Add Snapshot Voting Support to Meta-governance

Add Snapshot Voting Support to Meta-governance

As the AUM of the DPI has grown, meta-governance has become an increasingly important feature of the Index Coop. Currently, we only support meta-governance for just 2 out of our 12 tokens (Compound and Uniswap). By only supporting a small subset of our tokens, we are underutilizing one of our most valuable assets.

Fortunately, 5 of DPI’s tokens conduct their governance solely on snapshot. These tokens are:

  • SNX
  • SUSHI
  • YFI
  • BAL
  • MTA

By allowing the DPI contract to participate in snapshot votes via a module, INDEX holders will be able to participate in governance for the above tokens.

The implementation of this is would be relatively simple. Snapshot allows you to interact with a smart contract to delegate an address’s snapshot votes to another address. We could write a module that simply calls this function and delegates DPI’s votes to an external address. Unfortunately, we cannot delegate to a multi-sig since they cannot sign messages.

I’ve included a temperature-check poll below. If it gets strong support, I will begin working on an implementation and draft a proper IIP.

Add Snapshot Voting to Meta-governance
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

6 Likes

This would be a huge value add. 100% in favor

2 Likes

Brilliant! Would love to see this.

1 Like

That would be great! +1 for this!

1 Like

Big fan - great idea!

1 Like

Great! I can see that we’ll need good tracking and coop communication to make the most of this. Maybe those writing about tokens for the IC could monitor their token for votes, or something like this. It really could be quite a large undertaking. A worthy one though!

1 Like

This would be really cool. Maybe we could form some sort of meta-governance committee that spends the time to analyze each vote, then makes a recommendation on how they think index holders should vote? It would be a great way to help people who don’t have the time to research each proposal to still be able to contribute to reaching quorum.

7 Likes

Putting out recommendations for meta-governance votes was part of the vision for the investment committee.

From the proposal - “Meta-governance is an important responsibility for the Coop. So far, it is active for UNI, COMP and AAVE. Analyst for these tokens will need to understand their governance proposals and write up a summary as well as a recommendation for how $INDEX holders should vote on each new proposal.”

The problem we have run into is time. Understanding these tokens, their business models and all the details enough to be able to provide analysis on governance proposals takes a lot of time as @Lavi, @Matthew_Graham and @bluehills can attest to. With all the other work going on in the Coop, we realized that we are rather time-constrained and that, perhaps, the investment committee could be spun out as a separate working group if 1) the community finds the output & the goals of the committee valuable eoungh to justify a separate working group and 2) there are community members who have the desire and capacity to take this on.

4 Likes

Activating more meta governance would be a fantastic step forward./

3 Likes

I voted “yes” - one specific question for now. I am not in need of an answer here, but will at least be looking for the answer in the IIP.

Question: Assuming this does get implemented, what are the operations associated with this? That is, what specifically will humans have to do to execute these votes? We likely will need someone to step up to run this and do marketing around it**

  • Brief Context: Meta-governance today requires non-trivial human work

And another question for broader consideration (and likely a different forum thread) :point_down:

How do we maintain high-enough engagement in a world where there are even more meta-governance votes & continued Index Coop governance votes?

2 Likes

You’ve made two great points @anon10525910, and they are questions that I have been considering myself for the past several days.

From an operations perspective, it is likely that the Set team will have to handle executing snapshot votes. The DPI can only delegate its snapshot voting power to a non-contract address. This is because, in order to vote on Snapshot, you must sign a message, and a smart contract (like a multi-sig) cannot do this. The consequence of this is that we must have a trusted entity (the Set team), take ownership of this address.

What we can do to alleviate the amount of effort on the Set team to execute meta-governance votes is to form a “meta-governance committee” to execute votes, excluding those that are on Snapshot, which must be executed by Set for reasons described above. This committee would be tasked with simply executing the will of INDEX holders for meta-governing Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. From a technical perspective, this is quite simple, as we already have the ability to delegate these votes to a multi-sig. This idea was originally pitched to me by @setoshi, and I think it is definitely worth pursuing.

As for your question on engagement, I think this is a much harder problem. The number of protocols we govern will grow. I’ve already written the implementations for the Snapshot and Aave V2 governance, and hope to add more in the future. Governing all these protocols will be a strain on INDEX holders, and we must provide positive incentives to ensure that we reach quorum for all these new votes. I think @DarkForestCapital’s post on governance mining can potentially provide a solution, but it will definitely be something that we need to consider further.

2 Likes

Great points raised here!
Reading through this also makes me a little concerned that the amount of meta-governance voting, that might come with the implementation of this module, could be overwhelming for INDEX voters.

And as @verto0912 pointed out above, keeping up with other protocol’s development, as well as Forum or Discord discussions to make qualified conclusions or recommendations, is very time incentive for little output.

I support @ncitron’s statement that we need to further consider this. I’d argue we need to evaluate the effort that comes with this more deeply. And discuss the best solutions. The meta governance committee sounds very exciting. Would be interesting to know if people are keen to commit to become “meta-governors”.

@ncitron this is a great idea and something we need to pursue. Part of the narrative behind the $Index token is meta-governance. The more protocols that we bring under the meta-governance umbrella the better.

In my opinion we should shift our thinking around meta-governance votes. We do not need to have maximum engagement on every vote - that is both impossible and not needed. We need to do two things:

  1. Shift our approach from viewing each vote as a specific issue and start thinking about a broader Index Coop philosophy that guides our voting

  2. Create an avenue for other communities to present contentious or important votes to our community. We do not need in-depth insight into every procedural vote that occurs in the eco-system - we do need insight into the truly important and structural votes.

@romario @fallow8 and @cedrick are currently building a forum post to address just these issues and start laying a framework around how we should approach this. If you would like to be involved in that discussion please DM one of them on Discord to get added to the conversation!

2 Likes

hey @ncitron, jus thinking ahead, could we add this functionality for the Metaverse tokens? Specifically, Rarible, NFTX, MUSE and Decentral Games all use snapshot.

1 Like