Thanks for the detailed comparison of the other DAOs. I’ve got a few thoughts on the shift in incentives and the practical reality of these “attack costs.”
1. Passive Veto and the Urgency Around Delegation
My main concern is that moving to DVP-Quorum takes away the urgency to build up our delegate supply. Under the current system, undelegated tokens work as a “passive veto” ; they inflate the supply and push us to actively campaign for delegation in order to get over the threshold. If we switch over to DVP, that pressure valve disappears; if delegation drops off, the quorum bar just drops down with it.
While this fixes the “liveness” problem, it might work against our long-term goal of boosting participation. With the current initiatives in place to reward delegates, it seems like a no-brainer to focus on adding extra voting power to the delegates we already have and are paying them rather than just lowering the bar across the board.
2. Theoretical vs. Practical Attack Costs
When it comes to the “Quorum in USD” table: I think we need to be careful with these metrics. In practice, attacking the DAO is way harder than what the math suggests.
- Slippage: You can’t just buy 145M+ ARB at the current spot price. The liquidity isn’t there for that. Trying to buy up that amount would send the price through the roof, making the actual cost way higher.
- Borrowing Limits: Even the “renting” attack vector (borrowing votes through DeFi) has real ceilings in terms of liquidity. So, while the theoretical security margin might look lower under DVP, the practical barrier to entry stays quite high because of market depth.
3. Stress Testing
One edge case worth talking through is a high-volatility event. How does DVP-Quorum behave during a “capitulation” where the price tanks significantly and we potentially see delegates rage-quit (arb holders selling)?
- Liveness: Does the quorum adjust downward fast enough to let the DAO react to the crisis?
- Security: Or does it open up a window where the cost of an attack becomes dangerously low (because of the lower DVP base) before the system stabilizes?
4. Abstain Backstop like Scroll
Instead of just structurally lowering the quorum, we could have a wallet controlled by the OpCo that is strictly required to vote ABSTAIN only on proposals that are clearly well-intentioned/non-controversial but struggling to hit the threshold.
This could bridge the gap for liveness without permanently tying the quorum mechanics to a fluctuating DVP.