THE PROBLEM:
Over the past month, web3 (Gitcoin included) has experienced a series of âfakeâ or scam Snapshot proposals that have been posted to various DAO snapshot sites. Last week, SnapshotLabs responded with this guidance: Snap the scams out!
TENSION:
The social contract governing the proposal/vote process at Gitcoin was defined in Gitcoin DAO Governance Process v3. Generally speaking, anyone can make a proposal on the forum and it has to 1) be available for comment for five days and 2) receive comments from five stewards. With those two conditions met, and given the formatting of the proposal was correct, the proposal could move to snapshot for vote.
Here is the relevant section from the Governance process v3 listed above:
Proposal Discussion
Before a proposal can go to a vote, it must be posted in the appropriate category on the forum for review and comment by the community.
Proposals brought to the forum must be in the format required by the and address the considerations set out in Table 2: Required Information, above.
Once it has been posted in the forum, a proposal must:
- Be available for review and comment for at least 5 days, and
- Receive input from at least 5 stewards not connected to or working with the proposal/with workstream (any stewards part of the proposal should also be disclosed).
A proposal that does not meet the requirements for formatting, required information, length of review, or input from stewards will be removed from Snapshot voting if an attempt is made to hold a vote.
From Gitcoin DAO Governance Process v3
Previously, the Gitcoin Snapshot voting site was pretty wide open. Nearly anyone could make a proposal on snapshot with, or without following the social convention outlined above.
On four occasions, scam proposals were posted to the Gitcoin snapshot accounts suggesting or proposing Gitcoin airdrops.
To quickly lock down the proposal capability, the snapshot account was locked using Gitcoin Passport, limiting posters to those who had donated to past grants rounds. This approach had issues given that database updates were no all ways 100%, thus the account was updated to allow posting only from those with a balance of at least 100GTC, or those who had greater than 1000 Twitter followers.
PROPOSAL:
The initial movement to lock down the snapshot account was necessary, but it is important to ensure that any major change in governance should be ratified by voters. This is especially important when putting controls and limitations around who can and who cannot make bonafide proposals for Gitcoin.
This being the case, this proposal attempts to do three things:
- Explores options for gating proposals
- Articulated pros and cons for each case
- Set the draft governance proposal for change
OPTION ASSESSMENT:
To rectify the issue, we identified three options below to gate our Snapshot account. Please provide feedback on those options - or suggest additional options I may have missed.
Option 1: establish a manual review process & whitelist proposers
This option would lock down snapshot to âa fewâ people who would be responsible for 1) reviewing the completeness of the proposal, 2) determining if the process was followed and 3) posting the vote if it passes the check
.
Option 2: Continue to use Passport as a control, using at least GTC = 100 or twitter followers = 1000
This option would gate proposals via Gitcoin Passport connected to Snapshot using the existing stamps, which are at least 100GTC tokens held OR 1000 Twitter followers.
.
Option 3: Continue to use Passport as a control, but explore other stamps
This option would gate proposals via Gitcoin Passport connected to Snapshot but explore using other stamps to gate the community. See the appendix below for a complete list of Passport stamps.
Leading stamp options:
- GTC staking 100GTC (gold) (drives GTC utility - we use it to make proposals)
- Stamp seems to unstake after each grant round - not ideal for ongoing votes.
- Github: illustrates open source contributions (but not validated)
- Snapshot - voted on 2 or more DAO proposals: illustrates participation with Web3 Governance
Recommendation: Option 3 with any of the following stamps:
Implement the following stamps
- Staking 100GTC (gold)
- At least 100GTC held in the wallet
I am not married to this option and I could live with option 2, but what is most important is that we ratify our governance processes to be consistent with how we execute. In an ideal world, I would love to see a higher staking amount or some kind of a participation NFT, but lets close the gaps we have.
Next steps
Collect any feedback on this proposal and formalize for a final proposal and vote.
In closing, this is not âwowâ work that anyone is going to be excited about. But part of operational excellence is paying attention to governance detail that can come back and bite us in the butt later on. Going back and cleaning up work that was done on the fly is necessary, however often not very exciting.
