Raise the proposal quorum threshold from 40M because recent voting participation is much higher and there is a lot of UNI that has been delegated
Summary:
With around 183M UNI delegated at this time (which represents a large increase from even just 6 months ago), the original quorum threshold of 40 million now makes little sense since it can be easily reached through only a few delegates participating in a given vote. In addition, prominent members of the community have voiced their support including Hayden Adams.
Motivation:
The underlying purpose of a quorum is to ensure there is a sufficient amount of community consensus before a proposal can be passed. A low threshold therefore allows proposals to be passed even without support from a majority of the community; given this, Penn Blockchain believes the quorum threshold should be raised.
Although one could object that having such a high quorum threshold requires an overly optimistic level of voting participation and makes it harder for the community to pass any proposals, we have seen historically high levels of participation with over 90 million UNI voting on the last proposal to lower the proposal threshold; and the heavily discussed @HarvardLawBFI proposal to create the DeFi Education Fund will likely also see a large amount of voter turnout. This therefore means that a higher quorum can quite easily be reached and so rather than making the passage of proposals more difficult, raising the quorum threshold would more so ensure that there is sufficient amounts of consensus before any proposal passes.
Specification:
We believe that a more appropriate quorum threshold would be in the range of ~60-70M UNI but this should be discussed.
Snapshot:
The Snap Poll will be live for 4 days, from June 18th until June 22nd at 7:00 PM EST. If the poll passes with a minimum of 25,000 UNI in support, this proposal will move forward to the consensus check phase.
Defi “Education” fund with the WEF lawyer was submitted already and withdrawn. Vote date was up today. Somebody explain the vote withdrawal procedures to me. They already submitted their vote, and I assume it didnt have the support to pass.
100% voted yea for this. Now we need to decide where to set the higher quorum. Its a great idea and I believe it will pass. I think 70 million UNI is a good place to set it.
I actually think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go even higher—what do people think about 75M or even 80M? As @jcp mentioned the number of delegated votes has more than doubled, and delegates are incentivized to be highly engaged voters/participants of governance. Given the number of votes delegated has more than doubled, I think setting it to 75M or 80M would not be a bad idea.
Perhaps it would be helpful to see how many votes the @HarvardLawBFI proposal see once it’s posted and use that as a guide. do think 75M/80M wouldn’t be a bad move though.
We strongly support this proposal as well. 70M seems like a rough place to start though we think there should be more rigorous analysis to decide on a number. We agree that turnout on the DeFI Education Fund will be a good indicator to decide on a new threshold.
Interesting proposal! I understand the principle behind increasing the quorum threshold: to ensure that a sufficient majority of the community is actively involved.
One argument against increasing the quorum threshold is a lower threshold makes it more important for large token-holders to be actively involved in the governance process. Since the current quorum is 40m votes and majority vote (e.g., a 45m yes vote, 70m no vote wouldn’t pass), keeping the current quorum may actually result in a more active, involved governance process. Increasing the threshold a large degree makes it easier for token-holders to abstain, which could be argued is undesirable.
Overall, don’t feel super strongly one way or the other here, but would be cognizant of the risks of raising the quorum too high.
I’m in support of this as a temp check (it’s already passed), but worth discussing this aspect more in the consensus check.
Theres a serious problem with raising this quorum. Theres a few whales that may have enough votes to obstruct any future votes from being passed. This has been made clear with the current vote with the Defi education fund. Frankly, Im somewhat suspicious that this proposal is coming immediately after the Defi Education fund vote.