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.
A very similar proposal recently appeared in the Uniswap DAO, to which we are also delegates. As our stance is the same, we wanted to share our thoughts here. Our thoughts on treasury delegation are also relevant to our view on the delegate accelerator proposal, or at least the part suggesting delegating voting power from our treasury to the trained delegates.
We are generally opposed to delegating tokens from the treasury, especially if that voting power is given to already active delegates solely to avoid difficulties in reaching a quorum. While we understand the frustration of needing to rally multiple stakeholders to achieve quorum, this reality in DAOs is a feature, not a bug.
There are multiple reasons why we are against the idea of treasury delegation:
- There is a significant conflict of interest, as existing delegates are voting to delegate voting power to themselves.
- Existing delegates derive their voting power, in whole or in part, from the token holders they represent. That means token-holders can, at any time, re-delegate their voting power away from delegates who no longer represent their interests or are no longer active. By using the treasury to delegate voting power, we circumvent that whole dynamic.
- While the premise is that the additional voting power will assist in achieving quorum, there is no way to ensure it is only used in cases where quorum is difficult to achieve, at least not with the proposed approach.
- While the governance risk is similar to that of reducing quorum, delegating from the treasury creates extra overhead and additional risk. If we are to accept the governance risk, then reducing the quorum is a more straightforward option.
While the above proposal is similar in concept to the one in Uniswap, it is wildly different in terms of the proposed amount to be delegated (~75% of quorum in Scroll vs. ~37,5% in Uniswap), which is also a big reason why we’re against the idea. So far, we haven’t had a proposal that failed to meet quorum. Artificially increasing the available voting power to more than 175% of the quorum to mitigate a problem that currently does not exist does not seem sensible or warranted.
Furthermore, the proposed breakdown poses a problem that is apparent if one takes a quick glance at the numbers. Essentially, we’d be evening out the voting power difference in the smallest ~35 delegates, bringing them all to about ~50,000 voting power. While we get the premise of where the proposed distribution comes from, and we certainly wouldn’t want to see bigger delegates get even bigger, we’re skeptical of the fairness of the approach and the dynamics it would create.
Alternative Approach
Since we don’t want to just say that we’re against an idea, but rather work on finding alternatives as well, we’d like to propose a different approach for consideration, at least on a high-level - details can be figured out.
If the problem that ignited the conversation was fear of being unable to reach quorum in the future, then we could establish a mechanism to mitigate that, without arbitrarily giving more voting power to delegates.
We could draw inspiration from Optimism’s anti-capture commission (ACC) and establish a multisig that has a fair amount of voting power delegated to it. That voting power could be mobilized to only vote in proposals that are failing to meet quorum, but are not generally contentious. The exact details can be figured out collaboratively, but it could look something like this:
- A 2/3 multisig controlled by the Foundation and two delegates.
- Only votes if a proposal has met a minimum amount of quorum (e.g., 75% of the actual quorum).
- Only votes if a proposal is not contentious (measured as a percentage of ‘Against & Abstain’ votes vs ‘For’).
Again, the exact details can be figured out; this is an illustrative example.
In this way, we wouldn’t mess with the existing dynamic between token-holders and delegates, we wouldn’t increase governance risk, we wouldn’t unilaterally empower delegates, and it would significantly reduce overhead.
Alternatively, and given that proposal execution still has to go through the Security Council, we could revisit the topic of slightly reducing the quorum. In our minds, this is still better than increasing the votable supply by delegating tokens from the treasury.