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

[404DAO]

It’s exciting to see this idea getting feedback from other delegates! 404 DAO has talked numerous times with the Event Horizon team and we are aligned with their mission to increase participation in governance across the industry. Our team has also worked with Event Horizon at GovHack on a similar governance participation experiment inspired by the program Stable Labs presented in the Uniswap DAO. It is now in the RFC stage.

Luckily, Arbitrum DAO benefits from a passionate community and it has numerous active delegates. But like @krst said, one of the best things about crypto is the ability to meaningfully experiment with governance and we think this proposal is a great way to start one of those experiments with Arbitrum.

Before seeing this go to a snapshot vote, we’d like to see a few clarification and edits made to the proposal:

1. It was mentioned in a response that the oversight committee only has the power to overrule and vote Abstain. We agree with this direction and it’s an important detail that should be added to the proposal. As well as just clarifying that the committee’s scope and powers only pertain to Arbitrum DAO votes, since Event Horizon is involved in several DAOs. Other responsibilities that we’d propose is notifying the DAO in the event that the delegation should be revoked and monitoring for any sybil activity or potential capture. If there are any other responsibilities or powers of the oversight committee, these should be added as well.

2. We would like clarification on if Gitcoin Passport will be used. Currently, the proposal is quite vague on whether this will be implemented. With mint passes being subsidized we do think it’s important to include and would like to see details on how long it would take the Event Horizon team to implement this in the case of a successful vote.

3. We agree with @krst that this experiment should not be optimistically approved after 1 year but rather should return to a DAO vote to be continued. If it is successful and proper reporting/documentation is provided to the DAO, we anticipate it being extended easily.

4. The technical requirements for the DAO to delegate to Event Horizon should also be included in the proposal. As well as costs, timeline, and actions required from the Foundation. Mentioned in this response:

@EventHorizonDAO

In order to implement this proposal, it is required that we create a DAO-controlled Franchiser contract.

5. While we are normally very supportive of milestone based proposals and KPIs, we’d like to better understand how easy/difficult increasing the delegation amount over time is for the DAO. Is this something that will require a vote after each milestone? If that is the case we’d recommend just starting out with the 5m delegation.

6. Lastly, we would like to see a more detailed timeline of events & steps required to make this happen. For example, if the snapshot vote for this goes up on March 25th; when will elections for the oversight committee start and how long is the application period? If possible we’d like to see the committee chosen before the onchain vote so that those details can be included, or at a minimum, chosen before the actual delegation takes place. This would likely add an additional 2 weeks before the onchain vote even goes live, and then another ~17 days before the delegation is actually executed. Given this, we’d also like to see an updated timeline for the KPI’s presented (depending on answer to number 5).

Looking forward to hopefully seeing these updates and any other suggestions from delegates! We appreciate the time and thought the Event Horizon team has put into this idea.

[EventHorizonDAO]

@Krst and @404DAO thank you both for your support and thorough feedback.

@krst We strongly agree that this is the foundation for broader evolution. A process we’re excited to kick off and will tap into your opinions for as we proceed ( if you’re willing of course ). This is in line with Event Horizon’s mission to improve governance both through and beyond our core tech.

A couple of questions:

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.

1. Re: EH team compensation — candidly, we were hesitant to request any compensation because our primary goal was to minimize the friction to getting this public good to a useful scale. Beyond maybe retroPGF at some point down the line, we haven’t put much thought into comp. What do you believe is a fair model for this?

While I’m not against larger pool size, I don’t think it’s necessary.

While we are normally very supportive of milestone based proposals and KPIs, we’d like to better understand how easy/difficult increasing the delegation amount over time is for the DAO. Is this something that will require a vote after each milestone? If that is the case we’d recommend just starting out with the 5m delegation.

2. Re: 5M ARB — we’re comfortable leaving it there, though we’ve also seen 7M referenced a few times now. However, a more outstanding question we have is whether we should vest the delegation or not. What are your thoughts on vesting vs single-tranche delegation? Vesting is obviously a more scaled approach (though it comes with added complexity as mentioned by @404DAO above). However, given the total sum isn’t massive, there is an argument for not phasing the experiment. Thoughts?

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.

We agree with @krst that this experiment should not be optimistically approved after 1 year but rather should return to a DAO vote to be continued. If it is successful and proper reporting/documentation is provided to the DAO, we anticipate it being extended easily.

3. Re: Non-Optimistic 1-Yr Check-in – We’re open to a non-optimistic approach. Our only hesitation was that that could effectively require a significant amount of lobby effort just to continue / not halt a successful experiment. An optimistic route allows the pool to continue to evolve unless there’s some community compunction not to. Given the relatively small sum and the fact that this is not a grant, a full-scale DAO vote might be overkill.

@404DAO to address some of your additional comments not yet addressed in this post. Following your numbering of the comments:

1. Yes, flagging for revocation would be be a right of the council. While anyone could bring this up at any point in the DAO for a vote, it coming from the oversight committee would carry with it more social capital

2. Yes, we will add implementation specifics shortly. We are actively working with the Gitcoin team, so this is a confirmed consideration.

3. That can be added.

4. We would like the snapshot to pass first as it highlights to the candidates that this is a worthwhile proposal to submit their candidacy for. We believe that this election process could happen concurrently with the launch of the on-chain vote such that both are completed in roughly the same order, rather than staggered.

[EventHorizonDAO]

The final version of the proposal is as follows:

Summary

Event Horizon is a public good. It is a public-access metagovernance block. With the aim of enfranchising the tens of thousands of small voters, this proposal suggests we delegate (not grant) 7,000,000 ARB to a public access-voter block subject to a 1 year renewal. This delegation gets mobilized by Voter Pass and Gitcoin Pass holders functionally giving underrepresented DAO citizens multiplied voting power and therefore more incentive to express their voices. The Gitcoin DAO has recently passed a proposal supporting Event Horizon, thereby making our Citizen Enfranchisement pool the #6 delegate on Gitcoin.

We also request a grant of 50k ARB to help the team maintain this public good across this 1 year experiment in addition to retroactively awarding the team for the fully-functional product thus far built out of pocket for the Arbitrum community over the past several months.

Problem

Today, typical Arbitrum voter participation rate floats in the low single digits. However, there are thousands of individual voters who participate in each vote despite having effectively no meaningful say. They should be rewarded with a voice. 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, say, $500 worth of ARB doesn’t make sense, it’s a drop in the bucket. Sitting out governance proposals is, unfortunately, the rational decision but collectively makes everyone worse off. The strength of the DAO is directly related to the number of participants having their voices heard by the community. The governance platform and vote multiple that Event Horizon gives to these citizens incentivizes greater participation: our average participation rate is 30%.

Mechanism

Arbitrum Citizens interested in governance may mint a free, soul-bound Voter Pass which allows them to take part in mobilizing this voter enfranchisement pool subject to an additional Gitcoin Pass requirement to prevent sybil attacks to be implemented soon after delegation. As detailed further below, this model:

1. Grants a clear and meaningful voice to statistically low capital DAO citizen 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

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 citizen 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, citizen 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 to those who do.

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, citizen 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 citizen-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 governance voice itself, implicit delegation attracts governance-interested citizens, not capital-interested citizens; 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, Event Horizon’s model leans into a systemic lack of participation to create a solution.

Rationale

Delegation rationale

7,000,000 ARB would place the Event Horizon community as the 15th largest delegate. Based upon significant dialogue with existing Arbitrum delegates and stakeholders, we think this places a fair amount of power into the 3rd pillar of governance, namely citizens (the other two being organizational and individual delegations) without being large enough to flip any typical proposal.

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.

Grant rationale

1. While we initially didn’t want to ask for compensation, several delegates pointed out that doing this magnitude of work for the DAO for free sets a bad precedent for future builders. It sends a message that “do not build here, your work is not valued by the Arbitrum community”. So despite our initial hesitation, and multiple refusals to do so, we now think it important to ask for some compensation.
2. As for specific amounts, LTIPP committees members were paid 25k ARB each for 7.5 weeks of work. We’re asking for 50k ARB total for the work already done + 1 year of work from the four members of the Event Horizon team and all associated build costs and ongoing maintenance expenses. This is not to depreciate the value of LTIPP committee members, but to draw a humble comparison of the value of our engineering and governance labor both already done and yet to come in this next year. In fact, this pricing explicitly values the work of LTIPP committee members at 12x that of the Event Horizon team, not counting the previous year of work that went into building the already functioning product.

We propose 25K Arbitrum as an initial grant sum as retroactive support for the product having already been built and operated within the Arbitrum ecosystem. This includes pass minting, automated proposal duplication, automated proposal passing, as well as a fully functional metagovernance UI and dashboard and associated server costs.

We will also have to pay for a Snapshot subscription which is $6k / year which will come out of the retroactive part of this grant.

Moving forward the continued sum of 25K ARB would be streamed to the Event Horizon treasury through a Hedgey streaming contract that can be revoked at any time so as to maintain the incentive for continued support. The expectation would be that the Event Horizon Team

1. Launch pass minting on Arbitrum – 5k ARB
2. Maintain functionality through any changes in Arbitrums governance process – 5k ARB
3. Maintain and further streamline voter onboarding UX – 5k ARB
4. Bi-annual reporting including KPIs such as voters, participation rate, voters above key threshold amounts (say $1k worth of ARB), etc. – 5k ARB
5. Service fee – 5k ARB

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 citizen 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 providing meta-governing public goods to Uniswap, AAVE, Compound, ShapeShift, and of course, Arbitrum. In fact, in several recent Uniswap votes, the Event Horizon community was the 10th largest voter in the Uniswap Ecosystem. Event Horizon has also recently voted as the 8th largest delegate in recent Aave votes. Gitcoin DAO just voted to make Event Horizon the 6th largest delegate in the DAO via delegation.

While there is still quite a gap between Event Horizon and the larger delegates in the larger DAOs, interestingly enough this position serves as a line of demarcation between individual delegates above, and citizens below. This dynamic does, however, highlight a call to action. Raise the long tail a bit, and bring in more voices. Sure, voting isn’t the full picture of DAO decision making, but it’s a great place to start. Individual, organization AND citizen delegations 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 2500 metagovernance proposals and placed over $23,000,000 of governance authority and enfranchisement directly into the hands of the citizen voter, a feat not seen anywhere else in the DAO space. This is $23,000,000 of voice amplification for the low-capital, high-conviction citizen which would never have been possible prior to the Event Horizon’s product. Across all proposals for which the Event Horizon Community has participated, the community’s cumulative voter footprint is on pace to exceed $50,000,000.

Some more metrics worth highlighting:

Number of Meta-Proposals Passed ~250
Our community members have participated in and passed over 200 meta-governance proposals, each corresponding to Arbitrum or other DAO 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: >$130,000 (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: >44,000x (and growing)
The average pass holder minted their voter pass for ~$3 in gas. When compared to the $130,000 in average authority mobilized, each member has mobilized over 40,000x their gas cost of admission in blue-chip governance authority.

Mechanisms

| Step 1 – Duplication: Once a delegation is established, Event Horizon begins automatically duplicating all base DAO (in this case Arbitrum) proposals within its own voting portal.

| Step 2 – Metagovernance: Retail voters may mint a free voter pass and begin voting to decide how the retail enfranchisement pool is mobilized in the base DAO proposal.

| Step 3 – Base DAO Voting: 24 hours prior to the closure of the base DAO proposal, the Event Horizon metagovernance proposal closes. Event Horizon then automatically pushes the consensus decision established by the retail community during the metagovernance proposal into the base DAO proposal.

Steps to Implementation

The primary step to implementation would be the delegation and grant of ARB to the EventHorizonArbitrum.eth. This will be a multi-sig SAFE to allow for future evolution and decentralization. The initial structure will be a 1 of 2 wallet with one signature being the Event Horizon team / protocol which will automatically vote in support of the passholder consensus and the other will be a ⅗ signature maintained by the oversight committee members which could be used to veto discretionarily. The delegation will use the Franchiser contract explained below.
After initial delegation from the DAO Event Horizon handles everything from there. Event Horizon will facilitate and maintain all elements of the pool from pass minting to metagovernance.
Again, this delegation would not be a grant and funds would remain in the DAO-controlled wallet. Consider us a delegate + service provider like any of the other talented delegates and service providers currently supporting the Arbitrum ecosystem.

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 citizen enfranchisement pool) and the above retroactive delegation proposal (boosting active delegates in the 10k-1m ARB range) as two sides of the same coin of the community’s call for creative ways to boost citizen participation and governance decision making processes.

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 will be implementing Gitcoin Passport requirements for Arbitrum metagovernance shortly after initial delegation to mitigate this risk.

Poll options

Yes

No

Abstain

[thedevanshmehta]

Thank you for sharing the final version of the proposal! I particularly like the framing around this not giving increased governance power to a small cohort of people but instead propping up many individual voices, the third pillar of arbitrum governance after protocols and large delegates. Here are some initial questions I have;

1. Is there a cut-off in delegation size for voters to get the event horizon boost? Could even a delegate with 5-10 million ARB mint the pass and influence the pool? Does amount of ARB matter at all in how Event Horizon votes or is it number of users only?

2. My second question is on the pass itself - I feel it greatly weakens the proposal by making it opt-in, rather than by default getting the boost. Since it’s a one year pilot, I would personally prefer taking a snapshot of all the already active but small wallets on ARB and by default including those in the Event Horizon pool. If a later wallet wants to become part of the pool, they can undergo the verification checks you describe. I would also recommend checking out the latest in identity systems that don’t require any user interaction, such as Trusta Labs and Gitcoins new Collusion Detection Model.

3. Regarding the compensation for implementation, those look fine to me. It is likely that @JoJo and others like @coinflip who were actually involved in LTIPP may have an issue with you baselining your pay against LTIPP and would prefer a ground up calculation of projected costs.

[JoJo]

I’m not really sure why I am getting summoned by you ser every time there is a discussion on compensation.

Anyway.

Gonna provide a feedback on comp part, will provide a feedback on the proposal itself if/when it will go to vote.

In here we have a cost of 50k arb that should cover

• 4 FTE
• working for 1y
• with a work based on maintenance of current infra, plus also basically some retroactive on creating the infra as I read it, plus delegates duty.

Am I correct?

We are basically talking of 50k/4/12 = 1k arb per month per member more or less. Or 240 arb per week. Which effectively is 13 times less a council member of ltip. Seems fair at first glance I guess.
(also tbh the work of council member is pratically way higher in time terms compared to the 7.5 weeks mentioned, but every role with high responsabilities usually carries more time commitment than what was planned, and this is true not only in our dao and in life as well).

If what i mentioned above is correct, could be worth to just mention the specific figures (aka say 50k for 1y for 4 fte which translates in a monthly payment of 1040 arb per person). So is easier at first glance to understand the costs.

[thedevanshmehta]

@JoJo

I’m not really sure why I am getting summoned by you ser every time there is a discussion on compensation

you are the ArbitrumDao paymaster ser

In this case i summoned you for the role you’ve played with LTIPP and to see whether their baselining against it made sense. I like the suggestion you provide of just giving the breakdown as 1k ARB per FTE rather than a lumpsum benchmarked against LTIPP which is indeed harder to understand here

[JoJo]

@thedevanshmehta

you are the ArbitrumDao paymaster ser

…no ser I am not tbh

[404DAO]

We believe that Event Horizon has sufficiently incorporated feedback and the most recent version of this proposal is ready to be put up on Snapshot to gather more opinions from delegates.

Voting is scheduled to start at 5pm EST (April 16th) and can be found here.

[mcfly]

I believe the Event Horizon proposal is worth supporting for a few key reasons:

First, it represents a genuine attempt to get more Arbitrum token holders actively participating in governance. The implicit delegation model leverages game theory to incentivize participation in an innovative way. If successful, it could uncover some best practices that benefit Arbitrum’s governance long-term.

Second, Event Horizon has already demonstrated with other major protocols that they can deliver strong engagement metrics like 30%+ voter participation. So while this would be a new experiment for our ecosystem, the team has a track record we can evaluate.

Third, the oversight committee provides a safeguard to veto any delegated votes if issues arise. This helps mitigate potential risks as we test out this new approach.

Some thoughtful suggestions have come in to clarify aspects of the proposal. The majority of those have been addressed, so I believe this experiment is worth pursuing. No governance system is perfect, and we should embrace opportunities to creatively evolve ours. A 1-year trial of this model could provide valuable insights.

For these reasons, on behalf of the ARB holders who delegated their voting power to me, I support this proposal at the Snapshot stage.

[cp0x]

Thanks for taking the initiative, but I’m still against this proposal.

1. This unfairly increases the share of votes in relation to those who spent a lot of money and time.
2. Such a share of votes can practically not influence the result, and the most important part of the decision is the discussion on the forum, in which I do not see hundreds of participants with a small number of votes.
3. In fact, you will be able to control a large share of the vote and decide who to accept into your electorate.
4. You give users the opportunity to vote twice: once through your platform, and once through their share.

cp0x vote AGAINST this proposal

[EventHorizonDAO]

It’s worth noting that cp0x is a signer for SpiralDAO, which has historically referenced metagovernance (albeit through very different , non-public good, practices). One might view this as a potential conflict of interests.

@cp0x, as a delegate, it would have been useful and relevant for you to have disclosed this at any point.

In any case, the below points stand on their own merit:

@Cp0x we have addressed the first two points multiple times already and point 3 is flagrantly incorrect, not what the proposal states, and not how the protocol functions.

1. This unfairly increases the share of votes in relation to those who spent a lot of money and time.

We addressed this in several of our responses to you including here:

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.

You then agreed here (despite strange framing):

Hello!
Thanks for the detailed answers.
In many ways, I now support your desire to gain control in other ways.

but also in the questions we asked you (and continue to ask) in our very first response:

We encourage all to reflect on the following questions:
Do you believe that the optimal baseline authority of 99% of Arbitrum users should be $0?..”

A notion that access should be 100% gated by capital is foundationally oppositional to the nature of public goods. Which cp0x supports according to your own website

Our commitment to public good values is proven by continued support from people to our grants from Gitcoin Grants 4 up to the present, as well as awards in the Retroactive Public Goods Funding from Optimism

The nature of many (most?) public goods is rooted in affording access to opportunities absent capital. We believe it is hardly unfair to afford a modest sum of governance to the citizens of the arbitrum community, especially given anyone (including yourself) would have equal access.

2. Such a share of votes can practically not influence the result, and the most important part of the decision is the discussion on the forum, in which I do not see hundreds of participants with a small number of votes.

We’ve addressed the scoping of the proposal several times. Another note, this is in contradiction with your first point. it is impossible for the pool to be both so large it is unfair and so small it doesn’t matter.

That said, we agree that forum participation is the most important part of a DAO’s deliberation process. That does not mean that voting is irrelevant or not useful in many other ways. Participation is a pipeline. Event Horizon serves as a new contributor top of funnel as it gives new users an easy and seamless way to vote with meaningful authority, all in a unified front end. Once users get used to voicing their opinion in the forum of a vote, they can feel more comfortable starting to express longer, more in-depth opinions on the forum. This is the first step to getting people to contribute to discussion on the forum. Voter enfranchisement and forum participation are not mutually exclusive, they are self-reaffirming.

3. In fact, you will be able to control a large share of the vote and decide who to accept into your electorate.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding both of Event Horizon and of crypto in general. Voter Pass NFT mints and DAO voting is permissionless: anyone can vote. We do not and cannot control who mints or votes. And if there was any “funny business” going on, that’s what the oversight committee is for, a committee which has full veto power hardcoded in the form of the multi-sig implementation.

4. You give users the opportunity to vote twice: once through your platform, and once through their share.

A public good is accessible to everyone. This ‘problem’ is what equalizes your first ‘problem’ if everyone can vote with their own authority and the pool, existing voters who have paid for their ARB aren’t ‘losing’ anything. They are able to vote with their existing delegation + the pool. Those without existing ARB would only vote with the pool.

@cp0x we respect your decision to vote against and have provided as much context as we can for you at this point. Feel free to reflect on the proposal and discourse above or maintain your current perspective!

[thedevanshmehta]

I have voted FOR the proposal, mainly because i like their framing of the three pillars of Arbitrum Governance.

We have the large delegates, the protocols that received the airdrop and small voters. This proposal props up the third pillar, which is currently too insignificant in raw voting power for it to even be considered a pillar.

That said, i will be tracking the opt in numbers to determine its success. If many users decide to forego minting the pass and its a few people that capture the voting bloc, i will be the first to recommend revoking of the proposal.

Ahead of the onchain tally vote, i would greatly appreciate them making a drive to canvass small voters to mint so there is already a bloc ready to go. They should ideally include minting links in the snapshot and tally draft so that small voters can go and mint directly from there.

[EventHorizonDAO]

Great recommendation @thedevanshmehta to put the mint page in the proposal. The Snapshot proposal cannot be edited but we will be sure to include it in the Tally proposal.

For everyone else, please feel free to mint a free pass if you haven’t already:
https://eventhorizon.vote/mint

[defipm]

Thanks for the detailed proposal, at first I was kinda confused on why we would try this approach when the delegation model seems to work just fine.

My biggest concern is the timeline from vote passing to audit/fork the code for this to work.

Can you confirm wherever the grant size would be used for audit purposes?

[EventHorizonDAO]

Appreciate the time you took to post.

We agree that delegation works well. At the same time, we think it’s important to both enfranchise the 99% of sidelined retail voters while also boosting the top of funnel for Arbitrum voters and contributors. That’s our primary aim with this public good.

Re: Franchiser contract, as stated in the proposal, the Foundation would handle the forking and auditing (including costs) of the Franchiser contract. This is something we spoke with the Foundation about at the Arbitrum hackathon in person and they expressed they’d be happy to support should the DAO make the ask in the form of this proposal. We’ll be sure to share any updates here in the forum post-Snapshot.

[Frisson]

I voted for this proposal at the temp check stage. I believe this proposal addresses a legitimate opportunity/problem (retail participation in governance) with a safe and credible potential solution (creating a pool of governance power that retail is incentivized to use). Excited to observe the experiment!

[cp0x]

Thank you for your time and detailed answer. I remember your position in the first destination very well, but I am simply stating my position on which I voted down.
We have already discussed this and I remained unconvinced even with the changes made. I understand that you sincerely believe in this public good and wish you luck in this experiment.
However, I don’t see how this experiment will improve the voting situation. The current way of distributing votes on ownership or delegation of an ARB token is rational until we see some other better way in action.

[defipm]

thanks for clarifying. We are voting For on the snapshot proposal

[maxlomu]

Voted FOR this proposal as previously explained .

[JoJo]

The mission of empowering smaller voters and users and give them a unified voice is a good mission.
I guess there are multiple ways in which this can be realized, and this is likely just one of the many. Which means, there are both margin of improvements and also margin to iterate in different ways.

But the mission is nonetheless good. Voting “for”.