The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.
We are voting to implement shielded voting for all snapshot proposals.
We do not have strong opinions on the effects that shielded voting can have, but we’re interested in experimenting and determining its impact. Given that there’s no risk of back-room collusion associated with having shielded voting during Snapshots (given there’s no executable associated), we believe it’s worth trying out.
To avoid the discussion around a proposal dying out because delegates do not communicate their rationale as they’re voting, we encourage delegates to still participate in the forum discussion and signal their thoughts.
This may seem counterintuitive as the core feature of shielded voting is that individual votes are hidden until the very end of the voting process. However, we believe that since no one knows the intermediate results and how their individual vote affects the final result, this can improve the quality of the discussion since the only signal delegates have is the overall sentiment of the discussion in the forum.