchisement pool votes change every time but are always self selected for being those voters most interested in that particular proposal.

[Tuda]

*As a delegate of Event Horizon, I am thrilled that the project has received attention from big names in the industry.

*I have participated in many DAOs myself, but it wasn’t until I came across Event Horizon’s implicit delegation model that I truly witnessed the effectiveness of this model.

[cp0x]

Let’s talk about delegation then. Those who received their racks and did not return anything - this is not entirely true - they returned their time and other resources to attract delegations to them.
And they present their decisions to those who delegated to them.
In the case of a delegation from the DAO, will the DAO have the right to withdraw its delegations if it considers a particular person to have voted incorrectly?
Who will decide this?

[EventHorizonDAO]

We appreciate the enthusiasm to think about every element of this proposal. We don’t think this is the right place to discus the pros and cons of delegation as a governance mechanism in this and every DAO. We encourage you to start a new thread to get to unpack the best ways of thinking about delegation in general.

To answer your question as it pertains to Event Horizon: yes, the DAO can undelegate from us the same way any delegator can undelegate to an delegatee.

[krst]

First, I’d like to note that this is my personal opinion and not L2BEAT’s governance team.

I’ve discussed this idea with Event Horizon on a number of occasions, and below is a summary of my thoughts on the matter, which I’d like to add to the discussion.

First of all, I like all experimentation with governance systems. I think one of the best things about crypto governance is that we can experiment with decision-making at a meaningful scale and with meaningful stake.

At the same time, I also have a strong opinion that voting itself is not the essence of this decision-making, but only one step of it, mostly optional. It is a much broader process consisting of idea generation, spreading awareness, stimulating debate, building consensus, etc. Voting itself in crypto is quite simple and frictionless, my personal thesis is that governance problems stem from deficiencies in these other aspects, not from so-called “voter apathy” itself.

That’s why I don’t think that simply “giving a voice to retail holders en masse” in itself is going to positively impact governance in a meaningful way. I’am fully open to be proven wrong though.

Having said that, I think that what Event Horizon is proposing could be a good foundation on which to build further governance experiments.

For example I can imagine this pool to be used only for voting early as a signal. 5M votes is not big enough to swing most votes, but it would be enough to signal support if those votes were cast early, for example in the first 48 hours after the proposal is published (and if some quorum is not reached in those 48hrs the pool abstains and the opportunity is lost) . It incentivizes the proposer to raise awareness of people participating in that pool early on, at the same time people participating in the pool have incentive to pay attention to what’s happening cause if they don’t vote early they can’t vote at all.

Another example is a very interesting concept already utilized in Starknet as a Builders Council (Council’_council). This is a pool with huge voting power given to the elected Builders representatives from Starknet ecosystem. I personally treat it as a kind of a Builders Union that can effectively veto governance decisions if strongly disagress with it. Similar concept is being explored by Optimism with their Anticapture Commision (Anticapture Commission - Metagovernance - Optimism Collective).

Obviously what I have given above are just examples of what is possible. I’m not suggesting that this particular proposal should follow any of these routes, I just wanted to demonstrate that this is a valid experiment that has been tried in one form or another in other ecosystems, so we should not be afraid of it, but rather try to experiment with it ourselves.

What’s most important to me (and what I think is currently missing from this proposal) are mechanisms that will accompany this voting pool to ensure that the community behind it is actively and meaningfully involved in governance. But I think we can safely start by agreeing to set up the pool and let Event Horizon expand and experiment with these mechanics later.

On the technical side I have three suggestions:

1. I don’t fully understand what’s in it for Event Horizon, there is no mention of any compensation/reward for providing this mechanism. I understand that the mechanism/protocol itself is supposed to be public good and is provided for free, but I want to make sure that there is an incentive for Event Horizon to keep working on it and experimenting with it on Arbitrum, so that it creates value for the DAO and does not just exist there.
2. While I’m not against larger pool size, I don’t think it’s necessary. This should not be a real competition to the voting power that comes from owning and delegating tokens. I want to avoid controversies where this voting power coming from the DAO treasury swings some important vote by a small margin (imagine such DAO-sourced voting power deciding on an issue such as the Wormhole vs LayerZero vote in Uniswap last year).
3. I would prefer that this voting power not be optimistically extended beyond an initial period, at least not in the beginning. Rather, we should have a vote in a year from now if this experiment was meaningful.