Signal Request: Should the Amount of kDAO Required to Submit a Proposal be Lowered?

Governance Signal Requests
#1

This is a signal request to determine if the community would like to adjust the threshold.

Which of the following Escrow amounts would you support?

  • 3,000 kDAO (Do not change the current amount)
  • 2,500 kDAO
  • 2,000 kDAO
  • 1,500 kDAO
  • 1,000 kDAO
  • 500 kDAO
  • <500 kDAO
  • Other (Please comment on this post)

0 voters

Details

Kolibri DAO uses an escrow mechanism to avoid spam proposals. The mechanism works as follows:

  • A user puts kDAO in escrow when they submit a proposal
  • If the vote achieves a minimum percentage of yay votes among opinionated voters (voters who voted ‘yay’, or ‘nay’ but not ‘abstain’) the escrow is returned to the submitter
  • If the vote does not achieve a minimum percentage, the escrowed kDAO is confiscated and placed in the Community fund
  • The minimum yay percentage is governable, and is currently set at 20%
  • There is no penalty if a proposal fails or is cancelled from the timelock, as long as it achieved the minimum yay votes

This is an important feature for two reasons:

  1. Spam prevention: Only one vote can be underway at a time. If governance had nothing at stake, then malicious users could run a denial of service attack against the DAO
  2. Encourage off-chain coordination and conversation: Submitters want to be sure that votes submitted on chain have some support before doing so. This incentivizes them to coordinate with the community off chain, which creates more well thought out proposals, and means that proposals on chain are higher quality and more likely to pass.

Currently, the escrow amount to submit a proposal is 3000 kDAO. Excluding Hover Labs, there are 8 addresses that can currently submit governance proposals.

We may consider lowering this threshold to make it easier for the community to become more involved. This would increase DAO involvement and let the community take a more proactive role in governance.

If we accidentally lower it to the point where a malicious user starts spamming the DAO, eventually they will lose all their kDAO, and we can pass a governance proposal to increase the escrow amount (back to 3000 kDAO, or another number).

Possible changes are summarized in the following table:

Escrow Amount Number of Addresses that can Submit a Proposal
3,000 kDAO (current amount) 8
2,500 kDAO 9
2,000 kDAO 12
1,500 kDAO 21
1,000 kDAO 31
500 kDAO 63

(Source)

A quick reminder on kDAO tokenomics:

  • 1M total supply
  • 15% airdropped to users in ecosystem
  • 20% granted to Hover Labs
  • 30% distributed in liquidity mining over 1Y
  • 35% in discretionary community fund, controlled by the DAO

Since Liquidity Mining is an ongoing program, addresses will continue to receive additional kDAO over time.

2 Likes
KIP-012 Lower the Governance Proposal Escrow to 1000 kDAO
#2

I think 500 or 1000 is reasonable. We should aim to make voting more inclusive while still preventing abuse. The benefits outweigh the possible drawbacks and we can always increase the requirement again if it proves to be an issue.

2 Likes
#3

I think that 500 seems reasonable given that the protocol has such punitive measures for wildly unpopular proposals (anything that doesn’t recv 20%+ of yay votes loses their collateral to the community fund).

IMO lowering it to 500 still means that someone would have to have a huge amount of the kDAO token supply to attempt a bad/spammy proposal and not lose their kDAO, and to expand the pool of people who can submit proposals from 8 to 63 seems like a real tangible benefit to me (over 2x the possible participation that 1,000 kDAO would be!).

3 Likes