Attributes
- Author(s): @JackALaing
- Implementer: @JackALaing (Governance Lead)
- Category: Governance Upgrade
Summary
Upgrading our governance tooling and processes to fully adopt POKT Arcade, a series of gamified community onboarding quests, and Snapshot, an off-chain voting tool, will drastically improve the UX of becoming a voter and voting on proposals.
Abstract
The current UX of vote acquisition and voting on proposals is far too frictioned: you need to deposit POKT to the DAO treasury using the CLI, use a tx memo to link your Aragon and Discord accounts to your Pocket account, this deposit then needs to be verified manually by moderators (the plan was to eventually peer-review using Aragon Agreements), and proposing/voting itself is then at the mercy of gas costs.
We have designed an improved process that fully embraces POKT Arcade, for more scalable distribution of votes and more efficient (off-chain) voting.
Motivation
- Minimize Friction of Voting: the only determinant of voter engagement should be voters’ interest in issues
- Simplify Vote Acquisition: to maximize stakeholder representation, acquiring a vote should be costless for those who have proven their stakeholder status (by completing POKT Arcade quests)
Specification
New DAO Onboarding Flow
- When you join the Discord server, you’ll choose some topics that are of interest to you
- If you choose Node Running, App Infra, Community, or DAO/Governance, you will automatically enter the Arcade, revealing channels with your first set of quests
- Each time you complete a quest, you will report the evidence in #achievement-unlocked and earn a new role
- Once you’ve achieved enough of the quest role set, you can level up by writing !become-{newrole} in #achievement-unlocked
- Once you reach the 3rd level on any of the 4 paths, you will qualify for a vote in the DAO; you can claim the Qualified role by writing !qualify in #claim-vote
- You will also need to link your BrightID to Discord, to prove you are a unique human being and prevent Sybil attacks on our governance
- Once you have proven your community participation, by earning the Qualified role, and your unique humanity, by earning the Verified role, you can claim a vote by writing !claim-vote in the #claim-vote channel
- You are now officially a Voter! All that’s left is to use the Collab.Land bot to claim an airdrop of your voting token, which you can use to submit gasless votes in Snapshot!
- Proposals will be submitted to Discourse and all new posts/replies will be automatically cross-posted to Discord to ensure maximal engagement in debates
- When proposals are submitted to Snapshot for voting, notifications will be automatically posted to the #proposals channel, ensuring you never miss a vote
Gasless voting is a massive improvement to our governance UX; nowhere in the above flow do you need to own any cryptocurrency, other than the POKT you may need in the course of completing quests
Constitutional Amendments
- Remove Governance Stake
- Update voting details
- Update action submission requirements
- Update Arbitration to account for off-chain votes
- Sunset Champion system
- Remove bootstrap measures
Rationale
Simplify Vote Acquisition
- Arcade minimizes cost of vote acquisition: Unlike the Governance Stake system, playing POKT Arcade and receiving a voting token airdrop costs nothing to community members, other than the time spent reporting on the Arcade quests and POKT they may need to use the network. As a bonus, it all takes place in our Discord metaverse, making it immediately accessible to all newcomers.
- Arcade is the best filter for engaged and knowledgeable voters: Making POKT Arcade the only way to get a vote ensures that our first voters are our most engaged and knowledgeable stakeholders. It will also serve as an additional incentive to play POKT Arcade, which has been designed to onboard community members.
- Governance Stake is now redundant: The Governance Stake was adopted to ensure Voters have skin in the game. However, by legitimately participating in the network, and proving this through completion of POKT Arcade quests, Voters would have enough skin in the game. The Governance Stake is arguably therefore redundant in this sense.
- Portable Voting Rights are more aligned with our Lean Governance strategy: By using generic non-transferable tokens to represent voting rights, rather than specific smart contracts, our governance stack has more optionality. Using alternative governance tools simply requires connecting the same wallets to those tools. The voting signal is also decoupled from on-chain execution, meaning we can apply on-chain execution in any system independent of the chain (xDAI) used for the voting tokens, giving the DAO more agency to enact its will on any system.
Minimize Friction of Voting
- Improves voting UX: Using Snapshot for proposals/voting costs nothing.
- Flexible mechanism design is more aligned with our Lean Governance strategy: Snapshot-style architectures have less overhead/complexity, making them much easier to experiment with. For Snapshot, updating our voting policies is as simple as writing a new “strategy”, no complex smart contract upgrades required.
- Moving with industry standards means we’ll have access to cutting-edge governance technologies: Aragon v2 represents a full commitment to this new design standard, which means the best future innovations are likely to require adoption of the new standard. For example, since pivoting to this new strategy a few weeks ago, a similar off-chain voting tool has already emerged at ETHonline (Tokenlog), which would enable us to use our existing voting tokens to prioritize feature/bug backlogs. We are already exploring how we might integrate this as a Discourse plugin.
- Signaling vs Executive Vote distinction now redundant: Since we’re using Snapshot + Aragon Agreements, we can remove the distinction of signaling vs executive votes. All votes are now signaling votes until the result of the vote (Governance Transaction) is staked on to be submitted on-chain.
- Remove aspirational designs: For now we should remove reference to anything that is not currently available or designed for the current tooling. Snapshot’s flexibility means we should take the time to reevaluate the optimal voting mechanisms for different proposal categories, since implementing these mechanisms will involve less overhead.
Update action submission requirements
- The constitution no longer needs to be signed using the new version of Aragon Agreements.
- With the full adoption of off-chain signalling, submission of proposals is decoupled from submission of on-chain actions. All votes are now signaling votes until the result of the vote (Governance Transaction) is staked on to be submitted on-chain.
Update Arbitration to account for off-chain votes
- No actions can be submitted on-chain (yet)
Sunset Champion System
- Champion system is now redundant (and undermines the neutrality of POKT Arcade): POKT Arcade is designed to be fair to all stakeholders who engage with Pocket Network, whereas the champion system was a stopgap to allow for trusted community members to be onboarded. Now that POKT Arcade will qualify stakeholders, we don’t need the Champion system anymore, and it is in fact detrimental to the neutrality we are trying to establish.
Remove Bootstrap Measures
- With the PIP-1 changes, none of the bootstrap measures are relevant anymore.
Dissenting Opinions
Reliance on Aragon Agreements for On-Chain Enforcement
Since publishing this proposal, the likelihood of Aragon Agreements and the associated Snapshot plugin being finished has become less certain due to the resignation of the team (Aragon One) who were building it (though I am told in the Aragon Discord that these products will be finished by the Vocdoni team). This means there is a less certain path to disintermediating the Foundation from the executive function (submitting the results of votes on-chain). However, all of the off-chain signaling tooling is still available, our governance as it stands will be no different from existing multi-sig systems used in most Ethereum projects, and I’m confident we can find a substitute to Aragon Agreements (e.g. Kleros) if necessary. I don’t believe this should stop us from proceeding with using Snapshot and CollabLand.
POKT Arcade in Adversarial Environments
Our current voting design is well optimized for the governance experience of our community members, validating the knowledge of our voters, and enabling democratic 1p1v, however it is not necessarily perfectly robust in adversarial environments. While BrightID will provide us with sybil resistance, it doesn’t defend against malicious attacks from unique persons. Neither necessarily does POKT Arcade; earning a vote will require engaging genuinely with Pocket, which should take a few months for most people, by which time we may even have assimilated would-be attackers, but it remains the case that the aggregate incentive-alignment in this system (post-vote-acquisition) is potentially weaker than in token-weighted (excluding vote rent attacks) or reputation-weighted systems.
RFP-1 aims to research and build custom Snapshot strategies that would help address this potential weakness as we scale. I don’t see this being a problem at this stage in our project’s life.
Implementation
Once all of the current voters have weighed in on this proposal, we’ll airdrop voting tokens to them and vote on this proposal using the new method described above. This will give them direct experience of using the new flow, ensuring their decision is informed by experience.
If the voters approve these amendments, we’ll merge the above commits with the master branch of the constitution and add a new version count per “Tracking Constitutional Amendments”. We’ll then proceed with fully implementing POKT Arcade and Snapshot.
We are also currently working on a number of refinements that will enhance the constitution’s clarity and robustness as a legal agreement. These amendments are independent of the changes outlined in this proposal, so there is no reason for them to hold up the implementation of this governance upgrade.
Potential for Future Developments
- Removing the Governance Stake as it is currently designed doesn’t rule out a staking requirement being introduced in the future. In theory, if we had a means of linking voting addresses to on-chain POKT addresses, we could design a Snapshot strategy that requires voters to remain staked for their vote to count. This is something that needs to be researched, as outlined in RFP-1: Research and Build Custom Snapshot Strategies to Reinforce Governance Security.
- RFP-2: Build a Custom Discord Bot to Automate POKT Arcade Quest Verifications: We can automate POKT Arcade by building a Discord bot that verifies POKT signatures and queries the chain for quest requirements. This should make DAO onboarding even more frictionless.
- RFP-3: Build a Discourse Snapshot Plugin to Improve Voter UX: We can build an integration between Snapshot and Discourse, to further streamline the voting UX and create an “omnichannel experience” as described by Rajeevan.
- We can integrate other voting mechanisms that also use Snapshot-style signed messages, such as RFP-4: Build a Discourse Tokenlog Plugin to Enable Pipeline Governance.
- We will need to work towards disintermediating the Foundation from the executive responsibilities (submitting approved decisions on-chain), as described in RFP-5: Build a Registry Smart Contract to Record Approved Decisions On-Chain.
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.