[RFC] Empowering Underrepresented Delegates

Proposals
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  • The $ARB in the DAO’s treasury is not issued. Although it is technically available, implementing this proposal would mean increasing the supply without enhancing liquidity. Even though it’s not a significant amount on the total circulating supply, this would dilute the price and lock up ARB which might be needed for other purposes in the future.

This proposal does not increase the circulating supply of $ARB. $ARB will be moved to the Franchiser contract but will remain under the DAO’s control and will only be delegated to approved candidates. As such, no $ARB will enter the circulating supply.

What is the fair limit? Why allocate 10M to the top 10 delegates between 50K and 1M? I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s difficult to establish an objective criterion given it has to be arbitrary.

1M $ARB is the minimum required delegation amount to be able to post to both Tally and Snapshot (500k for Snapshot, 1m for Tally).

Re: allocating 10M to the top 10 delegates, we will revise this proposal to “top-up” delegates to 1M rather than allocating a flat 1M ARB to each eligible delegate.

Re: why 10 delegates, we believe that 10 is a good place to start for a first run of this program. We can look to expand this number if this program proves successful.

The voting power currently held by delegates depends on the ARB holders. They are the ones who have decided whom to benefit with their voting power (VP), whether due to trust, their contributions, or simply because they like them. These are the rules of the game. A proposal like this does not respect that decision and arbitrarily dilutes the decision of the holders by taking away a percentage of VP from the current delegates.**

While delegation is a commendable start to representation and decentralization, it’s important to recognize its imperfections. Occasionally, deserving delegates may not succeed in the popularity contest of delegation. As we aim to amplify the voices of these disenfranchised yet valuable delegates, we view this proposal as an initial step towards solving this disparity, given its zero cost to the DAO’s treasury in broadening voting participation. Moreover, $ARB token holders will wield their influence by voting on eligible applicants.

2 Likes
22

Voting power is given to those who earn it, they shouldn’t just receive it from the DAO because of some criteria.

Please reference our reply to @pedrob

There is a difference between a passive and active delegate. Does a delegate just vote? Do they contribute to Discourse and author proposals? Is the voting power representative of that?

We are specifically focusing on tokenholders who demonstrate their commitment by actively participating in voting on Tally proposals, a task that requires considerable effort. As mentioned in our previous responses, we intend to utilize metrics such as the overall participation rate from the delegate incentives program to monitor the effectiveness of this initiative. This approach will help ensure that delegates are held accountable and facilitate transparent reporting to the DAO.

Is the DAO not diverse enough that it warrants such a proposal?

We don’t believe so. To verify this quantitatively, we plan to pull more data.

Is the ask too large?

As the allocated $ARB for this program will be sourced from a Franchiser contract, which will remain under the DAO’s control, and will not affect the circulating supply of $ARB, this initiative represents a cost-neutral method to enhance voting accessibility.

Have the authors analysed the voter participation, token voting participation and delegation rate? It would be interesting to see how diverse voting is within Arbitrum DAO before we make a decision.

As mentioned in the comment above, we plan to pull this data.

From the 25 eligible addresses, can you also include how much voting power they each have as 50,000-1,000,000 is a wide range.

Yes, we will.

As others have mentioned, why is the minimum 50,000 since the aim is to raise representation of underrepresented delegates. It feels unfair if someone has 30,000 VP and have been active in every single vote.

As mentioned in a previous reply, we are considering to either reduce the minimum voting requirement to 10,000 ARB or eliminate it entirely.

What would these quarterly reports include? Each voting address and their voting participation rate? What else? This could just use karma really and scope it down.

To streamline reporting, we plan to leverage the collected metrics from the Delegate Incentive System. For example, if delegates do not reach +60% TP they could lose the allocated voting power.

Is it when a delegate falls below 80% over the recent quarter right?

Yes, that’s correct.

Have you considered working with Tally @Frisson to run a delegation week event? DAO can sponsor this event so delegation is free too.

We love this idea and would love to showcase more talent from the smaller delegate pool.

23

I’m sorry for being persistent, but I asked this not just for no reason. I remember how we voted for this proposal, but it never appeared on Tally.
https://snapshot.org/#/arbitrumfoundation.eth/proposal/0xf22530295daee96dffd7f70854475c06216a4d3594929672f71c12bf638bb0c8
That’s why I decided to clarify this information with you in order to track the timing and regularity of proposals appearing on Snapshot. Once again, I apologize for going off-topic.

1 Like
24

You’re going to have a couple dozen or so large delegates picking and choosing which 10 medium sized delegates can get a boosted closer to their level. I’m not claiming anyone would… but it feels like a scenario ripe for “I’ll vote for you, but you have to support my goals in the future” type of thing.

This perspective can apply to any proposal put forward by anyone. Naturally, delegates who vote for specific underrepresented delegates are expressing their support for their future aspirations.

Giving 10 delegates a flat 1M ARB creates a proportionality issue given the wide range of voting power. i.e., a 50,000 candidate now is 20x as powerful where as a 1M candidate is only 2x as powerful. There should be a more equitable solution to this IMO. (Do we target a number that gets all 10 candidates to the same voting power? Do we maybe find a formula that 50,000 candidates are only getting boosted, say, 4x instead of 20x?)

As mentioned in a previous reply, we will revise this proposal to “top-up” delegates to 1M voting power rather than allocate a flat 1M to each delegate.

Somewhat related to this, I’m not sure it’s fair someone who has maybe 1.1M ARB tokens delegated to them is now going to be jumped in line by 10 people due to a cutoff. I know that’s sort of the nature of this - there has to be a number somewhere, but a flat 1M is going to create this scenario for a lot of people and a formula that takes this into account may alleviate some of that.

Addressed in the previous response.

I think there should be expectation that these delegates are also commenting on the forums.

As mentioned in a previous reply, tracking communication is outside the scope of this pilot program as we do not want to conflate the mission and objectives of this initiative with the mission and objectives of the Delegate Incentive System. With that said, in the future, we do want to explore ways to measure constructive feedback.

I think falling below 80% should just be automatic revoke, if possible

We will take this into consideration.

1 Like
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(post deleted by author)

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Is there any specific case you can refer to?

We definitely plan to pull some more data to validate the claim.

3 Likes
27

What will the process be like for moving this forward? Snapshot vote to determine if this is something we want, and then another snapshot vote to determine which delegates get delegation and then a third final on chain vote to confirm?

1 Like
28

This proposal makes a lot of sense, targeting active voting users like us with weighted empowerment

1 Like
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Yes, it appears that way.

1 Like
30

I plan to vote AGAINST this proposal if it moves to snapshot

I do not think delegating ARB instead of awarding it is a good idea. It creates misaligned incentives where delegates make money off their increased importance in governance rather than their $ARB bags going up

Not much can be changed in this proposals current form to address this issue, so i will vote against. I much prefer @SEEDGov proposal flat out giving arb to active delegates

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Hi @juanbug, yes, that’s generally correct although there are a few more details. Here’s what we outlined in the proposal for Next Steps.

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1 Like
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Will we need to provide additional information about ourselves? If so, what is the right way to do it?

1 Like
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Something like this was recently implemented at Uniswap. It would be good to hear from Uniswap community members on how that has gone before ossifying technical implementation or candidates.

Not quite the same, but Optimism also has an Anticapture Commission, which is basically an msig with 10m votes that is controlled by ~25 delegates.

34

Same question here, thanks @ruslanklinkov for bringing it up.

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I’d love to see how this would work in a flow. I’m working on an on-chain reputation protocol aimed at growing the voting power of underrepresented members, and this topic really interests me. Let me know if you’d like to discuss it; we can find ways to ‘coexist more amiably’ with plutocracy or in a decentralized environment where efforts are more recognized.