[Proposal] Delegate Mining

Ampleforth Governance
1

Simple Summary

Echoing @Mega’s proposal here:

The Ampleforth Community is seeking alignment for the use of their $FORTH tokens while the Ampleforth Protocol is searching for ways to stimulate governance participation/engagement.

Delegation structures have become integral foundations for governance representation but lack the incentive model needed to further scale.

Liquidity Mining is an inherent appliance throughout the Decentralized Finance ecosystem - largely rewarding participants for staking their tokens in return for a percentage of the respective protocol’s governance token.

A beneficial combination of these two concepts would be:

Delegate Mining

Vision

The overarching goal of this proposal is to:

  1. Improve Governance participation & representation.
  2. Deploy an incentive mechanism that will propagate engagement and community growth
  3. Augment $FORTH token utility.

Specification

The Delegation Mining process should adhere to general delegation & liquidity mining procedures.

Individuals looking to become Ampleforth Delegates can do so by announcing themselves as a delegate per Sybil or Tally. These newly formed delegates are now in position to receive delegate FORTH votes from community members.

By doing so, delegators will now be eligible to liquidity mine $AMPL tokens in proportion to the amount of $FORTH delegated. This liquidity mining structure will adopt the Geyser’s reward multiplier feature in which the longer participants stay delegated, the higher their multiplier (capped at 3x). However, these rewards will be largely reliant on the passing/denial of the proposal at hand.

If the Delegate’s vote is on the winning side of the proposal, the $AMPL rewards will be distributed as follows:

% of $FORTH delegated x Reward Multiplier = x AMPL received

The rewarded AMPL will be distributed via a time-locked faucet set with a vesting period of 90 days (1 Fiscal Quarter). The rationale behind this is to minimize/mitigate any potential gaming.

If the Delegate’s vote is on the losing side of the proposal, 0 AMPL rewards will be distributed.

Conclusion

FORTH Governance is very much still in its infancy but has caught the attention of the larger #DeFi crowd. Being one of the most economically sound projects in the crypto-economy, it is imperative that we - as a community - explore potential endeavors that will not only enable the continuation of scale but to also expand & challenge scope.

Full Disclosure: This proposal is in no way to be considered for immediate implementation, but to be taken into account as a possible Geyser iteration.

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I’ll reiterate my stance on this matter.

I don’t think that direct financial rewards for voting “right” on a governance matter will result in good governance.

On top of that, the way you’ve outlined an implementation of it specifically suffers from:

  • by only rewarding winning votes you incentivise herd behaviour rather than correctly assessing the best option. Especially dangerous when the legitimately interested vote % right now is so low as this means legitimate interests would not be able to out-compete only financial interests
  • seems to be a flat reward for each and every proposal, independent of time since last one. As such people are incentivised to pass meaningless proposals to cash out with
  • is 90 days really long enough to deter exploitative behaviour? I don’t think it is
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A response to your points:

  1. Yes, you would be rewarding the winning vote (whichever that may be). If the vote AGAINST a particular proposal wins, then those who’ve participated will be rewarded. The reward structure, on the other hand, is definitely something that could be expanded upon.
  2. Not necessarily. This reward mechanism would only initiate during on-chain voting; suggesting that it must pass through preliminary forum temperature checks, forum consensus checks, an off-chain snapshot vote and then ultimately the final on-chain vote.
  3. After giving it a bit more thought, the vesting period would be set for 1 year.

Now to add to the proposal in question, delegates would be capped at the amount of total votes assigned. This would serve as a contingency effort to mitigate any possibilities for a single delegate to swing a vote. Once this cap/threshold has been met, the delegate would no longer be eligible to receive any more delegated voting power from the community.

Thus, to make this sustainable, a Geyser-like Multiplier would be applied - the longer you stay delegated the higher AMPL reward you’ll receive if you’re a part of a proposal’s winning outcome. This will not only improve TVL metrics but also offer a leveled governance playing field.

In turn, it all comes full circle since the awarded AMPL would be locked to avoid any frontrunning.

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