Interesting point of view. It is true that governance work is usually carried out by delegates. However, without delegators, there are no delegates. And at the moment, there aren’t many incentives in place to delegate to them.
One could argue that a token holder’s incentive to hold is precisely to use the token for its intended function, but in practice, that doesn’t happen. It is simply financial speculation. Therefore, promoting delegation through the second season seemed very reasonable to me.
OP did an airdrop distributing tokens to wallets that delegated their tokens. Scroll is discussing incentives for delegates, but it’s not clear to me how that relates to increasing the percentage of tokens delegated to them. I haven’t had the chance to engage in those discussions yet, but I will soon!
I was unaware of that - thanks for point that out! I’ll look for it but if you can also link to anything (both in terms of plans before they did it and/or how it went and did they see any positive outcomes from it), that would be much appreciated.
So this overall thread of ‘improving the votable supply’ touches on both getting more people to delegate and getting delegates more delegation. I see it inherently as a 2-sided problem where one can’t really be solved without the other (unless the solution is around using Foundation treasury as a point of delegation).
Getting more people to delegate is tough. In this regard, we want to explore:
a public campaign and call for delegation
a private campaign for the team to nudge their network directly
any other solutions that exist currently (I personally have concerns around tools such as LobbyFi but am keen to see how it goes in Arb)
In addition to that, we want to explore:
delegate highlights of some kind (so those choosing to delegate for the first time can see more color than see by most voting power)
do all of the above before sessions 2 to maximize positive outcomes regarding delegation in sessions 2
explore potential temporary delegations from the foundation prior to sessions 2
The specific course of action I’m hoping for is to keep gathering ideas over the next week or two, and then discuss this in a gov call right before Denver. This is also one of the topics I want to bring up at the delegate day. And then following Denver, create a clear proposal for folks to react to. And then action it (ideally before end of Q1)
Please let me know / add to this thread if you think other ideas should be considered!
Here are the top 3 consensus priority responses as determined by SimScore API. @eugene
Top 1 @HumbertoBesso
“Picture this: SCR holders stake their tokens, then delegate those staked SCR to delegates. The yield is the result of the % of participation of that delegate. If the delegate you staked to doesn’t participate your yield is sent to the DAO. Yield could be shared with the Delegate. Therefore, there are incentives to (1) hold SCR, (2) delegate it, and (3) stay active in the governance.”
Top 2 @danielo
I was thinking about a yearly/semesterly event where people can join live calls where delegates pitch (get a poap) and then those that delegate (or update delegating, even if changing back and forth to the same delegate) get some reward in newly minted scroll tokens.
Top 3 @sam_mccarthy
For reference, the research I posted on delegate incentives earlier in the week has a list of “delegate races” (+ links) that other DAOs have run in order to distribute tokens from the treasury / foundation to delegates. This includes the:
Happy to see this topic being addressed from rather early stages. First of all, it surely is something present in most protocols and it’s hard to think of a highly effective measure to boost delegation significantly, so keeping an experimental mindset is important for this. As we know, the reluctancy of holders to delegate may come from several reasons that go from opportunity cost to legal concerns or plain indifference/unawareness.
In that sense, building trust is a pretty straightforward step in order to facilitate delegation. Although we advocate for on-chain reputation, that trust usually comes from more from a social layer perspective and a bottom-up approach. Therefore having delegate campaigns, AMAs, showcasing contributions and reaching out holders is surely worthy and can be implemented with relatively low overhead.
The staking option which has been mentioned is also a fair try but it adds multiple layers of complexity which are non trivial at all, including inflation and governance alignment regarding delegate activity. Feel free to check the final report we conducted for the ARB Staking working group that sums up the findings. Just mentioning this since it can be addressed as a mid-term initiative and some ground can be covered earlier.
