Authors: Volpe, Rica Amaral, Joan de Ramón
Problem:
Governance participation is low and concentrated in a few active whales. This further disincentivizes retail voters to engage, as they are under the impression their vote “doesn’t count”.
Context:
There have been initiatives to use Celo Community Fund (CCF) assets to delegate to individuals. The authors of this text find this unfair, as people would get voting power disproportionate to their economical exposure in Celo. It is a classical example of “politicians voting themselves more power”, as only people who have more time for politics than they do for building will have the time dedication to engage. Such a proposal would set a dangerous precedent, as nothing would prevent these entities to vote more voting power to themselves, or fund their own initiatives. This can very easily spiral into regulatory capture.
Such programs will always have the problem that delegation will always be, at the end of the day, arbitrary. Why should one person receive delegation and another wouldn’t? Why would a DAO created and funded by CCF less than a year ago receive more voting power without economical exposure, than someone working on Celo before mainnet launch who decided not to sell? It’s not up to the authors of this proposal to give a moral judgment of what is the right thing to do, but to point out it’s not a trivial question to answer.
The fact that Celo Governance is only binary further complicates this problem, as the members included in the proposal are up to the authors of the program.
These can be more dangerous if implemented by sending Celo to a multisig, as the CCF will not be able to reclaim these assets without collaboration of the multisig signers, on top of general risk of a multisig, like UI vulnerabilities or failures in signer management or key handling. Nobody really has an incentive to return the funds upon program completion.
Proposal:
Instead of using Celo in the Community Fund to delegate to individuals or organizations, we propose to create a program to match Governance delegates with Celo holders.
With this approach, the voting power remains with the holders, and delegates are accountable because holders can individually end delegation as they see fit. It incentivizes competition, as all the delegates compete for the same voting power, using more from the CCF is not an option.
A small committee will take on the task of creating public forms where delegates and holders can sign up to be part of the program. The committee will make sure to scout for holders to make them aware of the program, and every member of the community is invited to collaborate to get as much delegated Celo as possible.
- Sources of potential delegates: Celo regional DAOs, Governance contributors, Celo Forum users.
- Sources of potential delegators: early Celo contributors (for example folks that have worked atCelo Foundation, Valora, Mento, cLabs, etc), investors and validators.
Both ends should be allowed to participate anonymously, but delegators are not encouraged to do so.
Success Metrics: more than X million Celo delegated, duplicate average active voting Celo on proposals
Budget: the funds required for this program would be minimum, can probably be funded by PG or some other initiative.
Next steps: recruit a small team interested in this program.
(this is not a governance proposal)