Proposal: Scroll DAO Delegate Accelerator Proposal

Governance Iterations
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is there a recording?

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All past recordings are published here.

The latest call was hosted on the 2 d of April, the recording can be found here, and the transcript is available here.

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This proposal has been updated to provide better justification for the budget request, we would appreciate more feedback.

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GM Scroll community,

Thank you again for the thoughtful and constructive feedback throughout this thread. It’s been encouraging to see such engaged discussion around DAO priorities and resource allocation.

Following several follow-up calls, we’ve worked collaboratively to clarify how the proposed funds will be allocated. In revising the budget, we carefully considered all input shared here — balancing fair compensation with market rates for curriculum design and facilitation, while accounting for the specialized nature of this program.

Please see the updated Financial section for a detailed breakdown of how the budget will be distributed across the program components:

Please note that, pending approval of this proposal, a follow-up proposal is planned to outline deeper operational details, including the finalised curriculum, program tooling, participant selection criteria, trainee rewards structure, and KPIs for measuring program impact.

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Thanks @Nneoma_StableLab for including feedback and sharing an update. Could you maybe point out, which part(s) of the requested budget have been adapted? I don’t remember the initial state.

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Thank you to the entire Stable Labs team and everyone else who worked hard to put this together. @EthereumTGU strongly believes that delegate training and compensation is a very important conversation to have in order to achieve a healthy and lasting governance process.

We like the proposal as it is and are happy to endorse it so it can be included in the next voting cycle.

That being said, we would like to see a continuation of this program in the future and possibly explore other ideas, such as finding a way for the SCR delegated to program participants to eventually be owned by them (perhaps through a vesting mechanism).

Congratulations again to all those who participated, and we hope to see this proposal passed in the next cycle.

Regards,

Luis Cedeño
Ethereum TGU

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Thanks for the latest update on the proposal following community feedback, especially the clarifications around the budget and the facilitator responsibilities. This looks like a great plan to onboard new delegates to the governance.

I noticed the mention of the VOICE tool in the proposal and during the last delegate training discussion. I’m curious when will we have a chance to try VOICE ourselves either before or during the program? It seems like a valuable tool for capturing feedback and sentiment in a more meaningful way and I’d love to better understand how it works in practice.

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After reviewing the proposal and the comments, here are my thoughts and suggestions:

  • Participants’ compensation. As a user I would really like to be compensated to participate. However, as a Delegate am here to make decisions that safeguard the DAO’s best interests.
    Aiming to find a common ground from the different comments regarding the participants’ incentives, I suggest that participants do get a compensation but through a SuperFluid approach where compensation for apprentices comes from participating as a Delegate and not just for passing the course.

  • Increased VP. A meaningful part of funding this course is “professionalizing” Delegates. Therefore, those who pass the course should have a meaningful voting power that puts their training into real value. A common ground between @DonofDAOs’ and @Kene_StableLab’s thoughts would be to increase VP of participants gradually as they evidence their committed participation to the DAO’s governance.

  • Cost per trainee. Even if the initial cost for a trainee will be less for the next cohort, it won’t be drastically less. $4,350 usd per trainee is expensive. I support @connormcmk’s suggestion on dropping the costs for both development and facilitation.

  • More in-depth Scroll training. As @Pedro points out, Delegates should be professional on the technology and Scroll specific ecosystem, goals, vision, etc. How can we govern something we don’t understand?

  • Use of tools. The curriculum should include the use of governance tools that are used within the DAO such as VOICE, Negation Game, Hats protocol, Pooling SCR, etc.

Conclusion. I support this initiative but it should still be improved.

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Thanks for explaining the changes in the delegate training call. Comparing with the initial proposal, it seems like the cost was reduced by 3k to 87k in total? Considering the discussions about the cost, I thought the reduction would be a bit more significant, e.g. 80k. Nevertheless, the proposal looks promising, and I’m in support.

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Hi all, after reviewing the new proposal most of my big concerns are addressed.

Primary thing that changed: I couldn’t previously justify the costs of the facilitation cost, but now with the reduced cost and a better breakdown on the hourly costs and after comparing to the typical rates of a highly specialized facilitator / module developer it makes more sense to me.

I’m currently in favor of the proposal.

EDIT: I reviewed the proposal yesterday with a fairly limited time budget and lazily said it looks good. But now that I’ve gone over it again, I still feel uncomfortable with the costs. We’re talking about paying an estimated $150-200 an hour for module development. And >$360 / hour for facilitation costs.

I understand that part of what this budget has to cover is the cost of time to get it approved (I’ve left the Budget Buffer unchanged for that reason), and I’m sorry for delaying it, but I just can’t vote yes as long as it’s going to be this pricey.

What I can vote yes for is a facilitation cost of around 12,000 and a module development breakdown of $100 / hour for two collaborators, and $150 for one, this would imply a total module development cost of about $21,000.

This would mean that the total budget should be reduced by 23k ((29 - 21)+(27-12)) to 64k. I’ll vote yes if that’s the case, otherwise I’ll vote no. I do think this is a valuable initiative but not at that price, it’s just excessive, and I’m not trying to be complicit in facilitating the excesses of DAOs.

If it’s possible to provide this service for ~64k total then it’s a YES from me. Otherwise I vote NO.

You can see my updated rationale here, and here is a recording of me working through this.

I’m sorry I’ve put StableLab through this, for upcoming proposals when I attend proposal meetings I’ll try to come in with a clear sense of what can I can say yes to.

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Due to the feedback around pricing, we will run a poll here on the forum to gather more community feedback and adjust the proposal based on the feedback.

The options for the poll are:

  1. Leave the proposal as is in terms of budget and scope.

Rationale: Several months of discussion and iteration have led to the current version. Given the scope, complexity, market rates, and specialization of contributors involved, we believe the proposal should move forward to the May voting cycle in its current state. We’ll also clarify the most accurate hourly rates (e.g., facilitators at ~$96/hr, Factory Labs post-program support at ~$3,000) to ensure full transparency.

  1. Scope down to a ~$64k budget with a reduced program scope overall.

Rationale: To justify the spend, delegates can reorganize and slim down the proposal to match the lower budget, resulting in a leaner program structure that balances fair contributor compensation with a more conservative budget.

  • Leave the proposal as is in terms of budget and scope
  • Scope down to a ~$64k budget with a reduced program scope overall
0 voters
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Thanks for the suggestion. Slimming down the scope and budget wouldn’t necessarily help the concern around the hourly rates, I guess. Is an option in between the two scenarios possible?

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The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.

We are voting AGAINST the proposal.

We want to thank StableLabs for the effort put into drafting the proposal and responding to all the questions and feedback so far. Delegate onboarding and training are, in our view, complicated topics. It is not necessarily about the onboarding process or the training itself, but rather about who the targeted audience is.

Below, we’ve distilled our concerns about a delegate accelerator program, as we’ve also expressed them during the governance calls. We’ve broken them down into challenges we see in the concept of delegate training and concerns we have about this proposal in particular.

On the concept of the delegate accelerator

Role of a Delegate

First and foremost, being on the same page about the role of delegates within Scroll DAO is crucial in understanding our point of view. In our opinion, delegates should help decide on the direction the DAO should take to support and grow Scroll’s ecosystem. And who better to do this than Scroll’s stakeholders: builders, investors, big token holders, etc.

Training just anyone to become a delegate when they might not have a material stake in Scroll’s success seems like a fruitless endeavour. It’s not that we do not want contributors who are engaged with the DAO and have strong knowledge and lots of context about how everything works, but those people don’t necessarily need to be delegates and drive decision-making.

With that in mind, if we were to pursue a training program, it should either be focused on Scroll’s stakeholders to enable them to participate in governance, or it should be more bare bones and act as a guide on how individual contributors and service providers can work for Scroll’s DAO, which brings us to our second point.

Demand

The whole approach to structuring the program is backwards. Instead of existing stakeholders wanting to participate in governance and the program filling in that gap, we’re creating the program first and hoping to find the right participants after the fact. We understand that it can be a ‘chicken and egg’ situation, but at the very least, we should have soft confirmation from existing stakeholders that they want to participate in governance, and if not, we should figure out why.

Similarly, although kind of different, if we are to train individual contributors and service providers on how they can work for the DAO, we should first have concrete things for them to do. One experience we have from an onboarding group we helped facilitate in a different DAO was that we were trying to onboard people to the DAO, but there weren’t any places they could actually contribute to in a structured way.

Practical influence

Lastly, a big reason we are sceptical about a delegate training program is that, in practice, a delegate with no voting power cannot easily influence decision-making, nor do they make it easier to meet the quorum. While, in theory, an active delegate would slowly start accumulating voting power from token holders who take notice, it doesn’t actually work like that in practice.

The proposal itself acknowledges this, with the proposed solution to mitigate it being delegating voting power to trained delegates from the DAO’s treasury. We are generally against the idea of treasury delegation, and we have written our extensive reasoning in another proposal here.

On this particular proposal

Leaving the points about the concept of a delegate training/accelerator program aside, we also reviewed and assessed the proposal itself. Given that we are not the only delegates, the proposal can be passed even if we vote against it. Understanding that, we want to share our feedback on the specifics.

Contrary to high-level things, the below points could be addressed or changed for us to be more comfortable with supporting the proposal.

Program’s costs

As other have pointed out, we also think the cost of the program to be on the high side. That’s not because of the cost itself, but rather because we think there is not much to actually do in each curriculum to justify such costs.

As an example:

  1. Introduction to DAO governance

    Many articles and videos online explain DAOs, how governance works, and the different types of governance. Recreating those seems like a waste of time, effort, and money.

  2. Understanding the Proposal Life Cycle

  3. Writing and Submitting Proposals

    The DAO’s docs should be more than enough of a resource to get someone familiar with these topics. Creating an additional resource and hand-holding trainees through it seems overkill. Also, if there are gaps or things that are not up-to-date with the docs, we believe it would be more useful to point those out to the Foundation.

Facilitators, Curriculum Developers, and Accountability

We do not understand the separation between facilitation and curriculum development, especially since most facilitators are also curriculum developers. Besides the scope of work, what’s the point of separating these two functions?

More importantly, however, it’s unclear to us who the ultimate accountable party for the program is. Who can we expect to be responsible for ensuring the success of the program or for communicating any potential issues to delegates in a timely manner? Right now, it seems that this responsibility is kind of diffused between everyone involved, so there’s no real ‘owner’ of the initiative.

Unclear expectations

From the survey results shared, one of the main challenges or barriers raised was unclear expectations and responsibilities. However, the proposed curriculum does not mention delegate expectations or responsibilities.

On top of that, we’re also not clear on what the expectations are from the program itself, especially if we are to include existing delegates. Is it an increase in delegated supply? If so, how are we to attribute that to the program and not to circumstance? Is it higher-quality proposals? If so, how are we to measure it, and how do we compare it to the quality of proposals now? Is it stronger community resilience? How do we
you get the point.

Trainee incentives

Having to incentivize trainees to undergo the delegate accelerator program highlights one of the key issues we mentioned above, which is the role of the delegate. Delegates should want to participate in the program because their end goal is to be able to effectively participate in the DAO and help shape the Scroll ecosystem, not because they’re getting paid to do so.

Going forward

All in all, we’re very keen on increasing governance participation and activity and are open to exploring ways to achieve that. Although the proposed program does have its merits, we’re not confident enough in its potential to have a meaningful impact on the DAO and its governance.

Having said that, if the proposal passes, we will try to help in any way we can to help it succeed.

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We are voting AGAINST this proposal.

Thank you very much for the effort and for being receptive to feedback. That said, as we’ve expressed in this thread and during the calls, we do not agree with the program and do not see a clear need for it given the current state of the DAO and the Scroll ecosystem

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blockful is voting AGAINST the proposal.

We admire StableLab’s effort to design a program to bring new delegates to Scroll. It is essential that we increase participation in DAO governance. However, bringing in new delegates whose tuition and remuneration are funded by the DAO may not be the most efficient way to achieve this goal.

We support education about governance, and it is essential to encourage new people to take an interest in it. But at the moment, Scroll would be more successful bringing in and retaining more experienced delegates to the DAO - like many who serve here on a recurring basis.

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I’m broadly supportive of efforts to increase voter participation, specifically informed voters. While the details of educational program are important, the sole fact that new, up and coming delegates can get a spotlight on there after going through the program is a massive value add. One of the problems in every DAO I’ve participated in is that active contributors to DAOs are often left high and dry as it’s very rare for anyone to redelegate tokens to them. This results in a large disparity between hard influence between old incumbents and new blood with fresh ideas.

So I’d like to see a more fleshed out plan for how post-program delegates can have their work showcased and promoted across the community.

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We voted ABSTAIN on this proposal. While we fully support delegate‑onboarding and education initiatives, the program as presented is too broad and insufficiently focused. Our primary concern is the absence of clear, data‑driven KPIs to back the program’s stated objectives— namely:

  • Increase active votable supply

  • Improve proposal quality

  • Strengthen community resilience

For example, the following KPIs could be measured:

  1. Increase in percent of delegated supply vs. total votable supply

  2. Proposal revision rate after delegate feedback on forum (or in Negation game)

  3. Number of new delegates who actively use Negation game

Without concrete, measurable targets, it is hard to assess progress or hold the program accountable.

We applaud Scroll’s willingness to experiment with governance tooling—VOICE and, separately, the Negation Game are encouraging—but the proposal still needs sharper goals, defined success metrics, and a tighter scope before we can endorse it.

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I vote AGAINST this proposal. I think Sinkas and the L2BEAT team provided a good rationale for why the proposal shouldn’t move forward, and their reasoning closely aligns with my own. I also feel that the DAO is already functioning well as it is, and the treasury should be used in other areas.

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In light of the adjustments made, I vote FOR this proposal. I generally support education and inclusion within the context of delegate governance and Event Horizon is available to support the program where possible

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