[DIP v1.5]Delegate Incentive Program Questions and Feedback

[jameskbh]

Hello! I’m putting this in here as there was a few discussions about this topic in this thread. I want to put here in the forum the same feedback I presented in the Delegates TG about the VP multiplier:

@SEEDGov

Motivation and Rationale

After receiving feedback from various stakeholders and delegates of ArbitrumDAO, who expressed their inclination to link the Voting Power of delegates to the compensation they receive, we have been analyzing both the reasonableness and the alternatives available. This analysis led us to two conclusions:

1. On Reasonableness, It is widely understood that “with great power comes great responsibility,” and this logically implies that delegates with a higher amount of delegated Voting Power bear greater commitments: keeping Arbitrum safe and ensuring quorum. In this sense, it is reasonable that they could achieve better scoring through their voting activities. Just as their vote carries more weight during voting, it also carries weight when compensating for their participation in the DAO.
2. On Alternatives, it is possible to apply a multiplier to the parameters related to the Voting Scoring of delegates. As mentioned, a direct logic exists between a delegate’s Voting Scoring and their Voting Power. This approach makes sense and is more cost-efficient since one consequence is reducing the cost per unit of VP participating in the program. Limiting it to Voting Scoring is also not arbitrary; it is publicly known that some delegates with relatively low VP make significant contributions to the Arbitrum DAO. Therefore, Voting Power is not necessarily a metric that reflects the delegate’s “capacity” to make meaningful contributions outside of off- and on-chain voting.

With these two conclusions in mind, we developed a linear function, ranging from 50,000 to 4,000,000 ARB, in which, as Voting Power increases, a multiplier is applied to the sum of the different voting scorings (PR90 + Off-chain votes + On-chain votes).

While I understand the reasoning of wanting to tie VP with any type of metric within the program, the actual introduction of this metric created a “penalty” to delegates with lower VP, with the logic this would be the most cost-effective option.

While I can’t argue against this, as lowering the scores of the delegates will indeed lower the cost of the program, a better alternative to “incentivize” or “reward” delegates that have a higher VP (by being able to convince more holders to delegates to them) would be to introduce the multiplier starting at x1 and going up to x1.2, for instance.

That way, you keep analysing the delegates by their contributions/votes (without slashing) and introduces a bonus to the ones that have a higher VP.