VIP-7: Delegated Voting

General
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Proposal Summary

The goal of this proposal is to enhance the governance process for token holders who might be less active than others in governing ValleyDAO. We introduce a delegated voting system, facilitating such holders to entrust their voting rights to informed and pre-approved volunteer representatives.

What is Delegated Voting

Overview: Delegated voting is a mechanism that allows GROW token holders to entrust their voting power to informed and dedicated volunteer delegates.

Objective: This system ensures that every GROW token holder, irrespective of their activity level, can actively influence ValleyDAO’s direction and decisions.

Operation: Upon selection, a delegate uses a sanctioned ETH wallet to vote, representing the interests and intentions of the token holders who entrusted them with their voting rights.

Benefits: Delegation amplifies the voices of all GROW token holders, including those less active, ensuring a more encompassing representation in ValleyDAO’s governance.

How to Delegate Votes

  • Token holders will access Snapshot to choose a delegate.
  • Snapshot offers comprehensive profiles of all delegates, detailing qualifications, core values, social media links, and ETH addresses. This ensures token holders make well-informed choices and that their selection aligns with their interests and values.
  • The delegated voting power corresponds directly to the GROW balance in the token holder’s account.
  • Delegating voting power does not impact token ownership or usage.
  • Delegators retain the autonomy to modify or retract their delegate choice whenever necessary.

How are Delegates Selected and Managed

Overview of the Selection Process

Step 1: Application Submission

  • ValleyDAO members can initiate the delegate process by submitting a delegate application form.
  • Members must also furnish their wallet details to the core team for reference.

Step 2: Identity Verification & Whitelisting

  • The core team undertakes a rigorous verification of the submitted details.
  • Successfully verified members are put to a community vote on Discourse and Snapshot

Step 3: Periodic Delegate Review & Voting

  • Every 3 to 6 months, a comprehensive review of the delegate roster takes place.
  • The community casts their votes on:
    • Performance evaluations of current delegates.
    • Potential addition of new delegates.
    • Possible removal of inactive or inefficient delegates.

Key Details

Minimum Delegates: A minimum of five delegates are always maintained to diversify decision-making and provide varied options for vote assignment.

Current Delegates: As of now, core team members Albert Anis, Daniel Hussey, Hamza Qureshi, and Morgan Richards are serving as delegates.

Open Applications: ValleyDAO always welcomes applications from its members who wish to assume the delegate role. A delegate application form will be created shortly after this proposal passes the community scrutiny.

Onboarding and Expectations

Influence: Delegates have no upper limit in the total influence they can acquire within the DAO.

Alignment: To ensure alignment, delegates are mandated to lock up a portion of their GROW tokens before officially commencing their duties. The lock-up amount is the greater of:

  • 20% of their total GROW allocation at the time of their application
  • 1,000 USD worth of GROW tokens at the time of their application.

This locked-up portion will remain untradeable for the duration of their delegation period, plus 1 month. The delegate’s lockup contract will automatically renew every six months, unless the delegate decides to step down from their role. Even if a delegate chooses to offboard themselves before the completion of the initial six-month period, they won’t be able to access their locked-up tokens until a month after they officially leave their delegate position.

Active participation: Delegates are expected to participate in community discussions, answer questions, and vote on proposals as long as they’re active. It’s also a good idea for the delegate to clearly explain why they vote the way they do, so that tokenholders understand the thought process.

Conflict of Interests: Delegates must proactively disclose conflicts of interest. Potential conflicts should be disclosed on their profile and within the delegate application. When a conflicting interest arises, the delegate must abstain from voting.

Offboarding Process

An existing delegate is offboarded as follows:

  1. Nomination for Offboarding: A delegate can be nominated for offboarding either by a core team member or through a proposal backed by at least three token holders. Reasons can vary from ineffective representation and inappropriate behaviour to undisclosed conflicts of interest.
  2. Core Voting: If the core majority agrees to the offboarding, the proposal is forwarded to Snapshot for further voting.
  3. Final Voting: A successful Snapshot vote culminates in the delegate’s offboarding.

OR

Voluntary resignation: A delegate wishing to voluntarily exit should notify the core team at least one month in advance.

  • Agree
  • Needs revision (comment is mandatory)
  • Disagree (comment is encouraged)
0 voters
1 Like
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Excellent proposal. Well done team.

3 Likes
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I have a couple of questions before casting my vote.

To ensure alignment, delegates are mandated to lock up a portion of their GROW tokens before officially commencing their duties. The lock-up amount is the greater of:

** 20% of their total GROW allocation at the time of their application*
** 1,000 USD worth of GROW tokens at the time of their application. *

This locked-up portion will remain untradeable for the duration of their delegation period, plus 1 month. The delegate’s lockup contract will automatically renew every six months, unless the delegate decides to step down from their role. Even if a delegate chooses to offboard themselves before the completion of the initial six-month period, they won’t be able to access their locked-up tokens until a month after they officially leave their delegate position.

How will this be facilitated on a technical level, can this be done through snapshot as well?

What measures has the governance taken to verify that there’s a demand by potential delegates who want a more active governance role? Is it possible to list the names of these potential delegates? I don’t really see the need of introducing this if there isn’t an initial roster of potential delegates beyond the core team. The core team has enough governance power already, the goal of this proposal is to decentralise decision-making further. Matter of fact, I don’t think the core team should be able to amass more voting power.

Has the governance group talked with any of the larger token holders, such as True Ventures, IDTheory and the other entities mentioned in VIP5 ? It would be good to know if these stakeholders would be open to delegate at least some of their voting power.

Is there a cap in terms of how many votes (tokens) a delegate can be assigned?

The proposal isn’t mentioning any criteria or qualifications required for a delegate beyond identify verification and locking GROW. What ensures a delegate is competent or represents the community well?

2 Likes
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Agree with the proposal overall but I think we should create lockup contracts for the execution. The point of the lockup is to facilitate trustlessness which we cannot achieve by being forced to trust people to not sell.

1 Like
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This would be a good long-term solution. We can technically do this with Jonas’ vesting contracts but it is not as straightforward as creating a bespoke one

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Lots of stuff here. Let’s try to go through as many points as we can

Initially, with core team members being the only delegates, we’ll use trust/social contracts. When we add new delegates later, we’ll either use Jonas’ vesting contracts or create bespoke ones

There is demand in the governance and tokenomics working groups (outside of core) to start. The goal is to reveal these candidates in due time once they submit the applications through proper channels, i.e. the delegate application form (coming soon)

The primary goal of this proposal is to enhance the governance process for token holders who might be less active than others in governing ValleyDAO. Mechanically speaking, delegation usually does the opposite of decentralization, but this case is a positive form of centralization. The end goal of the system being proposed is to let the community members decide who should and should not have more governance power.

Delegates themselves can delegate if they think they have too much say. Initially, this is limited to core only but, in the long run, especially as we learn more and correct course, we’ll have non-core delegates in the mix too

Good question. We sought advice from folks over at bioxyz, turns out delegation is generally sought after. Once delegation is in place, the goal is to encourage all community members, including the ones with substantial holdings, to delegate, if they are not actively governing already

There is no upper limit here. The goal is to let the community decide

Successfully verified members are put to a community vote on Discourse and Snapshot. Here, once again, the community (including core) decides the fate of the incoming applications and address the qualification aspect

P.S. Some of the answers are there in the primary text but may not be immediately visible because this proposal tends to be information heavy. Apologies for that.

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Thank you for the detailed replies, I appreciate your time.

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Awesome proposal, but confused about locking tokens to become a governance delegate, as i havent seen this in any dao before and it might create unnecessary friction, as i’d expect a lot of delegates to be eager to contribute to Valley but without many tokens yet - but with time and expertise to get involved… instead of creating a cost and friction to become delegate, i think its more important to reduce friction and create incentives to do so, as its otherwise not incentivized…

eg. in VitaDAOs case would expect less delegates if they would have to lock up tokens, as some valuable delegates might not have many tokens yet VitaDAO Delegate Applications - Apply now! - Proposals - Governance Forum | VitaDAO

similar patterns ins ens dao or gitcoin dao ENS DAO Delegate Applications - 💬 General Discussion - ENS DAO Governance Forum

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Thanks Vincent. The motive behind having

i) some pre-defined amount of GROW in the wallet is so that only aligned contributors and people in the know (~6 months worth of work on average) become delegates

ii) a lockup is alignment. This ensures that the delegates have a ‘higher’ stake in the process

The goal ultimately is to deploy, learn, and iterate on the current model