VDP-65 Introducing Delegated Voting

Proposals Passed Proposals
1

Summary

We propose to allow token holders of VITA to delegate their voting rights to a delegate and wallet of their choice to vote on their behalf.

Team:
Vincent, Alex, Todd, Cat, Theo B, Schmackofant… (open to others who actively want to contribute)

Why Delegate?

For those VITA token holders who may not have the time to actively participate in the governance and evaluation of the research proposals of VitaDAO, we suggest that they can delegate the voting power of their tokens to a volunter who has offered to take on this responsibility. These volunteers are known as delegates.

Delegating your voting power:

If someone holds VITA, they have the option of assigning their voting power to a delegate. This can be done by accessing the delegate dashboard, which provides information about all available delegates, as well as their qualifications and applications. Through delegation, it is possible to ensure the community’s opinions and views are taken into account when voting. Furthermore, it is possible to reverse or cancel a delegation at any point.

How do I delegate my votes to a representative?

  1. Choose a delegate in snapshot or (to be built) delegate dashboard
  2. It is important to carefully read through delegate statements of interest before making a decision on who to vote for.

A well-functioning governance system is beneficial to both VitaDAO and all VITA token holders, so it is in their best interest to choose a reliable delegate. By doing so, the delegate will be awarded the right to cast votes on your behalf, without affecting your ownership of the tokens or their usage.

Implementation and Responsibilities

  • Tech WG:

    • implements snapshot delegation strategy
    • builds dashboard displaying all delegates on https://dao.vitadao.com/ similar to ENS Delegates incl their voting weights, and linking to their governance forum applications
    • (later) enabling you to monitor how your delegate has been voting on snapshot. Your delegate should also write up the reasoning behind their votes in his snapshot vote.

  • Awareness + Community WG:

    • raises awareness for people to apply as delegates

  • Operations WG

    • onboards delegates, helps them setting up their identity/ens etc.

  • Longevity WG

    • raises awareness within their working group members to apply as delegates, helps onboarding them, potentially rewards active delegates?

At any point, you can go back to the delegation page to adjust your delegate selection or redirect your voting power back to yourself. Delegates may be rewarded with VITA tokens, depending on how many tokens are delegated to them and/or how regularly they participate in voting.

Incentives, Budget

As a starting point, 10k vested VITA tokens will be given to active delegates as a reward over the first 1-2 years, that this proposal squad is responsible for designing in a way that it is aligned with governance goals of especially growing governance participating by reputable longevity researchers.

Timeline:

Poll

  • Agree
  • Agree with revisions (please comment)
  • Disagree

0 voters

4 Likes
2

Will it be easy to choose to delegate or not at each vote? Because if I take my example I do not have the skills to vote on each proposal but I still want to be able to continue to vote on certain topics.

1 Like
4

Short answer is no, not yet.

Long answer is you could in theory redelegate before certain proposals, but that would require you to be pretty on-time. If you’re 5 mins to late and the proposal is already up on snapshot (which means the snapshot of voting power and delegations has already been taken), it’s too late to redelegate.

3 Likes
5

Thank you for the proposal @vincent

I agree with the general direction of professional delegates and it has been proven to be a positive practise in other DAOs

Based on my experience as a delegate with DAOStewards (a meta-governance group from BanklessDAO) I would like to further suggest that

a. paid delegates are beholden to minimum governance participation thresholds in order to be eligible for compensation
b. the compensation can be a function of voting power & governance activity
c. the delegate program be iteratively developed in epochs. For the suggested compensation I would recommend an epoch of 3 or 6 months

Looking forward to collaborating with VITADAO

4 Likes
6

Welcome @ jengajojo, great to have you here!

Excellent points! Totally agree

a, b, c) excellent points and ideas!! we are still exploring how to approach this best, my sense would be that it could make sense to give delegates who put in extra effort some relative reward as a multiplier of their =

(relative delegation % received) * (percentage of proposals they voted)… for example the multiplier could be:
(10% of all delegation power) * (voted on 70% of all proposals) = 7% of the reward pool

What do you think about such an approach? We can ofc still iterate and improve

1 Like
7

Thank you. I suggest, splitting the comp into two parts:

(70% budget weight)
a. Base Comp for fulfilling some minimum thresholds:

  • Participation in at least (50/60/70)% of snapshot votes per month.
  • Communicate reasoning for at least (25/40/50)% of monthly snapshot votes in a delegate thread
  • Comment on (10/20/30)% forum proposals per month
  • Participate in at least (10/25/50)% of community calls per month

(30% budget weight)
b. Variable comp for:

2 Likes
8

This is a summary of ideas that were in the making before VDP-65, that we can iterate and improve on as we go along:

  1. Consider a social or technical solution for delegates who are competent in one domain, but not in others
  2. Ask any delegate to announce their competencies and, if they’re a niche expert, ask them to further delegate to other delegates? E.g., a “longevity delegate” could pledge to re-delegate x% of their tokens to a “governance delegate”, and vice versa?
  3. Optimise for experience in the DAO, e.g. time of being a working group member or owning POAPs of related milestones and events
  4. Allocate roles of affiliations to try to increase transparency on incentives and token holderships with other projects; consider rules and a code of conduct for that
  5. Coordinate with bio.xyz and/or DeSci DAOs bilaterally (Lab, Psy, Athena, Valley, etc.) whether they would like to collaborate on a DeSci-wide delegation system
  6. Could include DeSci-wide profiles for DeSci delegates across DAOs
  7. Could include DeSci-wide reputation/CV based on completed DeWork bounties
  1. Could define ENS names as mandatory for delegates
  2. Could define Gitcoin Passport for sybil-resistance as mandatory for delegates
  3. Could include a method that brings attention to under-represented delegates and reduces attention to top delegates, e.g. by shuffling the list of delegates like Gitcoin Grants’ weighted shuffle

VDP-65 has enough votes to pass phase 2, but I think these points should be considered if any significant changes should be made before moving on to phase 3.

2 Likes
9

awesome, could you maybe add numbers to each 1.-10. or something, so we can easier reply and discuss?

1 Like
10

Going live: Snapshot

12

Thanks a lot for these ideas. We can implement them in the followup proposal. Not sure how we could technically do delegation after a proposal is up on snapshot (afaik it takes a snapshot of the blockchain at the block in which the proposal published).

Maybe establish a system where a proposal is frozen for 2 days before it goes on snapshot so people can delegate ahead of time for this specific one, and then undelegate for next? (5 days for comment/proposed changes, 2 days frozen)

How would it work when there are multiple concurrent proposals?

1 Like
13

usually people delegate more long-term than proposal by proposal…

1 Like
16

Is there a team still stewarding this? The delegation strategy on Snapshot is the only thing that has been implemented afaik. We haven’t had a single delegation yet either :eyes:

I’d be happy to help as my goal is to advance VitaDAO closer to on-chain governance with innovative voting incentive mechanisms as well as building a hub for democratic coordination and not so much bureaucratic obstacles that exist in TradFi today. My concern is also the dormant incentive pool of 10k vested VITA.

2 Likes
17

Yes, would be amazing if you could support @alexdobrin to enable people running as delegates by sharing their applications here in the forum similar to ENS DAO Delegate Applications - 💬 General Discussion - ENS DAO Governance Forum for say 1 month and onboarding them via tech with @schmackofant

3 Likes
18

wondering if we should introduce an upper limit of voting power per delegate to keep more decentralisation. Say a delegate can have not control of more than 2% of token supply or such.