Looks like the vote is in a contentious place at the moment. A couple of thoughts:
Program Length and Operational Overhead
Conducting a regular vote on this type of program is pretty messy. Operationally it would add unnecessary overhead for the DAO, which imo would outweigh potential benefits around adding new delegates. For example, I don’t genuinely think many have been concerned with the status of the first round of treasury delegation—and that’s because those who’ve received the respective voting power have actively partaken in governance over the past year. In fact, most of the proposals over the past year have been sponsored by teams like PGov and StableLab, both of which attained votes from treasury delegation—this datapoint is relevant to the below concern:
It becomes inconvenient for active delegates to put up proposals when they have to rely on others to sponsor posts…speaking from experience.
Plus, increasing the cohort at the present time to 12 total candidates addresses the need of qualifying new delegates. There likely won’t be too many new entrants into the DAO who would even qualify for treasury delegation off the bat. It usually takes a handful of months to cultivate some sort of persona with a DAO, at which point, the 12-18 month period will have passed, allowing the new delegates to partake in the next cycle of treasury delegation. So to address @Gauntlet’s point, the feedback loop between assessing new delegates for treasury delegation requires at least a year and certainly more than 6 months.
Selection Criteria
I don’t fully agree with using the metrics from the Delegate Reward Initiative for this proposal, aligning with @jengajojo’s main concern, albeit for different reasons. Adding a voting component like the first iteration of the program makes more sense than having a second set of eligibility criteria. Here’s why—
Elections better mimic token holder delegation:
Voting for treasury delegation candidates better mimics the elective process that UNI token holders go through when determining who should have more weight in the system. It provides a direct mechanism for the community to choose trusted delegates based on a preference-based evaluation, reflecting the essence of representative selection. But the Delegate Reward Program prioritizes activity over community preference, which is a characteristic that probably shouldn’t fully translate to treasury delegation. Treasury delegation via voting and not fully based on “objective criteria” stands as the truer embodiment of the elective process, ensuring that influence is granted to those the community deems most worthy, not just the most active.
Popularity contests of course are a resulting issue. So a hybrid is probably best:
- 50% of a candidate’s score is derived by the stated numerical metrics
- 50% are based on an election
This way, the same people who get paid via the reward program are not necessarily the ones with more voting power—even though this will predominantly be the case anyways.
Governance Takeover
Would not suggest lowering quorum—lower quorum means that governance attacks become easier. One can argue that treasury delegation is in effect a governance attack from within, where delegates themselves just subvert token holders to control the DAO.
But Scopelift’s work on implementing expiring delegation is a very neat addition to control for this issue. If at a future date the influence of delegates via treasury-sourced UNI isn’t up to snuff, then those votes are recalled. In that sense, “delegate takeover” has an inherent termination date.
Lower quorum is a more permanent alteration with the potential for more dire consequences caused by malicious and anonymous external parties. At least with delegates there is a degree of transparency and communal responsibility where folks are in part kept in line for their reputation’s sake. Plus, there’s the incorporation of the “DAO Principles” in this proposal.
I would suggest that he DAO take advantage of Scopelift’s work and utilize the expiring Franchisers.
Regarding Delegation Campaigns & Unistaker
The best time to run a delegation campaign is upon launch of a governance token. The second best time is when there’s an economic incentive attached to the delegation. Most protocols with high delegation % today ensured that TGE aligned with a congruent delegation campaign. L2s are pretty good at this, and tools like Tally have helped with the process. Unfortunately, this setup wasn’t common at UNI TGE, so there’s latent voting power that never considered delegating.
Running a delegation campaign is notoriously difficult…because people just don’t care. From the below numbers, it seems like the UF’s delegate race had good success. We could run one of these again, but the amount of token holders willing to partake in such a race quickly taps out.
Although I am unsure how active the voting power from this race is since most of it went to new, smaller delegates.
Objectively, the event that brought in the most delegates so far has been the Delegate Reward Program…for obvious reasons. But most of the new delegates don’t have much voting power. And likely, the catalyst for increasing the other side of the equation, the number of delegators, will be launching Unistaker.
My prediction is that UNI token holders, for the most part, will nonchalantly delegate their tokens to well-known names—granted their voting % is high enough (in case Staker rewards are based on a delegate’s voting rate). This will crowd out active delegates with smaller brands. Hence, one way the DAO can signal trust in certain entities is by delegating to them on its own. Right now, if you sort the top delegates by VP on Tally or Agora, you really don’t want folks to just delegate to those top entities. It should be a mix. Sadly, token holders don’t know delegates well. They just know brands from crypto in general.
As a final point, if the DAO ever wants to capitalize on fees itself to attain operating revenue, it must delegate its treasury tokens. This proposal would be a step in that direction. Although out of the scope of this discussion, we should be very careful about using the DAO’s tokens as revenue generating assets, which may warrant blacklisting the Franchisers from earning Unistaker fees.