[Discussion] A Framework for Delegates

đź”” Meta-Governance
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Hello frens,i’m CryptoReuMD the champion of Nación Bankles, a subDAO from Bankless DAO, actually i’m learning about governance in some forums: Optimism, Arbitrum, Gitcoin, Push and Nouns just to mention my most active participation, but as i see everyone it’s getting the best from each other and for the governance process of the DAO to PGV3.0, we need to attest some of the best principles that we have in another projects:

1.- Token Gated Voting: Every DAO has something similar, a token that has some privileges, in our case it’s a Governance Token, a revenue token, and a payment one to the channel submissions and maybe further opportunities. Everything seems excellent for the value accrual, but this isn’t going to make any difference in the governance process and the participation of the team that were grantees or are investor in the protocol and as a design we have three different approaches in this situation:

a.- Investors: The ones that are here for revenue, because they believe in the project and how makes some solutions in web3 and the relevance of the evolution and the participation, they are not interested or have very low interest in the governance process, but also don’t make any movements in the price because they look for stability and quality of the projects.

b.- Traders: This are the friends that look for speculation and are market makers, the most of the interest its to get the strongest numbers for revenue and take all the benefits, they are not always aligned with the ethos of the project and maybe also have no interest or at least a little of the governance and stability of the project

c.- Governors: These are the people that read the forum, look for the new opportunities and are really aligned with the coordination and ethos that are relative to equity and understanding of the experiments in web3 governance process.

With this in mind we have different types of web 3 enthusiasts that are inside every project, and we have to be aware of how balanced this process is, and we have to answer for all what they think and believe.

2.- Delegated power voting. As we can see in another projects, with this type and different interest in our governance we need people that it’s more aligned and has the fully understand and how this needs to be driven, transparency, sybill resistance and decentralized, and this process it’s oriented to the participation of some outstanding individuals that are looking for the benefits of the coordination process and governance forum. The designation of the community and participation of new people for the delegation, makes this process easier and low time consuming, since we don’t need to reach the quorum of the total token holders, and just for the delegates.

As i see, this is going to be a problem, since we are facing some governance capture of another regions of the world so to be in this phase of token delegation we need to solve some issues:

a.- Which tool are we going to use? Tally, Aragorn of something alike, to see full transparency and delegation, and we can start experimenting a token gated voting with low latency and low cost, not just signing like snapshot, charmverse or writing like discourse, we need something different to stop the spam and the Sybills that can take power just inviting friends to vote and win. This type of decision is important.

b.- We need to address all the different projects that we have, and also weight the candidates to have a channel in Push to the communication of the governance and voting criteria, to see a on chain stamp of what’s happening, we need to use our tools, and also weight if they have another channel, DApss, and holdings. Also if we have staking, are this is going to be allowed, to the voting process of the participation

c.- Establishedemphasized text retroactive funding for their work, some projects are looking for revenue to the delegations, and something that it’s working it’s incentivise the work and compromise with the project, we can give some funds to the delegates that have 100% participation.

3.- Full transparency, as you already read, we are a DAO and as we know and understand every movement and every decision needs to be addressed on chain and immutable, we can start using attestations to give the full transparency of the decision before the decision has any funds inside.

4.- If we can make a division of the money and the process, we are going to have a better result. Why? The protocol can’t decide on the money per se and the nation doesn’t need to change the protocol since we don’t have the knowledge of doing this. So with this bicameral influence, we can address the grant program to the protocol with two different approaches: Related to the protocol (PIPs, DApss, Chains) and unrelated (Marketing, events) creates a team that it’s related to the holding of tokens. And another that it’s related to the grants ecosystem and onboarding of new projects, token gated, with delegation power.

i think that this is going to be difficult and troublesome at the beginning but it’s going to be great if we make a difference in the governance of Push Protocol.

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Thank you, @CryptoReuMD for your input.
In line with your perspective and inspired by successful programs in other communities and the lessons we’ve learned from other community governance models. To address the current low participation in our DAO, both in terms of voting and discussion, as well as proposal submissions, we’ve been planning a Delegate LaunchPad Program.

In a nutshell:

  • We’re initiating a program that will run for a set period, like 6 months.
  • During this time, we’ll identify and collaborate with community members to develop them into star delegates for Push.
  • These delegates will be granted significant voting power for proposing and voting on decisions.

We’re still working out the finer details, but your post serves as a starting point for incubating this idea and kickstarting discussions, similar to what we’re doing with Push Grants.

While we’ve been using Snapshot up until now, I share your perspective that it might be a good time to explore alternative tools that can assist us in our journey towards becoming a fully on-chain organization.

Can you please elaborate a little more regarding this @CryptoReuMD ?

We firmly believe in this.
Delegates play a crucial and time-consuming role. Therefore, including incentives for program participants must be an integral part of the proposal to the DAO.

I’ll share the draft of the Delegates Launchpad Program tomorrow to kickstart our brainstorming.

Additionally, this is a good opportunity to explore other mechanisms to boost engagement in protocol governance and establish clear paths for community members to participate in Push Governance.

See this draft Push community for ref:

Push community diagram
Push community diagram1200Ă—1200 124 KB

One option is utilizing Snapshot to create strategies, although I’m uncertain if this can be replicated with other tools. For example:

  • Grant recipients’ votes multiplied by 1.25
  • DAO contributors’ votes multiplied by 1.35
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Yup of course.
I love everything that you are proposing and the way that it’s getting.
If i’m a delegate, well i need my own channel about governance, something tthat i see, it’s that i need to enter to my web mail, click de updates, log in into the forum, read the proposal and write. Imagine if we have a channel inside push that has a TL;DR from the delegates that voted an dlink to the forum. It’s easier and without too many clics.
So if we have the tools, let’s use them.

We are up to this and very engaged to start helping with this process. @Carlosjmelgar i think that we can also use prophouse from NounsDAO with Hypercerz to attest votes on chain to realte all of this to evaluate also on chain behavior. or oSnap from UMA Announcing “oSnap:” Gasless Snapshot voting with on-chain execution by UMA | by Clayton Roche | UMA Project | Medium

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this makes sense. This used to be a practice in many discords a couple of years ago, but for some reason it stopped. I also think if I want to delegate my voting power to someone, I should have easy access to talking with that someone.

@CryptoReuMD would love if you can join us this wednesday 10/18 or next and talk about these alternatives you mention.

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one idea toward some governance weight, of which there will likely be a multitude of solutions which work together in a multi-pronged mechanism to ensure governance adheres closer to the good of the Organization and not shortsided personal greed by an entity or group of entities attempting personal gain:

  • governance voting with fee-staked funds weighted by duration said tokens have been staked.

again, there are many solutions to ensure those with the votes are those who are truly invested in the organization itself, but long fee staking funds are a good indicator of an entities commitment to PUSH, imo

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I discussed something similar with another group the other day. PUSH is very well positioned to implement something similar to friends.tech in this regard. Friends.tech “sells” keys, aka NFT, which allows a user to enter a sort of group chat of said user - not too unlike the PUSH Chat feature requiring a user to pay a fee for cold communication, but different in that it becomes a group chat and not a DM.

PUSH community could implement a similar idea where anyone wishing to become a delegate would be required to utilize PUSH Chat, then anyone delegating their votes - a delegate should be able to set a minimum delegation requirement to prevent SPAM through delegation of 1 or a small number of $PUSH, but I digress - would be granted access to join the delegate’s “group chat”. This group chat would be a direct line of communication between holders of PUSH and their delegate “representative”.

It should also be made very easy to switch your delegate.

The main difficulty here would be providing incentives for delegates - why should anyone spend their time sourcing the governance forums and tools, learning about each proposal and why they should vote one way or another? There would need to be some sort of incentive mechanism.

One idea would be as I proposed earlier where fee-staked PUSH are one voting mechanism. It could be designed that in order to earn on those fees, they must be delegated - they could very well be delegated to the owner of said staked tokens. Moving on that idea, the fees earned each epoch could carry the requirement of some threshold of voting participation. This means not only must staked funds be delegated, but they must be delegated to an “active” delegate (definition of active would need be discussed). The mechanism could likely be something like:

  • Simply stake to earn 50% of potential fee reward
  • Delegate to earn 70% of potential rewards
  • Delegate to an “active” delegate to earn 90% of potential rewards
  • The remaining 10% of potential rewards go as salary to PAY your delegate
  • Delegate yourself to earn the full 100% potential - but be sure you’re active or would drop back down to the previous tier (70% in this broad high-level example), thus missing out on more than you would by delegating to another active delegate.

This is high-level brainstorming for which details would need to be thoroughly discussed and finely tuned to both provide incentives while not stifling participation - in other words we need to make it simple and easy for users to stake in the fee pool while also creating a mechanism to provide incentives for delegates to “show up for work”, because it truly is work or every DAO would have full participation all the time.

Sorry for the mush of ideas here, I know i went way beyond the response, but I didnt really know where else to put those ideas.

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This one is very interesting. As you mentioned there are numerous approaches to accomplish this
I’ve been researching other projects where they lock $PUSH for $vePUSH, and from there we can create incentivized mechanisms for both delegators and delegates. This probably requires a heavy lifting upfront, but makes it “simpler” to create a game theory that incentivizes delegation and engaged delegates.

Now I agree with you, this is where the real challenge begins. Creating a simple to follow non-gameable strategy is difficult. Considering using the protocol fees for this is a very interesting proposition… it will necessitate support from token holders and the community, but is one good alternative to consider.

The idea of using Push chat with some sort of gating is really cool to have access to talk with your delegates. We can potentially develop a game theory to add rewards for the long term participants and true believers of the project.

Finally, yet another thing we need to clearly map is the different roles & participants within Push DAO. These will also have a significant impact on shaping strategies for more effective governance. To list some:

  • Push Grantees
  • DAO contributors (i.e. Ambassadors)
  • Integrators & Collaborating projects
  • Node operators (in the future)

Will add this topic for discussion in our weekly Governance call and start gathering ideas. At some point, we may even establish a dedicated working group. However, for now, bringing this matter during our Governance meetings is an excellent initial step.

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Interesting ideas here @grasponcrypto , I’m a big fan of staking $PUSH as it also adds an extra layer of utility for the token. Minimal rewards for simply staking, more rewards for delegating, even more rewards for delegating to active delegates, and a portion of your rewards goes to said delegates.

I’m really curious if there are any examples of this actually being done in the space, an increase in staking rewards for delegation will definitely incentivize more holders to delegate. I would imagine the process to be quite manual.

Yes, this is one of the bigger problems with delegates, making sure they are active, incentivizing delegates to be active, and incentivizing delegatoors to delegate to active delegates would generally improve the governance of any protocol.

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I’ve been recently collaborating with a team in a similar situation, and we came up with the idea of a incentivized delegation program - aiming to increase delegation and encourage delegates to actively seek out delegation by being meaningfully active in forums, discussions, promoting proposals, etc.

We are in a very interesting phase in Push transitioning to a model where the community has greater ownership of the protocol and with this comes resource allocation, etc; hence the need of more engaged and valuable delegates .

I’ll try to coordinate with @jarisjames to join us in the next Governance call and see if he can tell us a bit more about the Delegate Social Scoring system he is creating. Will give us some good ideas to get started.

NEXT GOVERNANCE CALL:
When: Wednesday Nov 15th, 2024 | 3PM UTC
Where: Push Discord Stage

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gm @MrJaf. Thanks for the invite for tomorrow’s Community Call. I’ll be there to explain the system we’re working on for creating Delegate Scores and the framework for the Delegate Incentive Program as well.

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I was not able to make this call. Were any good discussions had?

aiming to increase delegation and encourage delegates to actively seek out delegation by being meaningfully active in forums, discussions, promoting proposals, etc.

Push is in a position that an elite few projects are in, an income generating protocol. This also allows PUSH to have a unique opportunity to utliize that income to design a method for perpetual encouragement of participation.

The largest hurdle i see, is that currently PUSH is not generating income, at least not as far as Im aware - or if it is, it is in trivially minute portions as to be ineffective for generating incentives (aka users would not earn enough to entice participation). So the hurdle would be how to kick start participation until that income generation has risen to sustainably sufficient amounts.

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Through Push tokenomics, income can be generated in various ways, be it through utility features or the Fee pool. Nevertheless, I agree that, currently, the revenue generated by the protocol will not suffice to make a strategy that is attractive for delegators or delegatees.

Perhaps, for an initial experimental phase, it might be worthwhile to allocate some DAO budget to implement a program and develop a game theory that can provide rewards for both delegators and delegates. Ideally, this game theory should align with the one planned for implementation when the protocol begins generating more revenue.

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I love the idea, and would be happy to be a part of that project. I think there are several things which must be determined, or at least given solid educational guesses.

  1. what would the protocol bring in today if all fees were charged as is planned for the future?
  2. how would/could/should those fees increase (increase with use, increase with cost hike, increase with additional charges such as chat?)
  3. what is the baseline required incentive income strategy. In other words, how much is the minimum amount of incentive structure before the community is appropriately engaged.
    3a. how much before the average holder takes the time to delegate in order to earn incentives on their hodl?
    3b. how much before the average holder takes the time to ensure active delegation to earn the additional incentives.
    3c. how much before the average delegate is active on >X% (50%, 75%, 90%) of votes

This would need to be given careful consideration in order to realize if it is an achievable goal with the income generation expected.

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These are some really good questions.

I’m thinking, same as we are currently co-designing the Grants Program v3 with the community right now, it would be good to formally start conversations around this topic in the Governance calls. (FYI - due to the increased interest in Governance topics, we have transitioned to holding weekly Governance calls every Wednesday at 3 PM UTC in Discord.)

I begun exploring delegation incentive programs in Arbitrum, Optimism, and other projects. However there is a lot to discuss as our tokenomics are very different.

Also, your questions (3a, 3b, 3c) got me thinking about the techie stuff involved in running this kind of program. Right now, we don’t have any token locking mechanisms for extended periods of time. Taking a quick look, it seems like for the program to really work well for both delegators and delegatees (and the DAO), should it roll for 6 months? Maybe 9 months?

Will start bringing this topic as a part of our Gov calls.