To submit on chain proposals for voting on Tally, the current threshold is 150k Forth, which is almost $1 million USD. This makes it hard to submit proposals and only very few individuals with enough voting power can submit. While this is good for security it is bad for decentralization and inclusion of the community.
Solution
Lower the proposal threshold to 35k Forth (about $215k USD at time of writing). This will allow for a smaller group of community members with enough stake to make a proposal without requiring a team member or mega Forth whale to submit the proposal.
Risks
Spam - with a lower threshold we invite more potential proposal spam and could reduce the quality of proposals. However with 20k Forth I think we strike a balance between difficultly to propose and enabling more independent proposal submissions
Gas - more proposals mean more gas spend required for on chain proposals. Delegation is a good way to work around this problem. Again with the right balance they should still be high quality proposals that Forth holders would want to vote on
Governance attacks - this doesn’t really increase the threat of gov attacks because in order for the attacker to get the vote to pass they still have to get enough Forth for a quorum.
What do ya’ll think? I believe we should lower the barrier a little for community members to submit proposals so it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable task to get enough voting power to submit a proposal.
Edit: Updated the new threshold to be 35K forth to keep the ratio of voting power to market cap similar with other notable protocols.
I’m not sure I see enough reasoning on why to change the threshold.
The binding on-chain vote is the last step in the “governance decision-making pipeline” (see official docs) and as long as there are no proposals being hindered to be executed just because of the threshold, I’d follow the mantra of “never stop a running system”. We should keep in mind that on-chain governance exposes AMPL to a lot of security risks and while I love the financial innovation in our community, I’d argue we should follow a conservative path for our governance structure.
Thanks for engaging with this proposal. While I believe preventing the risks I mentioned above is good, the ratio of amount of Forth needed to propose relative to the fully diluted market cap is way higher than most protocols im seeing. Here are some examples:
COMP - $3.4 mil usd in tokens / 1.4bil market cap = 0.0024
TRIBE - $1.3 mil usd in tokens / 552mil market cap = 0.0024
UNI - $23.5 mil usd in tokens / 9.3bil market cap = 0.0025
Notice a trend here? Now if we compare Forth
Forth - $920k usd in tokens / 92 mil market cap = 0.01
So I think we are safe to at least reduce the threshold by a factor of 4, making it 150k/4 = 37.5K Forth required to submit.
Edit: We can find examples of even lower ratios, for example Pool Together has a ratio of 0.001, and less than 25% the market cap of Forth. So we wouldn’t be going into uncharted territory going even lower than 37.5k
If we do lower the threshold is it possible to extend the on chain vote from one week to two weeks? Would that even be helpful? This increase in time can help mitigate the risks of low quality proposals getting through or something bad being rushed through in a week. This gives the community plenty of time to think and sort through the increases in proposals. For anything more urgent maybe the committee (see forth committee proposal) can help expedite things. I’m also wondering if this is only a short term problem. As more people enter the community and as more grants or other incentives like hackathon prizes go out a lot more forth will be injected into the community (and thus can be used to help delegate or vote). Does lowering it now make sense, right before major growth? Curious what others think.
I think this is a tough thing to know. That’s why I’m in favor of lowering it to be closer to other protocols and see if there are too many proposals. I’d like to empower the community to engage with governance more but there is definitely a balance.
I don’t think this is necessary, as a week is already a pretty long time and we generally post about votes going on in discord and whatnot. I’m personally not to worried about the risks, the worst case is that there are a few too many proposals to vote on, in which case we can always increase the threshold. I think this is a good opportunity to try and fix the threshold to be more in line with other protocols while ForthDAO is just getting going.
FWIW - I am also supportive of lowering the threshold.
I don’t think this is an exact science, or that we need to exactly mirror other DAOs in many aspects (for example with .0025); however, I think you’re all directionally correct in that the threshold could use lowering. I would be eager to see if it incentives a higher volume of community involvement and the ratio of quality activity.
I’m supportive of whatever number we land on here (.0025 or higher), with the caveat we act quickly if the approach looks like it is heading in the wrong direction. Another consideration is we could lower to 1/2 the amount with the understanding we will vote for 1/4 at a pre-determined time (such as 1 quarter from now).
I oppose this proposal, lowering the threshold would lead to some special motives and bad intentions to disrupt the project, especially some people with mental illness
No this would leave the quorum the same, it would just affect the threshold for submitting the proposal.
This is always a balance. Remember that proposals are just the first step in getting something changed, and there is still the 600k quorum required for a proposal to actually be executed.
In response to @Brandon ’s comments in this week’s Amplitheatre advocating for an even lower proposal threshold, I wanted to get a feeling for what Forth DAO members think the proposal threshold should be if we lowered it.
35k ~ $200k ~ 0.25% total supply
25k ~ $130k ~ 0.167% total supply
15k ~ $85k ~ 0.1% total supply
0voters
After this we will move to a snapshot vote where those of you who do not want to lower the proposal threshold can downvote the whole thing if you desire, but this poll is to figure out what number to put on the snapshot.
Just wanted to provide my rationale for voting for the 15k threshold on the poll. If we look at historical snapshots, the majority of them have had participation on the order of ~10k-15k or less. As for some of the concerns you laid out: “spam” proposals at this level I do not think will have a significant impact; the “spammer” would still be responsible for getting people to delegate to them - and even they just happen to have enough, the 600k quorum is still an effective security barrier for the on-chain vote. Also, the gas isn’t really a concern, since I believe those are all paid by proposer/queuer/executer so it does not come out Forth DAO time-lock contract.
Disclaimer: I am not familiar with governance attacks and how to prevent them.
Can we look at some examples of spam proposals and malicious votes that have hurt projects? It would be nice to know what can possibly happen to us.
I voted for the 25k threshold, because I think we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that a large wallet buys a lot of FORTH over a long time scale. I believe we also need to consider the amount of FORTH in liquidity pools, as this affects the time scale over which a wallet can buy FORTH with less slippage.
Sorry for the delay here. Before posting the snapshot I wanted to get a better idea where the market was heading, specifically the Forth price so we have a little more info when evaluating this proposal. I see there is a decent amount of interest but as I think we are at an inflection point in the market I wanted to get a bit more info on what we would be setting the current USD value of the proposal threshold before lowering it. Let me know if this doesn’t make sense and we should go through with a snapshot on the closest value from the poll (which I think would be 25k Forth considering current market prices)
Thanks @kbambridge for this proposal, I think it’s definitely needed to increase access to governance processes for more of the community.
One other thing to keep in mind is that we don’t need to get to the perfect value all at once. We can make a move in the right direction and adjust if we need to. I think you’ve identified the risks accurately and the quorum value still provides a lot of protection to the protocol, so I’m not too worried about security as long as we don’t do anything too drastic. I think any of the values in the poll are reasonable fwiw.
Okay in that case I’m thinking to submit a snapshot vote using the original market value of the successful poll ($85-90k) using the current FORTH price which would be about 25k FORTH. Considering it sounds like the FGP needs more deliberation and consensus from the community to get right I think it makes sense to lower the barrier to submit proposals in the meantime.
Posted a snapshot vote so we can get some signal from the community: Snapshot
These constants were chosen because they were inline with what COMP (and UNI) used. COMP had minimum of 50K against a total supply of 10M, FORTH has 75K against a total supply of 15M.
We can go lower than 75K, but it would first require upgrading the GovernorBravorDelegate code to have a lower minimum. This is a larger action than has been discussed so far, though.
I propose we move forward as far as we can with the 75K number now since we have consensus. Then we can revisit this again when we’re ready to update the Governor?
Since quorum was not reached, I made a snapshot vote for lowering the proposal threshold to 75,000 Forth (the current contract minimum) or waiting until we make another move in governance to upgrade the contract: Snapshot
