… and other related topics. @marcusaurelius on Telegram says:
Now re decentralizaiton theater: addmittedly the lack of concentration of this particular vote is a promising sign towards a more decentralised Bitocracy. Do you have some stats by what date the core team’s collective wallets don’t have a per se majority anymore? I am just curious, because that’s when our DAO-voting will blossom.
I mainly cannot get my head around how such consequential decision is given such a short notification and duration. Check CELO which for weeks is sounding out temperature in the community about becoming an Ethereum L2 in an official way (not just expecitng I follow discussion on TG where I try not to spend my weekdays) before putting the vote on chain. I think there is a misconception in many projects (this one too perhaps?) that people who don’t spend X hours a day in TG or on Discord are not engaged. I am! I usually spend Sat mornings going over anything that needs my attention in my web3 investments, and so I found out about this SIP “in time by shere luck”. Further, if you want people voting for or against SIPs with a large degree of “self sovereig” thinking than I probably need a week to percolate on such big decision, maybe talk to peers and people I trust, not feeling rushed like this time and others in the past.
I think you, Light, come from Aragon, right? So you must know, if you are still connected to the DAO-Tooling-Sphere, that we now have coordination tools that are 10x if not 100x more sophisticated for community voting than what we use here. We all want the same, to Sovryn to scale meaningfully and sustainably, and it’s 2023, so maybe it’s time to shore-up documented, transparent easy-to-access proposal shaping and decision-making. The next wave of adoption will not put your community calls in their calendars.
Thanks again for the continued dialogue. The feedback is great and much appreciated. Here’s my response:
Now re decentralizaiton theater: addmittedly the lack of concentration of this particular vote is a promising sign towards a more decentralised Bitocracy. Do you have some stats by what date the core team’s collective wallets don’t have a per se majority anymore? I am just curious, because that’s when our DAO-voting will blossom.
I think we’re already there. See: https://twitter.com/EdanYago/status/1685912129969225728
Check CELO which for weeks is sounding out temperature in the community about becoming an Ethereum L2 in an official way
The CELO decision is a big shift in strategy, expensive, difficult-to-reverse decision that rightfully deserves lots of attention and time to consider. This vote was none of those things: it wasn’t a shift in strategy (it was consistent with our strategy of getting Sovryn Dollar adoption by supporting the peg), it wasn’t expensive (originations may have been the main revenue source for stakers recently but we’re still not talking about a lot of money in the grand scheme of things), and it isn’t difficult to reverse (it could be reversed as fast as it was enacted: in a matter of days).
I personally considered this vote quite urgent because millions of dollars worth of collateral has been redeemed and any delay would lead to more collateral being redeemed. If anything the proposal was long overdue. Yes the better thing to do would have been to propose this weeks or months ago, give it a couple of weeks for debate then have the vote. But here we are. And given where we are, if we wound back the clock to last week and did it again I would say that putting the proposal to a vote asap was still the right thing to do. (See below for more of my take on this.)
I think there is a misconception in many projects (this one too perhaps?) that people who don’t spend X hours a day in TG or on Discord are not engaged.
I can speak for myself here and say I don’t have this misconception. As someone who is also a weekend warrior or mostly a lurker in some projects I know that “engaged” does not mean sitting in a chat room all day.
if you want people voting for or against SIPs with a large degree of “self sovereig” thinking than I probably need a week to percolate on such big decision
I agree and every time a vote is proposed by the core contributors I am consistently pushing for more time to review. My position which I have told people before is that if you feel a proposal is rushed, you should vote no on it. In this case I voted yes because although the vote came on short notice, the issue has been considered for a long time and anyone who has been following the conversation and looks at the data would probably already have an opinion about it, or be able to form one quickly. And in the end the option to vote no is still there.
But again in principle I agree that proposals should have at least a week of debate. Eventually I want to get to the point in the maturity of Bitocracy where we can enforce this by making the contract enforce a delay period before voting starts, making a longer voting time, and also a longer execution delay. As the project is still relatively young it seems the preference is for moving quicker but as more funds are secured by Bitocracy we should slow things down.
I think you, Light, come from Aragon, right? So you must know, if you are still connected to the DAO-Tooling-Sphere, that we now have coordination tools that are 10x if not 100x more sophisticated for community voting than what we use here.
Yes, I worked on Aragon. Some of the available governance tooling has improved upon the simple “debate in a forum, then vote onchain” model. I don’t know that I would say I’ve seen 10-100x improvements over what we have but I would be interested in any recommendations for things to look at that you think are such a big improvement. I actually joined Sovryn to focus on improving governance, since then my role has shifted around, but I can share some of the challenges I encountered when thinking through how to improve Sovryn’s governance system:
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The smart contracts are pretty rigid. The staking and vesting system is tightly bound together. This in contrast to Aragon’s modular system. This means changes are more difficult and could have unexpected/unintended effects if not very carefully considered and implemented. (We are all aware of the challenges we have had with the staking contract in the past.)
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We have low capacity to support more “sophisticated” systems. We also don’t see a lot of people in the community proactively stepping up to shoulder the additional work that would need to be done (many thanks owed to those who have, e.g. Sacro organizing Circle of Tokens – I hope someone picks that work up again). Crucially, we lack capacity to build capacity. It’s a chicken/egg problem. Hard to solve without more resources up front (time, money, personnel…). We have experimented with using bounties to leverage existing resources and build out more governance tooling, with mixed results, and we haven’t had spare bandwidth to iterate and improve that process. So we’ve had to make due with what we have.
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A lot of the hot new tooling is built for other chains. Adding Rootstock support is possible but may be nontrivial depending on the tooling in question. That is, assuming we can overcome the first two challenges mentioned above. And doing to legwork to convince those devs to come over to Rootstock again is more work that we lack capacity to do (see previous bulletpoint). There needs to be a strong reason (bordering on existential crisis) to move this closer to the top of the priority stack and so far haven’t been able to justify that. So again, we make due with what we have.
We all want the same, to Sovryn to scale meaningfully and sustainably, and it’s 2023, so maybe it’s time to shore-up documented, transparent easy-to-access proposal shaping and decision-making. The next wave of adoption will not put your community calls in their calendars.
All of what I just said having been said, as part of our process for sunsetting Sovryn Alpha and moving core functionality into https://sovryn.app, we are in the process of re-designing the Voting and Proposals apps. Don’t expect paradigm shifting changes at first but there will be noticeable improvements. Most notably, we plan to implement vote notifications so that people can opt-in to receive an email whenever a new proposal goes live. We’ve also been thinking about how to make delegation more prominent, so that people who aren’t as active in following the chats and forum can delegate their vote to more active members. We already have a subforum dedicated to this but can definitely do more to support delegation.