Boost governance participation by delegating to retail voter pool Event Horizon

[EventHorizonDAO]

Introduction

With the aim of enfranchising the tens of thousands of small voters, this proposal suggests we delegate (not grant) between 150,000-300,000 GTC to a public access-voter block. Gitcoin community members may mint a free, soul-bound Voter Pass which allows them to take part in mobilizing this voter pool. As detailed further below, this model:

1. Grants a clear and significant voice to retail voters regardless of their financial means

2. Incentives participation with additional governance authority, not inflationary rewards

3. Incentives participants interested in governance itself, not financial gain

Rationale

A delegation, not a grant, of 150,000-300,000 GTC would place the Event Horizon community around the 5th largest delegate. We think this places a fair amount of power into the 3rd pillar of governance, namely retail (the other two being team and individual delegates).

Problem

Today, retail voters very likely hold some of the greatest ideas, contributions and desire to affect change, yet they have no meaningful voice to function as a platform for their values. As a result, turnout is incredibly low and their ideas never see the light of day. This issue is self-evident and widely recognized across almost every DAO. Users suffer from lack of voice, but protocols also suffer from a massive constraint in their potential thought capital and as a result the DAO doesn’t leverage the full power of collective cognition. This is a problem which can be solved without expense by simply treating the 99% of retail users no differently than any currently extant delegate.

Background

Event Horizon is a public good.

It is a public-access metagovernance block. DAOs today rely exclusively on individuals and company entities to serve as network delegates. However, this isn’t the only option. While individual delegates certainly add incredible value to the Gitcoin ecosystem, so would a governance allotment dedicated to the greater body of smaller retail participants.

In this regard, Event Horizon slots into the Gitcoin ecosystem in a similar fashion to a standard delegate, however, rather than the block voting based on the decision of one individual, it votes with the collective cognition of potentially thousands of individual voter pass holders.

This serves two functions:

1. It provides a clear and designated voice for smaller, retail voters.

2. It drives participation through a game-theoretic process called Implicit Delegation.
   One of the greatest barriers to participation is a lack of voice due to lack of capital. Implicit delegation and public access governance changes this.

Implicit Delegation is a model by which the full public governance block mobilizes in favor of the consensus of those who do vote, thereby implicitly delegating the authority of those who don’t vote.

When participation is low… each voter receives a larger slice of the public access pie. This means the fewer people there are voting, the more incentive there is for someone new to come and participate.

When participation is high… there are more voters splitting the same pie, however, retail participation is high, which is a win for the ecosystem.

Implicit Delegation represents an effort to offer a new paradigm around means of influence. A shift from today’s entirely capital-centric to a more retail-friendly participation-centric model.

Where Direct Governance allocates influence along the lines of capital, and Explicit Delegation allocates influence along the lines of popularity (which often reflects capital), Implicit Delegation allocates influence to those who care most: people showing up to vote. Because the carrot is influence, it attracts governance-interested retail, not capital-interested retail, more on that below.

Because the entirety of the block is always mobilized, those who are most vested are rewarded for their participation by having a larger share of the voting pie. In this regard, EventHorizon’s model leans into a systemic lack of participation to create a solution.

Benefits compared to Token Incentivized Governance:

While token rewards for participation hold legitimate merit and are an intuitive remedy for low turnout, it has limitations.

1. Misaligned Incentives: Token-based incentives attract returns-interested parties. However, when it comes to governance, participation is most valuable when it comes from those interested in participating not payout. Implicit delegation directly appeals to these individuals as it rewards those who participate, not with capital, but with greater voting power.

Added Thought Capital: in line with the notion above, there are likely thousands of community members each holding both strong ideas and valuable contributions for the ecosystem, but simply lack enough voice to justify participation. Through Implicit Delegation, any community member of the Gitcoin ecosystem has an opportunity to have their voice heard, bringing thousands more minds and ideas to the surface.

2. Inflationary: While token rewards drive participation at the expense of inflation, Implicit delegation simply leverages its game theory model to increase incentive to vote in the form of a greater voting share. This does not cost the token any inflation, nor the treasury any GTC.

3. Non-scalable: Token-based rewards are finite and require a constant drain of GTC funds to continue driving participation. As the ecosystem scales, and more participants join, greater and greater sums of GTC will be needed to continue fueling growth. Implicit delegation has no cost, and its balanced game theory functions with no burn. As more retail voters join, more GTC could be delegated to the community block, however, again, this is not a cost as the GTC tokens are still retained by the treasury.

Specification

Past Performance:

The above is not just theory. The Event Horizon community is already actively meta-governing Uniswap, AAVE, Arbitrum, Compound, and ShapeShift. In fact, in 2 of the 3 latest Uniswap votes, the Event Horizon community was the 11th largest voter in the Uniswap Ecosystem. Event Horizon has also recently voted as the 11th largest delegate in recent Aave votes. While there is still quite a gap between Event Horizon and 10th place, interestingly enough this position serves as a sort of DMZ between individual delegates above, and retail below. This dynamic does, however, highlight an issue we are addressing. Retail needs more of a voice. Event Horizon aims to lift them up. Individual, organization AND retail delegation are all valuable and mutually inclusive, three symbiotic pillars for a strong ecosystem.

Since its inception just a few months ago, the Event Horizon protocol has processed over 100 metagovernance proposals and placed over $7,000,000 of governance authority and enfranchisement directly into the hands of the retail voter, a feat not seen anywhere else in the DAO space. Across all proposals for which the Event Horizon Community has participated, the community’s cumulative voter footprint is on pace to exceed $10,000,000 in the coming weeks. Some more metrics worth highlighting:

Number of Meta-Proposals Passed >150
Our community members have participated in and passed over 100 metagovernance proposals, each corresponding to Uniswap or AAVE base layer proposals.

Voter Participation: >30%
Over thirty percent of our community members have participated in our metagovernance proposals. Some participants have voted as many as 63 times in under 5 months. Check out the latest info on our leaderboard: EventHorizon.vote/leaderboard

Average Authority Mobilized per Participating Passholder: >$100,000 (and counting)
For the cost of $3 in gas, each participating passholder has mobilized an average of just over $150,000 in Uniswap, Compound, ShapeShift, Arbitrum and AAVE governance authority across all metagovernance proposals passed.

Average Authority Mobilized Multiple: 33,333x (and growing)
The average pass holder minted their voter pass for ~$3 in gas. When compared to the $100,000 in average authority mobilized, each member has mobilized over 33,333x their gas cost of admission in blue-chip governance authority.

Notable metagovernance proposals:

1. ehUNI-1 – Deploy Uniswap V3 on Scroll: The Event Horizon Community voted to support the deployment of Uniswap on Scroll. 24 voters participated each mobilizing >$4,000 of Uniswap authority: https://x.com/BuildWithScroll/status/1738249059616592223?s=20

2. ehUNI-3 – Lower Onchain Proposal Threshold: The Event Horizon Community voted to support the University of Michigan Blockchain Club’s proposal to lower the Uniswap proposal threshold from 2.5M UNI to 1M UNI. The initiative is intended to make proposal creation more accessible. This metagovernance proposal mobilized >$175,000 of UNI and achieved a record-high vote multiple of 8758x for those retail voters who participated.

Mechanisms:

1. Duplication: Event Horizon Automatically copies proposals published on the Snapshot of included DAOs, in this case Gitcoin, into its simplified UI metagovernance dashboard:

2. Metagovernance: The Event Horizon voter pass holders conduct a meta-layer vote to assess the community’s desired base-layer proposal outcome. NOTE: voter passes are free to mint and the Event Horizon will subsidize the gas cost for Gitcoin community members. EventHorizon.vote/mint

3. Base-Layer Voting: The Event Horizon community wallet automatically votes in favor of the desired outcome determined by the passholders.

Steps to Implementation

The primary step to implementation would be the delegation of GTC to the EventHorizonCommunity.eth. From there, Event Horizon will facilitate the processing of metagovernance proposals as it has been for many other DAOs.

Again, this would not be a grant and funds would remain in the foundation-controlled wallet. Consider us a delegate like any of the other talented delegates currently supporting the Arbitrum ecosystem.

[kyle]

I love the concept and idea here. Continuing to experiment in ways that draw more voter participation I think is a good thing! I am supportive, and a couple of questions on governance attack vectors.

1. Is there a quorum requirement for the votes to be active? (ie, event horizon requires at least 5 people to participate before the vote is registered with Gitcoin’s governance?)
2. Are there engagement metrics you can share for each vote, or a dashboard that the DAO has access to see how participation is shaped from Event Horizon (transparency around participation could be important even if folks don’t check it often… on any contentious vote, understanding how it was swayed could be valuable).

Thanks for proposing!

[EventHorizonDAO]

1.) Thus far, we’ve processed over 120 votes across 6 DAOs. The reward for voting is governance authority (not capital). And this multiplier effect is highest when no one else, or fewer people are voting. Given this, there is significant incentive to be the first, second, third, etc voter in our meta-governance proposals. As a result of this game theory, no recent proposals have had less than 5 voters. That being said, we can implement a 5 person minimum quorum as added assurance.

2.) We collect most of the relevant data on our metagovernance dashboard. From there we are looking to expand our metrics dashboards within our own UI. So this suggestion is inline with our current build path. For now, we’d prefer to launch with what exists on our UI, but would gladly expand moving forward.

[CoachJonathan]

Apologies for the delayed response on this.

I am generally in favour of this initiative. Here is my thinking:

• Allocate a set amount of tokens (I am thinking something like 150K)
  • This amount is significant AND will not tip the scales based on current voting delegates
• Because of the point above, I think this initiative will act as a signal for what the broader ecosystem thinks Gitcoin should do
  • Though the individuals are anons, they have opted-in to actively participate in our governance, and we are getting information from the average of thousands of people (which I think will generally protect us from nefarious behaviour)

My main logic behind saying “yes” to something like this is mostly that imo it is “safe to try” so long as the following conditions are met:
1 - Max 150K token allocation
2 - This is given a 3-6 month trial, with clear indications of what “success” looks like

For point 2, I’m hoping the Event Horizon team can make some suggestions based on how other DAOs using their platform are measuring success.

[Viriya]

This is really interesting. I love the concept of Implicit Delegation and I think it’s very value-aligned with Gitcoin and what it has historically stood for through our use of QF in grants distribution (i.e., pushing power to the edges of the system).

I’m for this experiment and appreciate @CoachJonathan’s framing in his reply. I think it’s safe (and exciting) to try and would love to see a follow up on how we’re thinking about success of this initiative.

It also supports Ecosystem Collective Objective F1O1: Empower Citizens and Stewards to add maximal value to our ecosystem

[EventHorizonDAO]

1. 150k is a great place to start.
2. For KPIs after 3-6 months we were thinking hitting 2 out of 3 of the following:

• 300 Voter Pass mints
• 10% monthly participation by EH voters
• 80% participation by the EH delegation

[meglister]

Thanks for posting! I’m supportive of this idea. I’d love to learn a bit more about the Event Horizon voter population – what DAOs/themes are they most knowledgable about? Besides participation, is there any other expertise that they could bring to our governance process?

I’d also like to learn a bit about the Event Horizon governance system. It looks like one person, one vote, correct? How do people become eligible voters? How could they lose this eligibility?

I talked with @kyle today about how this delegation could be done in practice and am pasting here for visibility. We currently have over 150k GTC sitting in the CSDO wallet, which we could delegate to Event Horizons through Tally. I’m not sure if that wallet will exist long term so am flagging to @deltajuliet in case we want to use a different wallet… either way, seems like there’s a path forward to use a non-treasury wallet for this!

[CoachJonathan]

I think these are some great KPIs for Event Horizon and I have no doubt that the team will meet/surpass expectations on these fronts.

I’m actually not sure how to measure whether this was a good idea for Gitcoin or not. How are other DAOs gauging whether Event Horizon participation in governance is something they want to continue or not? Is it just participation they are looking for? Are there other metrics they are using to measure?

I’m not proposing any solutions because I actually am not sure how to measure this. I think this comes down to “what makes a good delegate” which is a much larger conversation that I don’t have answers to at this moment.

[EventHorizonDAO]

@meglister , thank you for your support! It is one person one vote. Voting rights are allocated to voter pass minters which can be anyone from the community. We will implement Gitcoin Passports with exact requirements to be determined by Gitcoin Team and EH which we will add to the final proposal.

With respect to our voters, given the nature of web3, it’s hard to say with 100% certainty about their characteristics. But what we can say with high conviction is that these are disenfranchised governance nerds. We can be sure of this because we do not pay our voters. There is no inflationary token. No grant money being shoveled their way. No stable coin payout. The only incentive to vote via Event Horizon is a good old fashioned governance voice. Because governance is our only incentive to vote, it attracts only those who care about governance for its own sake. So definitely our people!

@CoachJonathan We agree with you that KPIs are never a perfect metric of success. That said, the ones listed to capture the essence of what we believe is crucial to a public good, namely: maintenance.

Consider a country road as an analogy. It’s important, we believe, to make sure that those at the extremes (disenfranchised retail / rural citizens) have access to key infrastructure. Measuring some “traffic” is certainly important (voter participation rate, voter pass mints). But the metrics are valuable so much as it proves that the good is functioning and available to be utilized as much or as little as those it serves need / want it. Ie a road should be able to sustain x throughput to be considered a functioning public good. But periods of low traffic don’t call for road closure.

This, of course, rests on a crucial assumption which is: the optimal amount of representation for every Gitcoin citizen, independent of capital, is not $0. Once we agree that it’s important to onboard new, but small, voters to the DAO, then the question of whether this public good is maintained comes into the picture. This has the added effect as serving as a “delegate incubator”. This framing should explain the KPIs we chose.

Finally, this initiative also serves as a signal to the community that we value all voices at Gitcoin. Hope this helps!

[UBIpromoter]

I had a call with Jordan from Event Horizon to talk through what EH is doing today, what they are building right now, and some of their dreams for the potential future of EH and meta governance.

I came away intrigued and encourage Gitcoin to make a trial governance delegation to the platform.

DAOs are amazing in concept and tough in reality. Voter apathy happens too easily and many DAOs, including this one, end up with only a small number of active voters. One of the many reasons people don’t participate in governance is that their voice is limited if they don’t have many tokens. Event Horizon will allow people to have a voice without that limitation. DAOs want and need many voices, this seems like a promising way to remove money as a hurdle to voice.

We also discussed the grave dangers of Sybil attacks.
Gitcoin Passport is just the sort of thing EH needs to improve their system, and they are pledging to use it. Great symbiosis there.

[Their current anti-Sybil architecture is dangerous and it will get destroyed once they open up minting voter passes on L2s. As on now, passes are minted on mainnet and cost ~$30 in gas. This cost is significant enough that it is likely doing a good job keeping out most Sybils. Once users can mint for pennies on an L2, this system could easily be over run.]

The team is eager to listen, adapt, and improve.
Ideas and suggestions from Gitcoin could lead to a much better EH product.
We can help shape this into a better meta governance platform.

[CoachJonathan]

I think I understand what you’re trying to say but I’m still not 100% sure how in 6 months from now Gitcoin can look back and say “This was a success because XYZ” or “We should not proceed with this because it didn’t do XYZ”.

Too often I find that Gitcoin enters into new arrangements with no clear end date and no way to gauge whether something was a success or not, and I’m getting the sense that this is another one of those things.

Again, I’m a fan of creating more signal in our governance, and that does not mean the above statement does not also apply.

I’ll likely be abstaining on this proposal.

[EventHorizonDAO]

It seems like we could have done a better job of communicating how our KPIs track direct benefit to Gitcoin.

• Voter pass mints: an increase in voter pass mints corresponds with an increase in Gitcoin voters given our 30% participation rate. Recent Gitcoin Snapshot votes saw 1500 voters. An additional 300 Voter Pass mints would correspond to an additional 20% of potential voters! But crucially, only 12 voters voted with over $1000 worth of voting power. Event Horizon would be able to bring ~260 voters to the table with over $1000 worth of voting power. That’s a 20x increase in economically meaningful voices. And remember, if participation is lower, the multiple is higher. So insofar as Gitcoin cares about more voters, and more economically meaningful voices, this metric helps Gitcoin.

• EH voter participation rate: Our current participation rate is around 30%, but as we scale we want to ensure that this stays high. 10% is a good starting point should we see this large influx of voters. This benefits Gitcoin as active voters leads to a more robust and representative democratic process in addition to the points mentioned above.

• Participation by the EH delegation: We know that Gitcoin’s has worked hard to keep delegates active. This delegation to the Event Horizon community would see this entire delegation vote in every election. Our current participation rate is 100% in the DAOs we currently support, but we want to leave room for error should there be a black swan technical glitch. So this proposal would see active participation by a delegate, a problem which Gitcoin has worked hard to find solutions for.

Beyond this, we know that you were working on a “good governance” framework. As far as we know this hasn’t been fully ironed out yet, so until then it’ll be tough for us to be even more precise beyond the KPIs already listed. That said, we’d love to help sculpt that framework with you and the rest of the community.

Hope this helps!

[CoachJonathan]

This vote has reached the minimum number of comments required and has been moved to Snapshot for a vote: Snapshot

[Yagmur2021]

This is a very good suggestion.

[ccerv1]

I voted no on this proposal.

In general, I am supportive of these types of experiments. However, I don’t think a broad objective like “boost governance participation” is all that helpful if it isn’t aligned closely to the type of participation Gitcoin wants from its community. The retail voter for Gitcoin has a different profile than the retail voter of Uniswap, Aave, etc – and it’s not clear how well they map onto each other. Specifically, given Gitcoin’s focus on OSS for its own rounds and additional support to community-led and citizen rounds, I’d like to see more engagement from a voter base comprised of OSS developers & users and communities that use Gitcoin Grants for funding allocation. This proposal doesn’t provide any detail on how or where Event Horizon would pull those types of voters out of the woodwork.

[EventHorizonDAO]

@ccerv1 We appreciate the feedback as it brings up a few things we could’ve done a better job clarifying.

I don’t think a broad objective like “boost governance participation” is all that helpful if it isn’t aligned closely to the type of participation Gitcoin wants from its community

As it currently stands, a typical Gitcoin Snapshot proposal sees around 12 voters with over $1000 of voting power. Event Horizon can bring 260 voters past that point, that’s a 20x increase in meaningful participation. While a comprehensive desired end state for Gitcoin’s participation is yet to be mapped out, we think it’s fair to assume that having more than a dozen economically meaningful votes is a low hanging fruit. And this would all be done at 0 cost to the DAO while also using a Gitcoin product (Gitcoin Pass).

I’d like to see more engagement from a voter base comprised of OSS developers & users and communities that use Gitcoin Grants for funding allocation. This proposal doesn’t provide any detail on how or where Event Horizon would pull those types of voters out of the woodwork.

It’s important to keep in mind what Event Horizon gives to users. We don’t pay people. There’s no inflationary token reward. The only incentive to show up to vote is an increased voice through Implicit Delegation. So while it’s impossible to say who exactly is voting, given the nature of web3, we can infer a few things given our sole incentive is governance authority:

Our voters:

• care about voting for its own sake
• want a larger voice
• are interested in specifically the DAOs and proposals they choose to vote on

So if Gitcoin is having governance proposals on OSS-related software, Event Horizon is likely to bring

• governance-interested
• retail voters
• interested in Gitcoin proposals on OSS-related topics, likely devs

There’s no incentive for anyone else to show up. But crucially, enfranchising developers and enfranchising retail are not mutually exclusive!

We’re happy to work with you going forward to see in what additional areas Event Horizon can help increase engagement in forms beyond voting alone.

[deltajuliet]

Jumping in to express my support and highlight a few points that I believe are particularly impactful for the Gitcoin community as this sits on Snapshot. Agreed with the points made by @ccerv1 @meglister and @CoachJonathan but also see the opportunities presented to grow the community and Gitcoin advocates.

Event Horizon’s approach to granting these individuals a more significant voice without financial barriers is pretty awesome and aligns with the democratic ethos of DAOs, and while specific/targeted community members are really important, it’s also useful to broaden our scope and onboard more missionaries into Gitcoin. By allowing retail voters to have a say, we’re tapping into ideas and perspectives that might otherwise remain unheard. While there is valid skepticism regarding the effectiveness of increased participation, I argue that fostering a more inclusive governance environment is a success in itself.

We can also embrace this as a chance to identify and address any weaknesses in our current governance model, not as a threat but as a tool for improvement and growth.

Other notes

• This proposal rewards engagement with greater influence, ensuring that those who are truly interested in the governance of our community are the ones who are empowered
• I agree on a lot of the considerations (scalability, vote manipulation, SME & their context) however I believe that this experiment can remain as an emergent exercise to test the holes in our own processes without significant risk.
• While voter participation rates and past successes are impressive, there’s less emphasis on feedback mechanisms for the community to express concerns or suggestions regarding the governance process facilitated by Event Horizon - @EventHorizonDAO I’d love to see us come up with ways to utilize this proposal further to gather meaningful feedback for @CoachJonathan and the Gitcoin governance team.

[ccerv1]

Here’s my last word on this (seeing that the proposal passed on snapshot)

Again, I’m in favor of the goal of boosting governance participation and supportive of experimenting with different approaches towards that goal. I am skeptical that “meaningful participation” will come from “retail voters” who are “governance-interested”. My expectation is that “rote participation” will come from “airdrop farmers”. But I’m very happy to be proven wrong!