Thanks for putting together such a detailed report. At Lighthouse, we agree that maintaining a Healthy Delegation Margin (“HDM”) is a key metric for assessing and improving governance resiliency in Uniswap and we should collectively lean more into how this metric can serve us.
While the documented 11.80% margin is concerning, as of prop 89, ~193M tokens have been delegated, so there is more than enough voting power ready to meet quorum. Our raw analysis can be found here.
We think it would be better to examine and activate this dormant voting power instead of designing new systems.
The main questions are:
How do we encourage voters to delegate to active, engaged participants and sustain that behavior over time?
How do we objectively track, measure and maintain this metric?
Takeaways from our Analysis
Across a historical dataset of approximately 486,000 delegations, the geometric mean of new unique delegators per month is 4,231.
Therefore the issue is not the lack of delegation, but rather the lack of participation by those who already hold delegated power.
Exploring the composition of VP at Proposal 89:
The top 100 addresses held 193M UNI in delegated voting power, however we know many of the top holders have specific reasons for not participating in voting, so we took a look at how the data changes if we skip the top 25 or 50 holders.
| Segment | Inactive Delegates | Delegated Voting Power | Unique Delegators |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skipping 50 | 44 | 20.4M UNI | 48 |
| Skipping 25 | 62 | 47.9M UNI | 67 |
Redirecting a fraction of this latent delegation could restore a strong and reliable quorum margin.
Our thoughts
Rather than implementing entirely new governance systems that introduce complexity and potential risk, we propose building an open, programmable mechanism to encourage re-delegation towards active participants. Such a system could:
- Track HDM as a first-class governance health metric
- Encourage users to re-delegate from inactive delegates
- Highlight inactive delegates
- Produce recommended actions for re-delegation
- Reward consistent delegate participation
This approach would address the root cause of the issue (delegating to inactive voters) without requiring complex protocol improvements.
We look forward to dropping in and discussing this further in the next community call.