Hello world! This is where we’ll be posting updates for the Arbitrum DAO community to see what we’ve been working on since receiving the delegation for the following year. Feel free to leave any questions here as well. And be sure to mint a Voter Pass if you haven’t already.
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Updates – October 29, 2024
AI proposal summaries
A brief summary for each proposal can now be found next to every proposal. We’re looking to expand this MVP into something more comprehensive, including forum debate/discussion summaries.
Tutorial
When a user minted a pass, they weren’t able to immediately vote as their pass was minted after all currently active proposals’ snapshot were taken. This would require users to mint the pass, then come back in a few days when a new proposal was live, and then learn how to vote. We’ve since changed that. Now when a new user mints a Voter Pass they are walked through a brief tutorial to get them familiar with how the protocol works. We’ve already noticed a significant uptick in user retention as a result of this change.
Rationale Capture
To expand on maximally impactful participation, a rationale capture flow has been integrated into the metagovernance process. This includes AI-generated options as well as the ability for the voter to create a custom response. The team is exploring a model by which we can replace the AI-populated responses with the custom responses of actual voters. Should a custom response creator have a highly selected rationale by other voters, rewards will be considered.
Backend and code refactoring
We have completed a migration and upgrade of our database which was much needed to improve the storing of additional Snapshot proposals for Arbitrum. This has significantly improved data speeds leading to a better user experience.
A lot of other bits-and-pieces have been worked through; server code refactoring, improved logging and data capturing, and general maintenance.
Metrics
Total voter authority mobilized
Since the proposal, the Event Horizon community has mobilized over $204,000,000 in cumulative voting authority across various proposals and DAOs, up from $89,000,000. $56,800,000 of that was mobilized for Arbitrum specifically. That’s over $56m of voting power given to the community, $56m which was previously not participating in governance.
Average voter turnout
The typical voter turnout prior to receiving the delegation was about 7 voters with Gitcoin Pass. The last 5 proposals the Event Horizon DAO community voted on was 15.2 or an increase of 117% in average number of voters.
Voter Pass mints
Since the passing of the proposal, we’ve gone from 521 Voter Pass holders to 583 Voter Pass holders. That’s an increase of 12% of Voter Pass holders without any social media or marketing efforts.
While we’re proud to welcome new members of the community we want to aim for much higher. That’s why our primary focus going forward will be user growth. The more voters and potential delegates we can bring to Arbiturm the better. For that reason, we’re looking to expand the team with a Growth Lead to maximize Event Horizon’s reach, to grow our socials, voters and to foster an active community which leaves constructive rationales on proposals. More on that below.
Roadmap
Delegate training boot camp
We’re partnering with UPenn’s FranklinDAO to start onboarding new delegates to the space. As a part of their semester-long educational program, about 60 students will get up to speed on all things crypto. Part of this will involve learning about how DAOs and governance works. Event Horizon will slot in by providing voting power to these students, collecting voting rationales, and outputting a post-program delegate report card. The intention of the program is to train new delegates and provide an off-ramp to outstanding participants which includes durable individual VP.
Rationale providing contests
As a part of our goal of onboarding not only new voters but also new delegates. We’re looking to get those who do vote to start posting rationales, hopping in community calls, posting on forums, etc. This will be one of the main responsibilities of our new growth (specifically community) support additions to the team.
AI proposal summaries
As mentioned above, we’re looking to expand the MVP we currently have available for proposal summaries. This would include summaries of Arbitrum Forum debates/discussions. The goal is for the end user to be able to get up to speed on not only what the proposal is saying, but more importantly what the community is saying.
We’re hiring!
As mentioned above, our top priority is growing the community. To that end, we’re looking to add a Growth Hacker to the Event Horizon DAO core team. This may even end up requiring two people. We received over 600 applications and have been diligently working through them all.
Call to action: mint your free Voter Pass!
If you haven’t done so already, be sure to mint a free Voter Pass. It takes a few seconds and allows you to vote with a more substantial amount of voting power. All proposals, be it Snapshot or Tally, are in our unified front end. We’re looking to add more forum integrations in the future too.
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Updates – December 4, 2024
The team grew
We made two new hires! Both on the growth side, specifically community and socials. They are getting spun up this week, so expect the fruits of their labors to trickle in over the coming months ahead.
Discord revamp
We did a total revamp of our Discord to facilitate easier proposal discussion and to have a seamless landing pad for each new community member. While the community is still in early days, we already had a team drop a proposal asking for feedback from the community.
Meaningful votes have gone up
The number of meaningful voters, voters with over $100k of voting power, has increased in the Arbitrum ecosystem by 40% thanks to Event Horizon. We’re now pushing around 18 meaningful voters per proposal.
Voter pass mints are up
There are now 610 voter passes minted. That’s up 5% since the last update and that’s before our marketing efforts kicked in.
More voters
We’re now seeing upwards of 18 voters per proposal.
Delegate bootcamp with FranklinDAO
We’re spinning up the delegate bootcamp with @PennBlockchain club members. These individuals will be not only getting used to voting with meaningful authority, but also leaving forum and proposal feedback, both of which we will manually filter and post the most value-adding contributions to their respective forum threads. Those with the most valuable contributions will be spotlighted to the Arbitrum community by us at which point we’d ask the Arbitrum DAO to delegate small starter delegations to get the most promising micro-delegates a delegation of their own. This is part of our initiative to go beyond just voting. We will look to expand this beyond FranklinDAO to the broader community. @krst
Twitter reactivated and growing
After a brief hiatus, we’ve spun up our Twitter again with the help of our new hires. This has helped us cross a big threshold of over 1000 Twitter followers. Our tweets are getting a little over 10 likes each which is solid engagement. While not ultimately the main KPIs relevant for Arbitrum, this is a large part of the top of funnel for new prospective voters and discussion/rationale contributors.
Roadmap
Contests and giveaways
We will start doing monthly contents and give aways to incentivize thoughtful forum and rationale contributions. We will manually be doing a screening of these and only post those which pass our quality check. We’re intentionally doing things that do not scale at this stage as solving arguably the problem in DAOs (lack of meaningful participation) will take time and effort as we continue to drop more pieces of the pipeline into place.
AI voting agents
We’re exploring the option to have users be able to spin up AI voting agents which will vote on their behalf and in line with a user’s priorities (e.g. revenue to the DAO, funding public good initiatives, decentralization, etc.) The idea is that most of DAO governance is automated except this “last mile” of actually commenting on and voting on proposals, although voting alone will likely be the initial focus. 500 AI bots voting with their owners’ volition just might be more valuable and representative of the community than 20 voters manually doing it, even permitting a less than perfect expression of volition. This is early stages and something we want to work with the community on in the scoping and potential implementation thereof.
Community call
We’ll be hosting our first community call next week, look out for it on the Arbitrum calendar. There we’ll be discussing these updates, growth strategies, and AI voting agents.
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Hi!
There are no Arbitrum votes in Snapshot.
Just a couple of weeks ago everything was fine. Can you explain?
I see only Optimism and AAVE, but we have 3 votings right now in Arbitrum.
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Arbitrum proposals are stored in a subspsce.
UPDATE: Transition to Agentic Governance
Users want to be heard, yet they don’t want to ‘do governance’. This is one of the lessons we’ve learned through both our successes and failures thus far (mid-program report coming soon).
When Arbitrum DAO voted to support Event Horizon’s “Voter Enfranchisement Pool” our mandate was clear: increase the number of people who can have their voices heard in Arbitrum DAO. With this learning in mind, Event Horizon is working to build a more intuitive, user-friendly governance UX through what we’ve defined as the Emperor-Consul AI Agent model.
Each voter is assigned a trusted, agentic consul to which they are the emperor. The human voter simply communicates their higher-level desires to their agentic consul, and the consul goes out into the digital agora and continues to represent those interests until told otherwise. This modality compresses the highly taxing governance process detailed below, into simple chat engagements with an AI representative.
Along the way, the consul agents will provide the human voters with reports of their voting behavior, the latest relevant news and events it has come across within each DAO of interest, and more. Through these communications, the consul can be further refined to reinforce actions that please the human voter, and deprecate those which deviate from how the human voter would have otherwise manually voted. The user can also override any decision by voting manually at any time.
In the first couple weeks since the launch of AI agents, we have seen over 120 individual agents created, each with a unique persona, and the user dialog has begun rolling in, further evolving each agent.
Proxy vs Independent Actor: We believe that it is critical to ensure that AI Agents are underpinned by human actors which they represent. The desired outcome is not to have thousands of independently acting AI agents deciding the fate of today’s protocols. Rather it is to use AI agents as proxies for true human desires. In this regard, the creation and inclusion of AI agents must be on a per-person or per-organizational basis.
1. Fixing a Broken Industry UX – The current governance UX standard is broken.
Prior to the creation of Event Horizon, the average voter had no reason to participate in governance whether manually or agentically as they had no voting power to leverage. Every DAO requires millions of dollars to have a meaningful impact. Such voting power is a luxury previously relegated to fewer than 50 individuals across all major DAOs, and of those 50 it was an opportunity typically utilized by about 20.
Before making governance better, Event Horizon had to make it accessible through the creation of the voter pool.
However, in the process of making voting meaningful, Event Horizon made many of the pain points of governance more apparent. By bringing dozens of proposals across 8 DAOs under the same UI umbrella, Event Horizon unintentionally highlighted just how much friction remained in the standard DAO governance UX by requesting the user go through the process tens of times per week.
The average proposal requires weeks to months of rigorous, often fruitless effort. It’s important to place oneself in the mind of a retail voter with little net voting power, no immediate incentive to participate, and limited connection to delegates or the broader governing body. At present, for maximal participation, we are asking this average retail voter to engage as follows:
- Forum: a voter must read dozens of comments across half a dozen or more proposals over the course of weeks of dialog in the governance forum.
- Working Groups: sometimes, this process is further fragmented across working groups which then turns the stream of communication found in the forum into a torrent of constant chatter across dozens of time zones in hard-to-follow telegram groups.
- Video Calls: along with chat communications there is an expectation that a fully informed voter would join multiple hours of Zoom or Meets sessions.
- Temperature Check: After the communications have been completed the proposal may move to temperature check at which point the user should manually sign their support. And, while it may sound like a small inconvenience when simply written here, for some hardware wallets add further friction. The added effort of finding, connecting, and interacting with a physical device for an already fairly low-reward endeavor does add more barriers to participation. For this effort, the proposal may fail at this point setting the process back to step one.
- Onchain Proposal: If all the above has been completed, the manual signature process of the temperature check is repeated on chain with the same inconveniences and potential for failure due to rejection or quorum.
In fact, it is a process so ridden with time, friction, setbacks and obstacles that nearly every DAO has had to implement some form of Delegate Incentive Program to encourage participation even amongst the most influential of voters. And, while being a delegate is a valuable contribution to the ecosystem and the difficulty found in being a delegate is aptly compensated such that participation and productivity do occur, this simply doesn’t translate well to the average voter.
Solution: Through agentic governance, Event Horizon is able to eliminate the vast majority of these hurdles. Text-based communication (forum, working group, and even video transcripts) can be fed directly into the model. The temperature check and on-chain votes can be automatically handled for the user by their agent.
2. Greater Voter Inclusion: While it is likely impossible to create an agentic model which represents its underpinning human’s interest with 100% accuracy, narrowing the delta between the would-be manually selected choice of the human actor and the automatically selected choice of the AI agent is crucial. The closer the difference converges, the stronger the case for synthetic decision trees becomes. I.e. 1,000 synthetic agents representing 1,000 retail users with 95% accuracy is a clearly superior structure to 10 human voters representing themselves with 100% accuracy. There is no inherent virtue in human action itself, so long as AI models accurately represent what the human actor would have done, and reducing the friction to participation on the human serves only to increase net representation within the DAO, which has been our mandate from the start.
3. Future Evolution Capacity: AI governance allows for significant future expansion which we will discuss at greater length in a future post.
4. Anti-Sybil: We’ve been reviewing the Sybil behavior noted last week. It’s disappointing that someone, likely within the delegate, channel would use the pool for nothing more than to satisfy their own desire to troll. That said, we have already learned from this instance and implemented the first step of a multi-part solution:
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Align Around Agent Voting: We have consolidated all voting around agent interactions. One can still manually tell their agent to vote in specific ways, but the actual voting is conducted by the agent (which we can directly injuncted upon if need be). Absent agents providing a point of intervention, there is a difficult balance between sybil prevention and user friction which occurs when you require added proof of humanity. Scaling up individual wallet sybil requirements blocks trolls, but also adds friction to real users and stifles our mandate to drive higher participation.
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IP tracking: Because we are taking a more interventionist approach, we can use IP access as a sybil filter. Event Horizon will purchase and blacklist all major VPN addresses and track IP-based engagement to internally identify clusters. If behavior is suspicious, Event Horizon will freeze agent clusters and provide a report and rationale to the DAO. Any affected wallets would also be able to petition their blacklist here should they wish to come public with their ownership of any potentially erroneously blocked agents.
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Conversational Monitoring: All voting engagements will require the provision of a request or preference set to the AI agent in the form of conversation. Event Horizon will have access to all chat logs with the agents which will further allow for the identification of similarities between the reasonings / intentions passed through to the agents.
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Increasing Net Participation: As the agent count increases, the threshold for Sybil capture rises. Since transitioning to fully agentic voting, the voter turnout has already risen from ~30 during the Sybil instance this past Friday to over 100 and rising as each new agent comes online. In the coming weeks, we expect >250 new agents. In the coming months, we expect to cross 1,000 with each agent further hardening the system against individual Sybil behavior.
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(non-AI Sybil Improvement) Improvements to MSS timing and Notification: Event Horizon will expand the MSS veto window to extend 22 hours after the EH snapshot closure and will notify MSS members of proposals that closed with suspicious contexts including large end-of-vote influx and close margin outcomes.
We believe that this direct involvement will better protect the pool and the trade-off of greater centralization is justifiable given the pool is a public good. It is a free privilege and not a right. No users paid for this VP and voters are not entitled to it should they engage in suspicious behavior.
5. Greater Rationale Capture: each of the now >100 agents is providing a bespoke rationale set for each proposal in accordance with the preferences of its underpinning human voter. We can already see quite granularly why an agent is voting on behalf of its human.
6. Faster Decision Time: Given all voting is done through agents, the start-to-finish voting process can be compressed down to minutes.
7. Fidelity to Voter Preference: As stated above, Event Horizon is working to compress the delta between the agentic outcome and the otherwise desired outcome of the human voter as greatly as possible. Satisfactory margin can be identified further through post-vote follow-ups with the human voter to check for agent-human alignment and can be further inferred by the rate of continued usage. Should a user choose to continue allowing their agent to operate and vote in their proxy, there is an assumption that the user is satisfied with the degree to which the agent has accurately represented their interest. And, again, at any point, the user may chat with their agent to modify its behavior pattern should they feel the agent isn’t ideally aligned with their interests or should they simply have a change in their interests over time.
8. Alignment with Initial Mandate:
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Manual Voting is Still Possible: Users will still be able to vote manually as was the core mandate of the original proposal. The only subtle difference is that manual voting will be done by requesting one’s agent vote a specific way on a specific proposal, vs manually selecting yes or no as a button on the proposal UI.
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Increase participation: Part of our core mandate was to drive higher voting participation. The two greatest barriers to participation are motivation and difficulty. We initially tackled increasing motivation by increasing voting power. However, we learned that this is only half of the equation. If the difficulty is sufficiently high as to exceed motivation, only the absolute apex governance dedicated individuals show up. Imagine effort as a point system. To willingly participate, a users ‘motivation points’ must exceed the ‘difficulty points’ which they perceive. If most users maintain 30 points of motivation in governance, but face 100 points of difficulty, they will not show up. We erroneously focused solely on increasing motivational points. When in fact, the difficulty barrier was quite high and increasing motivation was only half of the issue. But if instead, we can also lower the difficulty to 10 points via agentic simplification and automation vs manual engagement and repeated user obligations, anyone with greater than 10 points of motivation should enter the ecosystem. It’s a two-sided issue and we believe strongly this will address the to-date, unaddressed half of the equation.
Ultimately, AI and Agentic structures are a when, not if, for governance. And, Event Horizon sees it as imperative that it be done with the interests of the existing ecosystem stakeholders (delegates, users, foundation, and more) considered vs at the inevitable rogue swarm alternative. Event Horizon is here to bring Agentic governance to light while working hand-in-hand with each of you here. Please feel free to contribute suggestion and feedback below hopefully in the spirit of teamwork, collaboration, and the best interest of the ecosystem as our north star.
Hi. I have a few questions:
Can I override a vote from the agent? Can you share a detailed step-by-step procedure? (I failed to do it in all my attempts)
Can I choose which DAOs will the agent engage with?
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(post deleted by author). I was looking at the wrong snapshot page.
gm
I think this is simply unacceptable. Announcing a transition to agentic governance when the proposal was something else and what the DAO approved was entirely different.
Your value proposition at the start of the discussions was the identification of a problem to be solved:
What you are essentially saying here is that your large-scale experiment appears to have failed:
Since what you believed would happen once the necessary capital was made available to users as an incentive to participate has not materialized:
This is evident from the results of the five months during which the program has been running. In the discussions prior to the proposal’s approval, you estimated that you could attract over 2,600 voters with a meaningful say (double emphasis on meaningful say):
How can that meaningful say be replaced by AI agents?
Regarding the number of individuals, a review of the proposals voted on so far shows an average of 16 voters per proposal. Many of these voters are DAO delegates, meaning the net number is even lower if the goal was to incorporate or empower new voices.
That said, the latest votes did see a considerable increase in voters (between 80 and 90 in the last 3 proposals), though this is still low compared to the initial estimates. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you already incorporated the agents?
The idea behind the proposal was not to have AI agents voting on behalf of users—which may or may not be valuable, I’m not evaluating that now—but rather to empower and increase the participation of people who had something to say. This is definitely not the same as AI agents carrying out some kind of participation with a disinterested voter giving instructions.
I also disagree with this conclusion. UX may suck sometimes but its not the main issue. What EH made apparent is that the random user simply isn’t interested in getting involved or participating, even when they have the opportunity to influence 7M in voting power. In other words, interest in participation is not driven by voting power.
I believe that if you intend to continue down this path, such a substantial modification to the proposal should go through Snapshot to reconfirm the DAO’s interest in continuing this experiment as it is now being presented.
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Hello Pedro,
We’ll start by stating that we greatly appreciate your clear enthusiasm for the core mission of this experiment as defined in the original proposal. And, rest assured, this core mission of increasing voter participation hasn’t changed.
At no point did we say, nor do we believe, that the efforts have categorically failed. The notion of successes and failures we mentioned was a deliberate framing and word choice to show the community that we are well aware of both what has worked and what hasn’t and are adjusting accordingly. In most experiments, elements of failure do occur and anyone who says otherwise would be lying. That doesn’t, however, invalidate the entire initiative. The failures are where the learnings happen.
As far as total voter participation, numbers to date have fallen short of the assumption-based hypothetical mentioned in the initial proposal. However, in just days of launching agentic governance, we are on pace to reach much closer to those targets than one might imagine.
You highlight the definition of “meaningful”. Meaningful in this context explicitly means a vote with voting power behind it. This again, has not changed. Voting through Event Horizon still offers the same voice amplification it always has. Whether voting is done through pressing a voting button, through carrier pigeon, or through commanding an AI agent, the same pool is being voted on, with the same distribution model, by the same end users. In effect, there is no difference between A.) pressing “YEA” to vote and B.) telling an agent “vote YAE”. It is simply a quality-of-life improvement from a UI/UX perspective.
Regarding barriers to participation, the first principals conclusion we’ve landed on seems natural and intuitive. Many decisions (including governance) are a balance between a person’s desire to enact the decision and the perceived difficulty in enacting the decision. Low desire and high difficulty leads to non-participation. With that in mind decreasing difficulty (through a better experience) is an equally valid approach to driving participation as increasing desire (through added voting power). There is no reason to only address one side of the equation when both can be improved simultaneously.
Regardless, when the time comes to next vote on the future of Event Horizon, Event Horizon itself will still be available to you as quite likely your best platform to voice your opinion “against” or (hopefully with an open mind and some use of the product) “for” it as a public good. Thank you for your feedback. It has been noted.
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The mission
In recent conversations with delegates, we were surprised to find that there seems to be some confusion about the overall aim of Event Horizon. The original proposal was clear: Voter participation is low. To that end, Event Horizon has “the aim of enfranchising the tens of thousands of small voters” via a delegation from the DAO to a public access voter pool over the course of a one-year experiment. This was to be done by “giving underrepresented DAO citizens multiplied voting power and therefore more incentive to express their voices.” In other words, the mission is, and has always been, to increase the number of voters in Arbitrum DAO. Half way into this one-year experiment, how have we done?
Evaluation and metrics
Most delegates found our initial arguments for how we could attract more voters with vote multiples via Implicit Delegation compelling, but it’s important to be empirical with these experiments. How has Event Horizon fared so far? To answer this question we need to first understand what important markers of success might look like. Given our mandate has always been to increase voters, a natural metric to look at is, well, how many voters we’ve attracted. Let’s look at the numbers.
The original proposal highlights, “voting when you only have, say, $500 worth of ARB doesn’t make sense, it’s a drop in the bucket. Sitting out of 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 and surfaces greater cognition from the community.”
Today, without EH, of the >3,000 total voters, most only mobilize dust amounts. In fact, there are only ~280 voters who vote with 1000 ARB (~$500). Each Event Horizon voter represents ~43,000 ARB. This places each EH voter at a tied spot for ~65th largest voter in any given vote and increases the number of voters mobilizing >1,000 ARB from 280 to ~430, or a ~57% increase in meaningful votes.
To the second portion, turning this top of funnel, meaningful voting, into meaningful forum and discussion participation, we have already begun implementing communication features detailed below.
What about absolute voters? For the first 6 months, our average voters per proposal floated at around 10-15 voters. When we were estimating a few thousand in the proposal it’s clear: not good. But we’ve been around for slightly longer than 6 months. What does the full data look like? Let’s take a look:
Very interesting. What happened in the last couple of weeks? In a word: AI.
AI Agents
After hopping on several dozen calls with users it became clear to us that while voting power is a real incentive to show up, it’s not enough to justify the slow crawl through molasses that is DAO governance. You have to read the forums, through incessant arguments in a hostile, low cost-to-critique environment. You have to read proposals, talk with delegates, attend community calls, vote on Snapshot, vote on Tally, and provide a rationale for both votes. It’s a lot. We learned that it’s not that people don’t care; they simply don’t have the time and energy to labor for free. And fair play. A model voter is a delegate, and delegates, which includes Event Horizon users, are best thought of as senators, not as citizen voters.
In effect, through discourse with our users, we found that there are two sides to the equation when it comes to voter participation. The first being incentive. This was the only side our initial structure addressed. We incentivized participation with vote amplification. However, the other side, which was neglected (and ironically made more evident) through Event Horizon, was the perceived difficulty. The perceived difficulty of governance must not exceed the perceived value. And, without making governance easier, the high difficulty meant we could only attract those who found particularly high value in governance. The governance nerds as we lovingly put it.
This is where AI agents come in. What if you could spin up an agent which voted based on your preferences and values with a high degree of accuracy? What if all it took was answering a few questions in under 2 minutes?
There’s nothing special about manually clicking a button to vote. Would you rather have 10 humans voting manually? Or 10,000 agents voting with 90% accuracy to their underlying human’s preferences? For us, the answer is clear: there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn by who presses a button. What ultimately matters is that a user’s volition is expressed.
Current AI agents aren’t perfect. But we also have to be humble: most likely, these AI agents are already better than you at programming, research, making art, making music, giving therapy, debate, mathematics, and more. And if they’re not now, just wait a week. A new state-of-the-art model will be waiting for you.
But it’s also true that these models have their drawbacks. They can hallucinate and their context windows are limited. But skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is. AI governance is here to stay, and we’re happy to build with the DAO including all the necessary precautions and oversight (like the MSS veto vote) required to do this right. If we don’t build this, someone else will. And chances are they won’t care to work with the delegates as we do.
Sybil
How can we be sure that each agent corresponds to a single human? We can’t with absolute certainty, but we can take some precautions to minimize sybil attacks. After a recent sybil incident due to a too low Gitcoin pass requirement, we’ve tightened the screws. Changes include:
- IP address monitoring preventing too many agents being spun up from a single location
- VPN blocking
- Winding down manual NFT voting in favor of voting manually through chat
- The ability to shut down suspicious bot clusters
- Further, the very nature of the agent swarm affords build in Sybil resistance. As good actors setup agents, those agents continue to vote in perpetuity. To date we have over 150 doing just that. As that number grows the count to capture rises for any potentially malicious actors. As we rapidly approach north of 1,000 independent, human-rooted agents, a mal-intended participant would need to create hundreds of agents while trying to avoid IP blocks and traceable similarity between the agents and conversations the actor creates.
No sybil solution will be perfect, but this is a step in the right direction.
New features (launched in the last 2 weeks)
As outlined above, the number of voters we have has skyrocketed in only 2 weeks after switching to agentic voting. This validates our thesis and the conversations we’ve had with users that the final piece of the puzzle to increase participation is friction. Agents automate away this last mile problem.
Given the step function in users we saw after switching to agentic voting, we’ve been hard at work shipping as many features as possible to make these agents as smart, useful, and seamless as possible.
Voting rationales
Agents are no longer opaque black boxes who vote seemingly at random. All agents now provide thoughtful rationales for why they voted the way they did. These are not yet public, as we’re working on building the UI, but users can access their own agent’s rationale via the history tab at any point. Automatic forum posting of these rationales is also a feature we will be shipping soon, but we have begun sharing consolidated reasoning manually in our delegate communication channel.
Agentic vote preview
Users can see how their personal agent will vote, giving them the ability to intercede at any point.
External Context Inclusion – Agentic forum discussions monitoring
Agents no longer vote with just the user’s preferences + the contents of the proposal. As we all know, much of the governance process is done on the forums. Each agent now has this context just as any of us do. Decisions are made with the full back and forth taken into account, not just the “salesy” language put in a proposal.
Forum comment writing
Agents can now use full context provided from forum discussions and the users’ preferences to write thoughtful commentary on live and active proposal discussions. A common point of feedback we heard from delegates was that thus far Event Horizon hasn’t contributed to the direction of the pre-voting governance process. While our initial mandate was increasing voting, we took this feedback very seriously. These agents, in their current form (not some future state) are well poised to help with the DAO decision making process today by providing thoughtful contributions. We are not yet automatically posting these comments, as we want to find the right way to add agent rationales to discussions, while avoiding content overload. But, this is the first step in the direction of adding constructive contributions to the pre-voting process.
Proposal suggestions
Our agents have the ability to go beyond crafting forum responses that highlight their user’s preferences. Our agents can also suggest changes to active proposals.
An inflection point
The switch to agentic voting has proven to be a step function, not only in users (10->150 in 2 weeks), but also in functionality and utility.
We’re excited to keep building in this direction to not only continue to bring voters to the Arbitrum DAO, but to go use this new direction to also
Further risk reduction
We’ve heard concerns about Event Horizon’s delegation size and ability to influence votes. Given a recent sybil episode and the imprecise nature of sybil resistance, we suggest the following change: if a vote is contentious, and EH is likely to be a deciding vote, Event Horizon will force vote Abstain.
This change, paired with the already in place MSS veto ability, means that the Event Horizon DAO poses effectively zero risk to the DAO in any way at all. We’ll also remind everyone that Event Horizon does not hold any DAO assets. The MSS holds all tokens delegates to Event Horizon. Absent Event Horizon’s ability to influence any contentious votes, we functionally serve as an innocuous experiment in agentic governance building features to help make DAO governance easier to participate in. In addition to serving our initial mandate of bring more voters to the DAO, the recent agentic features listed above mean that we are on the verge of bringing thoughtful feedback and suggestions to actively live proposals, prior to any voting being held.
Final notes and further work
We would like to reemphasize that despite the change in form factor, the mission has not changed. For many, this change in form factor toward AI solutions is already seen as an exciting advancement toward the future of governance and governance inclusion. However, for those who may hold reservations, as we all learn to embrace the changes AI is driving, it is important to recognize that in all likelihood, this is an inevitability be it through Event Horizon or another similar structure. And, this is genuinely your opportunity to collaborate with a team in sculpting a solution you are comfortable with or can find excitement toward. The alternative being another initiative which you may have no voice in molding. We therefore invite feedback and suggestions for how to better improve the product over the span of the remaining 6 months of this experiment.
Finally, some exciting new features are being looked at internally including:
- Feeding in social media feeds and Arbitrum governance forum account tracking to further customize an agent’s persona and style of thinking
- Building a “delegate mode” whereby delegates can charge the agent with voting with their personal delegations, comment on forums, update a delegates delegation thread with rationales, and more. This is experimental and the feasibility is being investigated internally