After reading through all of the comments a few points we want to make:
We’re a big fan of the change to just having 3 months of voting history applied and should allow for more delegates to come into the system and easily over time.
Our biggest concern and one we share with most is the huge underweighting of comments after the snapshot which we think shouldn’t be. This setup would create incentives for people to game proposals and also increases the amount of “spam” comments purely for credit prior to a vote coming to snapshot. Keeping the same status quo of comments at or around the snapshot time would be best in our opinion; it seemed like that system worked quite well.
Hello Thank you for your comments, here are the answers:
We understand this situation, but the reason we are doing this is to reduce the gameability of the program. We also agree that this should change in the future to be a little more inclusive, but we want to scale the program gradually.
Your score will not be reset every month, when the program starts (obviously with the DAO’s authorization), we will take the historical tally participation of the last 90 days.
This means that if for example the program starts on October 1st, the delegate’s tally history will be determined by his/her participation in the voting in the months of July, August and September.
Thank you for asking this question, in the previous program results, for example April, you can get a breakdown of the rubric and the criteria selected for assigning Bonus Points.
Our idea is to continue in this way, evaluating significant proposals month by month in order to determine the allocation of bonus points. It is important to clarify that the rules will remain the same to this, bonus points will only be assigned to proposals that do NOT request funds from the proposal creator.
As mentioned here:
Also, with respect to promotion of the forum and the program in general, for this iteration, we will be reaching out to inactive delegates to explore the possibility of how to motivate them to participate in the program.
The objective of the program is the one mentioned in the proposal.
We will try to implement changes to add participants as we get metrics, this will help us determine what is the right way to route the incentives.
On the other hand, there are currently around 123 delegates with more that 50k of VP that are not part of the program, we will keep working in order to motivate them to participate on it.
I liked this new approach, extending the delegates commitment to the governance calls as well, and the incentives to engage in the conversation from the start, as that improves the feedback to the author and make the proposals better tuned when going to snapshot.
This continuity ensures that delegates can maintain long-term engagement, which is crucial for the sustained health of decentralized governance. The proposed budget appears well-calculated, and the increase in monthly compensation for delegates is not only justified but necessary, particularly in light of the significant 65% year-to-date decline in the value of ARB.
The introduction of bonus points for participating in governance calls is a particularly commendable enhancement. Active participation in these calls often leads to deeper discussions and more nuanced understanding of proposals, which in turn fosters more informed and thoughtful voting.
I am highly supportive of this proposal, as it reflects a thoughtful approach to maintaining and enhancing the incentives for active, informed participation in governance, which is essential for the success and resilience of the ecosystem.
@SEEDGov It would be great if delegates could meet in a XSpaces (Twitter) session to discuss the most relevant aspects of the ARB ecosystem and generate more proposals, not just in writing.
Thanks for putting this proposal together. I really love the overall concept, but I do have a few concerns about the criteria. As other delegates have pointed out, the early-stage comments might be challenging to keep effective since some people could post content that doesn’t really add value to the discussion.
Additionally, regarding the Bonus Points update:
Bonus points update: Adding Bonus Points for delegates who attend the “Arbitrum Open Governance Call” (monthly) and the “Open Discussion of Proposal(s) - Bi-weekly Governance Call.”
For the monthly call, 2.5% BP will be awarded for attendance.
For the bi-weekly calls, 2.5% BP will be awarded for attending each call.
I think this could be difficult for delegates from the Asia region to participate in since these calls are often scheduled in US or European time zones. Do you have any thoughts on how to address this?
I’m not sure how this would affect the budget, but I’d suggest raising the cap above 50 delegates, especially since the program is set to run for the next 12 months. We’re already over the limit with the number of delegates currently enrolled. Even though not all are eligible for incentives yet, I think we’ll reach that ceiling soon.
@SEEDGov - how was the 50k ARB threshold set? how do we determine if it’s appropriate and how do we change it? Would you consider 10k, 20k and why not? what’s the logic behind this specific threshold.
I ask this as for a newcomer delegate like myself this represents a significant hurdle to get going, attracting attention to be re-delegated to is very hard, in the absence of that working I notice when analysing newer smaller delegates many are buying their way in, spending 50k ARB (approx $26500 USDC atm) to just clear this threshold.
I assert there is much potential new delegate talent that has time and skill to be high context in Arbitrum and contribute meaningful intellectual capital to advance proposals yet lacks either
the social capital to attract re-delegation
or the financial capital to float themselves, and
the track record of Snapshot and Tally voting to onboard and become a new delegate.
Number 3 anyone can get started with, I’m doing that myself now with voting history the last 6 weeks with minimal ARB VP.
I appreciate this program, and this is a good conversation to have.
How might we design the full Delegate Development Life Cycle to ensure fresh recombination of talent has a means and the path is accessible and realistically achievable to become a delegate?
@jojo and @BlockworksResearch , I think something to remember is that proposals are supposed to go on the forums at a minimum 1 week prior to going to Snapshot (and often will go longer). So there should be ample time for an active delegate to participate in discussion prior to a vote. I don’t want to dismiss the concern, but ultimately I think pre-voting discussion can provide a lot of value and if we can incentivize it that is a good thing.
I’ve fallen into that trap before of waiting until voting so I see the (and like) the motivation behind the change. IMO it’s a welcomed changed, although I had not thought of this issue so don’t want to handwaive it. Openly brainstorming as I type… but a the few solutions I can really think of are either 1) reducing the penalty at the cost of being able to effectively enforce it or 2) the penalty only kicks in if you have >x% (10%?, 3 or more?) of your comments after it already went to vote. 3) Maybe the penalty is put into two tiers. If a pre-vote comment period is only 7 days, the penalty is 75%. If the comment period goes 7+ days then it triggers the 50% type thing (or whatever threshold of days makes sense, maybe its 10 or something. of course 2 and 3 come at the cost of creating more complexities… which I’m not a huge fan of.
Personally, I think best solution may be starting at 50% with openness to adjust after 3 months of results. This may just end up being a situation that rarely applies in the end. I think even in the stated scenario most votes wouldn’t need more than a few days to get out an opinion. Although I’m speaking thru the lens of a single voter versus some delegates who maybe have teams and may have longer processes to their commentary / voting.
I appreciate the efforts to refine the previous DIP and agree with what’s presented to the DAO.
I want to amplify what @KlausBrave & @Englandzz_Curia mentioned about being inclusive of the global time & not keeping delegates from specific regions at a disadvantage.
The KPI of reaching more delegates who are incentivized will cross the 50 delegate benchmark and this proposal shall have provisions to address in case of the higher number of delegates scoring a TP of 65%, as pointed out by @0xDonPepe
The threshold of 60% in the last 90 days shall attract more delegates in v1.1 than the previous DIP, but will also have higher chances of Sybil and delegates with less context about what happened in the DAO previously. I am sure we cannot have a Delegate screening. Still, without the context of history, there is less chance of high-value participation and there the Proposal Feedback’s subjectivity will play a crucial role. I suppose SEEDGov’s team efforts in refining those will be way more than currently estimated, and provisions shall be made for that by capping the number of proposals that the current resources mentioned in the proposal can handle.
Also, the clarity on the date on which this price shall be considered? The delay between publishing the monthly report and sending the ARB would create a different $ARB sent than what will be in the sheet. So, will the sheet be published after sending the ARB to respective delegates or have a cut-off date as the 15th Feb price will be for January month pay and on 15-16th Feb the ARB will be sent?
As one of the aims is stated above, providing clarity will be helpful though the different price scenarios clear it to an extent, but the gap between publishing monthly results and transferring can cause difference. Just highlighting that.
Example 1 has a scenario where the proposal was published in the forum and there are just 5 days to read and be in ESF, this can put those delegates who did not participate in the feedback of the proposal at a disadvantage.
To mitigate this a proposal that takes less than 2 weeks on the forum for discussion shall not have ESF & LSF classification. It should have the same wait irrespective of when the delegate participated in the discussion.
I would also share the same concerns as @Bobbay, in such a scenario just adding a comment is going to be redundant and increase the comments that the next delegate will have to read to get the context.
Overall, I favour this proposal and believe it pioneers the effort to make delegates more professional. This is a real opportunity at Arbitrum DAO.
Thank you once again for creating it.
We understand that it may be an inconvenient time for some delegates who are not in the time zone, so these are additional Bonus Points and do not form part of the main program scoring. We have raised this time zone issue in previous programs (which even affects us as well), but we believe it is worth promoting to more delegates to attend the governance calls.
We agreed with this, in fact we have mentioned this problem in the past, but we believe this is more of a structural problem of how DAO activities are managed. Maybe the Foundation should add a meeting within the time slot that covers the area of these delegates?
In fact, for example the Onboarding group, had this problem and solved it by organizing calls in different time zones.
As for the delegates viewing the async recordings, how do we verify that they have actually viewed the recording? Is there a reliable mechanism? This is a good problem to solve, we are open to suggestions on this aspect.
Anyway, we understand these problems and how difficult it can be to solve. But this is why we don’t think we should remove these BPs as they are used to incentivize delegates who can or make the effort to attend the calls.
Thank you for bringing this point up, we have discussed it a lot internally. So far approximately 34 delegates are managing to qualify for incentives and we hope to achieve in this iteration to reach 50 as stated in the KPI.
We believe that, if we manage to complete this goal quickly and the DAO sees good results and participation, we will be able to request by vote to expand this number and, if necessary, a larger budget. Our philosophy is to move forward step by step, demonstrate results and take care of ArbitrumDAO’s treasury.
The number is set in part by the amount and by the number of delegates in that range, currently 176. We also set that amount to avoid sybil attack, we prefer to scale the program a little at a time as we believe that a possible sybil damages the program.
We also have to be realistic with numbers that are manageable for the administrators. Behind the scenes we did a lot of administrative (KYC), communication and delegate support work. If it was decided to lower the number to 10k ARB we are talking about a number of 485 delegates that can apply, this could become unmanageable for the administrators and we could also receive several sybil attack.
We also take into account this number based on the report we made in the middle of the program.
In the study we conducted and in our research work, we realized that delegates with more than 50k of VP play a vital role in the DAO’s decision making process, as this is where the highest delegate/VP ratio is concentrated. However, despite all this, there are still a large number of delegates with more than 50k of VP who are not active in the DAO, so we want to work to reactivate these delegates who we believe can contribute positively to the DAO. This is important because as more ARBs become unlocked and enter circulation, it becomes more difficult to reach quorum, something that is extremely important to pass proposals in Tally, as our research shows:
On this we agree 100%, we know that there are many delegates with little VP. Even what surprised us during the previous iteration is that some have sought on their own who delegated VP (and also bought ARB token) to participate in the program and really made a great contribution to the DAO.
But as mentioned here:
We understand that the program cannot cover all the problems that exist in the DAOs. Even if we wanted to do so, we would need a large amount of human resources and budget, which we believe would be inefficient, not only because of the costs, but also because we are trying to solve everything at the same time (DAOs are plutocratic, there should be changes in the governance system). So we think it is healthy for the DAO to have several incentive programs that focus on different problems and are administered by different entities and, among all the programs, collaborate to make the ArbitrumDAO broad and diverse.
Thank you for the considered and comprehensive reply! I appreciate you sharing the history, logic, and process you have undertaken to structure this program. It makes sense.
Regarding timezones, there is 4 meetings a month 2.5% bonus each so 10% total available that’s significant. One way to solve for regional timezone accessibility would be for each alternating meeting to be at a different timezone that’s more friendly for different regions ensuring net net over each month there is a fair opportunity for anyone from anywhere to access these meetings live.
Regarding proof of watching the recordings, there could be a code word verbally mentioned that people could then supply to some form etc, there is probably other better ways to solve this.
Thanks for sharing an updated proposal and glad to see many learnings from the previous iterations being implemented here.
I support the bonus criteria for attending calls and I’d like to suggest considering similar weight i.e. 2.5% to other calls in which delegates participate. This can be considered part of the bonus points but if a delegate participates in all calls this does not mean they will automatically earn all 40%.
While I understand where you are coming from when it comes to DIP Bans or Suspensions, the current rationale behind it is rather subjective and lacks objective clarity. I suggest points based rubric for evaluation which would necessitate such drastic actions as well as a forum post explaining exactly why and how any delegate is banned.
There is a hard limit on the VP required to post on snapshot, hence a delegate without sufficient VP may not even be able to put their appeal up. I suggest the program admin takes up the responsibility to put up appeals if requested on the forum by the appealing delegate.
I also recommend investigating the implementation of ‘Expert Coalitions’ ie coalition of delegates who are experts in one or more particular area such as treasury or tokenomics etc. It would be great to have a pool of delegates in each of these Expert Coalitions that the DAO requires to grow as opposed to a large cohort being incentivised for writing the same set of comments in different words. This way we can identify a more streamlined budget for this program with a max. number of delegate set for each ‘Area of Expertise’
Hey, here are some answers to the questions that we received:
We are in agreement on this matter and trust in the goodwill of proposers to ensure that delegates have a reasonable amount of time to discuss proposals before they advance to Snapshot
That sounds reasonable. We can proceed with this approach on a trial basis, especially given that in the Continuous Upgrades segment, we have already considered the possibility of adjusting the Scoring methodology throughout the program.
This was discussed internally, and the proposed changes are primarily focused on reactivating inactive delegates with a significant amount of VP. As mentioned previously, the information gathered over the past few months has enabled us to implement anti-sybil mechanisms—such as the 50k VP requirement—that, for the time being, have been functioning as expected.
That’s a good question. To address this, we propose publishing the initial spreadsheet with the payment amounts (as we currently do) in USD. After the dispute period has concluded, we will submit the payment report to the MSS in ARB, based on the price at that time, and publish the corresponding report in the forum. This approach aims to minimize potential price fluctuations.
These are valid and understandable concerns. For the time being, we aim to keep this section as simple as possible until the DAO develops more sophisticated anti-fraud mechanisms (as we believe this is a general issue within the DAO and not unique to the program). However, we can assure you that SEEDGov will maintain the necessary transparency and openness to address situations like this. Any decisions will, of course, be communicated through prior publication in the forum, and it seems reasonable to us that any appeal be posted by the Program Administrator.
Looking ahead, we would like to implement anti-fraud policies to guide program administrators in DAOs on how to proceed and what guidelines to follow. In that sense, we agree with @DisruptionJoe comment.
Thank you for the recommendation. We are aware of the issue and believe this is where the DAO should evolve in the future. However, this should also be addressed at the governance level, particularly with different types of proposals and voting methods. Agora has been working on this for some time in Optimism, although we are unsure if there are similar plans in Arbitrum. Having different types of voting, where each delegate registers as an ‘expert’ in a specific voting category, would make it easier for us to track activity and adjust incentives accordingly.
To implement this, we also need to define, as a DAO, the most important verticals for ArbitrumDAO so that delegates are aligned. Fortunately, @Entropy has already initiated the first discussions in this area.
We support this proposal, and seeing the success of the first iteration of the incentive program we believe the extension presents a good opportunity for the DAO to nurture a growing community of delegates.
Depending on the outcome of this season of delegate incentives, we would be happy to continue support of these programs in the future.
gm all, and thanks to @seedlatam for all the work you have been doing on this.
Here are some thoughts from my side, some of which I have already expressed through private feedback:
The program should incentivize the professionalization of delegates, but not their bureaucratization.
We should explicitly incentivize delegates to add value to the DAO and measure their impact, instead of purely evaluating their output. All a delegate needs to do today is vote and justify that vote, and bring home a considerable amount of money.
We should strengthen the incentives for proactivity
We should reduce the rewards for basic activities.
Example 1: If a delegate is demonstrably reviewing on-chain code that will be executed during a Tally vote, they should be rewarded.
Example 2: the program should formalize and reward delegates that push forward new initiatives
Delegate compensation should be a mix of dollar value and ARB tokens.
Reason: Delegates should be incentivized to drive value into the ecosystem, which should be reflected in ARB’s value. If there is no connection between compensation and the value of ARB, this focus will be lost.
I suggest starting with an 80/20 split (80% fixed USD value, 20% in ARB).
Exclusivity: Similar to Entropy’s proposal, a delegate or organization should receive a bonus if it is not working with competing DAOs.
Thank you, @SEEDGov, for the well-thought-out proposal.
What I appreciate about this improved version of the program is the reduction in pure voting scoring and its justification, as well as the increase in meaningful participation scoring in the forum and during calls.
However, I would like to express my concern that the duration of the program should be reduced to six months instead of one year. This change would allow us to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and seek further improvements. I agree with @maxlomu’s statement on this matter; we should assess and compensate for the effectiveness and impact of the delegates.
As someone who just became eligible for compensation this month, I find it time-consuming to follow various topics, including approved proposals, new proposals, and their impacts, in order to cast an informed vote and justify it. This has become almost a full-time job for me. If we aim to measure their impact purely, it will make it even more challenging for new delegates to join the DAO.
I find the current proposal to be somewhat balanced; however, I suggest that we revise the criteria in the next six months and increase the weighting percentage of their impact on the DAO, as @maxlomu expressed.
Regarding this, how long does it usually take for MSS to pay the delegates?
Finally, could you provide some clarity regarding attendance at the calls?
As some delegates may not be able to communicate effectively and may remain quiet during the calls, will this still count towards their bonus points? Or must they actively participate in the discussions?
By the way, I strongly support this idea for the next version of the program.
