Appreciate your opinion as always @jojo, but you haven’t shared what you actually think about this proposal to sunset the DIP.
Also, in the time it took you to write all of this, you could have just filled in the anonymous survey with your feedback about the DIP so we can all make it better in the future.
We spent a good amount of time following what’s happening regarding Delegate Incentive Program and to be fair, I think it’s one of those topics that will have various opinions. We echo rather than sunsetting the DIP, it is better to apply some changes as time goes as experiments. One thing to do note is that we are aware some of points that are based on how much delegation has, it could be considered unfair to new and under represented but at the same time, it’s also rational argument that in theory, active and contributing delegates should be able to secure delegations. Of course, in reality, this doesn’t happen and this is also why for certain DAOs such as Uniswap and Compound, there are programs to delegate to active delegates via delegation from DAO treasury program. But that’s a separate discussion that DAO might need to have one day.
Appreciate the discussion here. While we don’t think sunsetting the DIP without an alternative plan in place is the best path forward, we agree with @stonecoldpat that a core issue lies in the commingling of intents.
Right now, the program is structured to reward both delegates and contributors within the same framework. This has created imbalances between participants who primarily want to focus on voting and those who are eager to contribute more actively beyond governance participation.
We believe that splitting these scopes would be an effective way to address the inefficiencies. The introduction of Tier X in the most recent iteration of the DIP already signals a willingness to move in this direction, and we hope to see this distinction made even clearer in the upcoming V2 being developed by SeedGov and the Arbitrum Foundation.
We believe Patrick summed up our view of the situation well. There are two types of activity that should be incentivized in broad strokes:
The first can be relatively objective, while the second is meaningfully more subjective. Part of the reason we are excited about OpCo is its ability to enable a more formal path for contributors to succeed. That said, there is still a hole missing in the workflow, something akin to the initial Firestarters, that enables new and upcoming contributors to make an outsized impact with a limited budget. Something akin to an incubator for talent, that places small bets, with high upside, and limited downside. That said, we believe that these two goals are best served independently, and previous DIP iterations showed that they likely should not be conflated under one program.
I just posted this proposal to snapshot here: https://snapshot.box/#/s:arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0xb1a39a0b7543e03cbb7aca0213448f4fbed4cbf1157fcb1b2458540fb452bc73
I think it is set up in a sufficiently neutral way and should serve to get a signal from the delegates as to what their preference is, regarding on what to do with the DIP.
It was my suggestion to make it a shielded ranked-choice vote, so everyone can vote without interference from what other delegates are voting, and can order the vote choices as per their true preferences.
For this vote to be binding, it needs to achieve a 3% non-constitutional quorum threshold, which at this offchain vote start time (ethereum block 23292645) is 139,253,514.323221335075381140 ARB (that can be verified here)
GM,
I’m not a fan of shielded votes.
In this case, I’ve voted against this proposal: “Keep the current version”.
Reason: This proposal and its measures seem rushed to me, and I believe it’s better to wait until the current programme v2 is proposed to see if concerns (all valid, and ones I agree with) are addressed. This also seems to be the Foundation’s position, as it was mentioned they are working with SEED to attempt and revamp this. I rather wait to see what they’ve been working on and then make a decision.
I vote first of all for the return of the program version 1.5
I was a consistent opponent of the changes that took place in this program
Even the changes in 1.5 I considered not thought out enough and immediately wrote that the team takes on too much subjective
The problem with any subjective assessment is that there is no universal and absolute opinion - therefore, in such programs it is necessary to compromise and minimize the influence of one person’s opinion on the assessment of all delegates
However, even 1.5 was still acceptable, and the following changes significantly worsened the results of the program, showing the impossibility of achieving the set goals
But I consider it the wrong decision to completely exclude the program, since there is a share of very competent, useful for Arbitrum delegates who are now receiving rewards for their good work and I consider it unfair to punish them
My vote on the matter will also answer the question above.
I am strongly voting against this proposal. There is a bunch of reasons, some tied to the evolution of the DIP until now and some tied to how this very idea came to life.
First, to me it doesn’t make sense to vote now on reverting to a previous version when we had a vote, 1 month ago, about updating it, and we didn’t even get the first results.
I sincerely don’t know why we are doing this now, with this vote that just happened, and 3 months to the end of the program, I can’t find the logic honestly even if I shake out all my bias.
Second, DIP 1.5 was quite good to bootstrap the delegates’ activity but had a huge collateral effect: a lot of noise and very less signal. For people that were in here, most of points were accrued for simply stating your own opinion, despite if it was provided in the first few days of discussion of the votes or later, and despite if others already provided the same opinion or not.
That had the byproduct effect of having a series of delegates creating a pletora of messages which, by a big amount, were just repetition of others.
Hoping that nobody gets offended, what we basically had was this
We then moved to 1.6 which introduced two main changes:
The former addition was in my opinion great: being able to filter repetition of the same idea over time, not providing a payment for this activity, was to me something fair. The fact that there are delegates (taking the list from Paulo which published this in the chat) that were able to always qualify for the DIP regardless of this change and regardless of their voting power is indeed an attestation that you can provide value to the DAO even with stricter rules: L2BEAT, myself, tekr0x, GriffGreen, GFXLabs, tempetechie, Bob Rossi, Gauntlet. This list spans from two of the biggest delegates in our DAO, to delegates with a few millions of vp, up to delegates barely above the threshold. To move to the latter point of the list, it means that the multiplier based on vp, while can introduce some difficulties, is absolutely not a gate to qualify. And we can for sure discuss if that is/was a good idea or not, the answer is probably a bit subjective and lies in what we want to incentive, and to me being able to put more weight into people and entities that have more vp is indeed the fair and right choice.
We are further moving away from this with the 1.7 with
Again, as I stated for that vote, I think both are fair changes: we do indeed have less votes so it makes sense to reduce reward, and we do have quorum problem so incentivising a passive behaviour that can help in this sense makes a ton of sense.
The question then becomes: why should we want to go back to 1.5? What value would bring, today, having 20-30 delegates all posting in any discussion just a slight variation of what is usually the same idea with the goal not of providing value but most of the time to qualify and get points for the payout?
We did that already, and it didn’t provide in my opinion a value worth the cost. And bear in mind, here for me cost is not only monetary cost, but the time and energy needed to navigate in all discussion and form an idea of how the dao is oriented.
I would like to add a few points here that are very very personal. I am not in love of having a discussion that
Don’t get me wrong, all of this is “legal” to use what is probably the wrong word; is doable, and I don’t think it breaks any rule in the constitution.
But I personally feel the whole setup of this discussion is just not clean.
Maybe some will instead say that is a testimony about the fact that our DAO is indeed a DAO in which even things like this are doable, and so a degree of accountability from community still exists. But I can’t wash this feeling from my mouth, honestly.
Thank you for the discussion so far, we have found it to be insightful.
While the DIP certainly requires the DAO’s attention (as Patrick summarized), the most recent iterations represent steps in the right direction - making governance more effective, while reducing some of the unproductive noise.
Accordingly, rather than reverting to v1.5, we believe it would be more constructive for the DAO to continue with the current version of the program, while the AF and SeedGov continue working toward a revamped v2.0 that incorporates the feedback received so far. We aim to share a draft of this v2.0 for discussion in the coming weeks.
As Karpatkey mentioned, designing the right delegate (and contributor) incentives is a complex task. The goal should be to strike a balance between improving governance effectiveness, continuing to attract diverse perspectives, and rewarding meaningful contributions.
Separately, we would appreciate it if proposal authors and delegates adhered to the DAO’s procedures requiring a minimum discussion period of at least one week before a proposal is posted to Snapshot. In this case, the aim and content of the proposal changed significantly—from “Sunsetting the Delegate Incentive Program (DIP)” to “Revert the Delegate Incentive Program (DIP) to Version 1.5”—just one day before it was posted. Especially considering that the results would be binding, making it more impactful than a standard temperature check, we believe the community should have been given more time to discuss these changes, before the proposal was raised to Snapshot.
This is blatantly incorrect @JoJo
The version 1.6 didn’t address the noise in the forum by introducing a timing or relevance criteria. Those were criteria that was kept from the original 1.5 version, until today.
What the 1.6 did was merge both the Communication Rationale (CR) criteria (which was 10 points) and the Delegate Feedback (DF) criteria (which was 30 points) into 1 single criteria worth (40 points) therefore increasing the proportion of subjective judgment of the delegates’ activity by the PMs, quite significantly.
The consequence of this change is that a lot of delegates (especially the big ones) stopped leaving vote rationales in proposals altogether, and just voting without any justification for their vote, which I think we would all agree is not a good outcome for the DAO.
The timing and relevance criteria in the subjective scoring of the comments in the forum, has been present in DIP since the 1.5 version. The issue, in my opinion, is that most delegates assumed incorrectly that they had to comment on all proposals to get more points and therefore more noise was generated, but that wasn’t a consequence of the formula of the DIP, it was maybe just poor communication from the PMs on how the score worked, and mostly a lack of understanding of some delegates on how the score was calculated.
You can check all changes that the 1.6 version introduced here:
Based on our discussions with other university blockchain groups, we believe the current reward system makes it unnecessarily difficult for clubs like ours to contribute meaningfully to Arbitrum governance. The point system is complex and often under-rewards university participation, even though these incentives are an important revenue stream for sustaining student engagement and exposing the next generation of builders to Arbitrum.
That said, the changes from v1.5 to v1.7 are directionally sensible. In our experience participating across major DAOs, check-the-box produce low-effort forum posts and mindless votes that rarely affect outcomes. Every dollar spent on incentives should be accretive to the quality of governance, not subsidize redundant commentary that makes discussions harder to navigate.
Rather than relying on subjective judgments by program managers, FranklinDAO suggests exploring a more meritocratic approach: each eligible delegate could be allocated one or two “impact votes” per month to award to peers for outstanding contributions. This would make recognition more transparent, reduce program overhead, and encourage delegates to focus on quality rather than volume.
From a purely financial perspective, reverting to v1.5 would likely benefit FranklinDAO. However, we believe the tone of debate and the conflict this reversion would introduce outweigh those short-term gains. Our view is that the current program should run its course, then be redesigned with structured delegate feedback to address its shortcomings.
In parallel, we also support exploring treasury delegations for university clubs so that academic communities can reach the 500K threshold and participate more meaningfully in shaping Arbitrum’s future.
We agree with @PennBlockchain that the changes from v1.5 to v1.7 are directionally sensible, and further agree with the idea of “impact votes” being incorporated into Arbitrum’s incentive structure. There are valid concerns to be raised regarding collusion between contributors hoping to maximize impact votes, but any subjective criteria has the potential for misuse.
Furthermore, we support treasury delegations for university clubs in order to meet the 500k threshold, but believe there should be stipulations. For instance, clubs should submit written proposals explaining their general governance philosophy and long-term alignment with Arbitrum. Additional accountability measures, such as scheduled meetings with the AF, also make sense. It’s worth noting that incentive payments to university clubs are often put toward crypto-native academic and pre-professional programming, so the funds are far from wasted.
With the understanding that any incentive program will be subject to sub-optimal criteria, we still believe in the importance of an incentive structure enabling participation in the DAO. We hope to see a framework emerge that benefits Arbitrum practically, while reflecting the DAO’s long-term values.
Michigan Blockchain | Jack Verrill | TG @JackVerrill
Hello everyone,
First of all, we would like to clarify that our voting order will be as follows:
Abstain
Keep the current version
Revert the DIP to v1.5
Sunset the DIP
Naturally, our first option is to abstain due to the evident conflicts of interest; we believe this is the most ethical stance.
That said, unfortunately, given the chosen voting methodology, we are compelled to rank the remaining options in descending order of preference.
We believe that, as the Arbitrum Foundation has expressed, the changes introduced so far were steps in the right direction. We also confirm that we are working with them on a new iteration in which the program will be split into two tracks (Delegates and Contributors). This is something we previously identified as necessary in our mid-term report, and Patrick has also explained it very well.
Separately, we would like to share our perspective on how this proposal process unfolded:
A proposal to sunset the DIP was posted on the forum from an anonymous account created three days prior, and less than a month after the approval of version 1.7, which had received strong support from delegates.
Juanrah invited the proposer to the Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call on August 26, 2025. The proposer never showed up.
On September 4, the proposer edited the proposal, suggesting to revert the DIP to version 1.5 retroactively, including August. It should be noted that we were never consulted on the feasibility of this clause, as explicitly suggested in the Writing Your First Proposal to the ArbitrumDAO thread on several occasions:
In this case, we had already begun working on the August DIP results, and reverting to 1.5 would not only mean starting over, but it would also be unfeasible under Karma’s dashboard framework. Reverting the changes and adapting the dashboard back to the December 2024 version would take several additional weeks of work for Karma.
It’s also important to mention that one of the arguments raised against SEEDGov as PM was the “retroactive” changes introduced on February 12, 2025, for the February assessment. We find it contradictory that the OP now proposes to change the August rules on September 4 retroactively.
On that same September 4, Paulo Fonseca decided to escalate this new proposal to a vote, completely disregarding the 7-day feedback period required under the DAO’s procedures after the adoption of the new Code of Conduct. This is especially problematic since it’s a binding proposal requiring a non-constitutional quorum, not just a “Temperature Check.” Once again, we find this contradictory, as Paulo has been outspoken about the need to allow sufficient time for discussion before voting (recent examples: 1, 2).
Today, September 9, the proposer once again had the opportunity to present his case regarding the proposal that Paulo brought to a vote during the Open Discussion of Proposals Governance Call, but once again chose not to show up.
From our perspective, the entire process has been compromised either by a lack of due diligence or by bad faith (everyone will have their own view), and this vote in itself sets a very poor precedent. It makes us think that perhaps we should consider raising the thresholds required to post proposals to Snapshot.
We invite all delegates to take these details into account when casting their votes, as sunsetting the program would leave the DAO without any pipeline to keep delegates and contributors engaged, while reverting to v1.5 would entail a colossal effort for both Karma and SEEDGov in terms of development and operations (setting aside other economic and social implications that have already been mentioned by some delegates and by the Foundation itself).
well, I can cancel the current offchain vote and post it again on Thursday, September 11th.
By the way, edits to proposals in this forum have always been done hours, sometime minutes, before posting the votes on Snapshot. There have also been proposals posted to Snapshot that have had no discussion whatsoever in the forum. This proposal was posted in the forum and generated sufficient discussion, in my view, to be posted to a temperature check.
It would also be nice if you guys, the de-facto non-elected enforcers of the Code of Conduct, would not accuse other delegates of bad faith here in this forum. That definitely goes against the Community Guidelines and the Code of Conduct. The fact that you feel it’s ok to say that, speaks volumes as to the way @SEEDGov as been acting lately.
And honestly, what I would really love to know, is your own answer and not a proxy answer, as to why none of the original KPIs were met by the program you’re running, as I showed here:
That justification would actually be something useful to the discourse of this proposal.
Hello Paulo,
The answer to your question about the KPIs has always been available in this forum, even before you raised concerns about them. That said, we agree with Patrick—not only because the KPIs were not fully well designed from the beginning, but also because it is true that KPIs should evolve in an experimental program as new information is gathered. In fact, they were adjusted in version 1.7.
As for the rest:
Honestly, it’s not our decision. Moreover, canceling it would, in our view, set yet another poor precedent. It has happened before, and delegates did not receive it well.
Could you provide an example of a binding proposal that was completely restructured in the forum and then sent to a vote on the very same day? (again, this is not a mere “temperature check”)
Also, could you explain why neither you nor the proposer consulted us about the feasibility of making the changes retroactive to August?
We are not making any accusations; we are simply pointing out that there are two possible explanations for this scenario:
Either proper due diligence was not conducted, or
There was bad faith (meaning due diligence was intentionally not conducted).
Each delegate can decide which explanation they prefer to believe—we are merely stating that the entire process is flawed.
Furthermore, we are not the “de-facto non-elected enforcers of the Code of Conduct.” However, we are the legitimate enforcers of the new Terms and Conditions of the DIP. We also remind everyone that delegates must adhere to the current Code of Conduct in addition to the DIP T&Cs, with the latter taking precedence in case of doubt.
Having said that, we believe we have the right to express our opinion as Delegates when we see that someone is not following the procedures agreed upon by the DAO’s delegates. It will then be up to the proper conflict-resolution body to determine whether what happened here was indeed a breach of the DAO’s procedures. We believe there is even a hint about this in this very same thread.
you know there’s no such thing as a “binding proposal”. all temperature check offchain votes are binding in exactly the same way. according to the constitution, there’s temperature checks, which are offchain votes published on Snapshot, and there’s onchain votes which are bound by their onchain execution. that’s it.
according to the constitution, proposals need to be in the forum for 7 days, before going to a vote, either an offchain, or an onchain vote. neither the constitution nor the DAO’s procedures specify anything about a specific delay between editing a proposal on the forum and publishing it for voting, or what voting type to use, or what options to use, etc. maybe that’s a flaw in our procedures that should be looked at. maybe that’s by design. I don’t know.
I do know that everything that was done is totally fine, and even has past precedent in this DAO.
you guys nitpicking about the timing of the posting of the temperature check on snapshot instead of addressing the feedback of delegates about the program you’re running is the real issue here. there’s some much unaddressed feedback from delegates about the DIP, it’s kinda mind-blowing.
I’ll share the results of the survey I created in approximately 12 hours or so. In the meantime, everybody can still submit their answers by going to:
We appreciate the effort that went into drafting this proposal and the intent to improve the Delegate Incentive Program.
However, we voted against it.
We do not believe that reverting to v1.5 would result in a better framework than the current one. Both the mobilization of voting power and qualitative contributions such as forum engagement and operational input are essential to the health of DAO governance, and we do not support a design that disregards voting power entirely. Moreover, v1.5 encouraged a large number of low-value comments, which diluted meaningful discussion. Governance quality is not necessarily improved by simply increasing the number of participants, so we do not view v1.5 as a superior model.
That said, we recognize the importance of addressing legitimate concerns. It may be worthwhile to lower voting power thresholds for delegates who consistently provide high-quality contributions, but such reforms should be handled in a distinct framework rather than through a simple rollback. We also believe subjective evaluation criteria need to be reconsidered, and that the current program management overhead is disproportionately large relative to delegate incentives. A streamlined and redesigned structure is necessary, but again, reverting to v1.5 is not the right path.
@paulofonseca @SEEDGov better just to keep discussion focused on the proposal at hand – avoid filling up the thread with a tit-for-tat back-and-forth.
I believe that discussing the DIP is essential, especially given the upcoming v2.0 expected in the next few months. As an interim decision, I support shifting back to version 1.5, which was the last iteration where subjective evaluation played a smaller role.
Version 1.5 focused on the professionalization of delegates, encouraging them to dedicate significant time to governance activities while ensuring that “Delegates should focus on their role and DAO activities, not on understanding complex economic mechanisms to receive compensation.” Additionally, it emphasized the need for “transparent and predictable incentives” so delegates could be confident in their compensation as they improved their contributions ( Proposal - Delegate Incentive Program (DIP) )
Starting with version 1.6, the DIP shifted away from these principles, introducing more complex, unpredictable, and subjective criteria. This shift required delegates to adapt to the new rules rather than the program adapting to delegate practices, which discouraged participation, and effectively inverted the original intent.
I don’t believe the problem is with the program concept itself, but with the direction change from v1.5 to v1.6. Therefore, I support reverting to v1.5 as a temporary measure to restore balance and engagement while awaiting a more thorough, data-informed discussion surrounding v2.0. I also think that it’s critical that this proposal and its lessons are fully considered as signals to guide the formulation of v2.0.
We agree with @SEEDGov that this proposal hasn’t followed a proper process and is setting a bad precedent. That said, we also agree with the reasons @paulofonseca presented to bring this proposal to a vote, as the DIP program has shifted in a direction very far from its original intent.
We also believe this shift in the program sets a negative precedent, as it misled small delegates into thinking they could invest time and effort and be compensated in return. Once these small delegates started to participate and contribute to the DAO, the program changed in a way that made it almost impossible for them to receive compensation.
Here is the comment we left when we exited the program after version 1.6 was implemented:
