Road to DecenGov : Juggling with humanity and capital

Transcript

good afternoon everyone still very happy to see many doll folks here today i'm going to talk about a road to decent golf my name is q decentralized technology architect from hopper so for anyone that has not heard about hopper for the first time i would like to to think about a list of website that you have visited for the past week and take a look around the room and find out who would you be happy to share the list of the website with well what if this website whether this list was for a year or even for your whole life online

so that's actually the reality of internet today with minimum effort your metadata are exposed is there a way of solving that yes hopper operates a network level privacy protocol that protects metadata privacy through a decentralized mixnet i'm not going to go too deep into the technology itself because my colleague amira had already gave a talk yesterday about the technology so please feel free to check it out but what i want to emphasize today is that besides the fact that harper has put into a lot of effort to make this decentralized technology

to be compatible with a privacy protocol there is a fact there's an aspect that we shouldn't overlook the potential point of failure a centralized governance so hopper provides the layer 0 infrastructure and who should be in charge of such an important and fundamental aspect of the network should it be a centralized institute well we all know that they didn't have a good track record of the privacy or a private company but they are motivated by the profit margin

and they are a potential legal pressure and sometimes you just directly shake hands with some intelligence agencies and here we at hopper we believe that the only way that we can assure a network level metadata privacy over the long haul is by means of a decentralized network a network that can run autonomously on its own by itself and not under the control of any company or organization so and this is actually the ideal governance that we in our eyes which is decent gov decent gov stands for decentralized community

enabling governance and the goal of decent gov is to achieve the balance of on-chain governance and off-chain governance and the off-auction governance will basically represent the ultimate decision-making power that lies with the community token holders and for the option part it will of course first and foremost offers the the place for discussion the place to exchange ideas but also it contains other perks of old world legal contacts such as the owning properties the enforcing rights and the opening world so of course this dao concept is actually not something new in crypto world but

what's the current dial reality are they providing enough governance or are they robust enough against decent or centralized attacks so let's have a quick recap on the latest ethereum news a young twitter account just recently made an announcement about an otc deal of 500k uni worth of 10 million dollars and right now of course people just ask questions so who are they and what do they do what actually happened during the governor's process and how did they receive that fund so it

turns out that it was a handful full of delegates with a control of massive voting power that was able to manage both discussion and vote regardless of what the broader community wanted and what do they want discussion border participation so among all the focus endows a building so far that's been on how to mechanize the process of giving proposals or voting hopper actually has our experiences for example two years ago at e3c2 i gave a talk on my work on how to represent

a fully fledged legally compliant swiss style swiss association in smart contracts but this time the ultimate goal of reaching the dyson gov with that in mind we thought that it's time to take a step back and focus on the grassroots concepts first and then build a techno of the fancy technical balance and wizards later so to find out the best mechanism that provides the participation and engagement of a central decentralized governance we decided to run a full series of governance experiments so we started vote actually the first question we asked our community was

hmm how should we first publicly distribute our 50 million hopper token oh yeah that's actually indeed a vital question for a project like how do you launch that um who did we ask this question about our engaged community so to start ways we chose to bootstrap this governance with our engaged community by including the tesla participants the early community members and partners hello um so they so for all these three together it consists of the uh our what we call

the genesis style and we are more confident that firstly there's less probable of having having symbols and given the genesis style was announced only after a series of community events this retrospective inclusion has nothing that has no way to gain and in total only 3k accounts was considered as genesis style members and for this experiment how do we do that as you may heard the word kiss keep it simple stupid for the very first experiment which was the easiest way of doing so um so this discussion for example there

are only three phases uh starting from proposal discuss and vote discuss discussion happen on our forum uh proposed and votes happened separately um on the snapshot page to stimulate the conversations to simulate the discussions actually we didn't put too much constraints beyond those small restrictions given by our lawyers the world is oyster so we trust the dow to give what we believe and we trust the dow to do what's right for the long-term house of the project and we didn't know how engaged our community was so we actually only put a very low bar to make the proposal pass on the voting

phase which is three percent and as we paid already particular attention in choosing who are the community members the rest is easy so one genesis style account basically each account members holds a non-transferable token for the voting and we were actually able to see that more or less every second participated in the experiments and we're very very proud of a community uh for their strong engagement so wrapping up our this practice we found that the discussion period was actually a little bit too short because we only gave 72 hours and there was not enough for a

thorough exchange on its complex topic and the threshold as i said for entering the final stage was actually low because we chose the number by benchmarking with existing dow votes and our assumptions about engagement were too pessimistic and the fact that we didn't have any finalization of proposals make that many proposals didn't make the brief or were inconsistent with their previous folks discussion of voting were actually held in different places make the fact that there's a bit counterproductive for our members to vote and participate in in the uh governance um and we also realized that with the the

way that how we choose the genesis now members there's no reliable way of expanding the membership so with this governance experiments what we found out is actually we managed to find a clear objective of our governor system which is the decent gulf should be fair to both big and small token holders and it also should be practical so that the process is simple enough to participate and of course trustworthy because yeah i mean voting should be trustless and immutable effective so that we want our users to make the decisions for the protocol

themselves responsible so that the decisions are for the long-term good of the protocol and private of course i mean we're a privacy project so your privacy should not be violated um carry on with what we learned from the previous genesis style we launched our second governor's voting and this is for the first time that all the toker token holders can participate and this time the question we asked to our community is that how we should do with the funds in the uni swap pool that was actually allocated by the genesis style after the launch how are we going to distribute this among decentralized exchanges and this time how do we do

i think about all the tech people already heard the term continuous improvement if not i mean you're particularly uh creative right so um as i get well guess what i'm going to say this time we improved so we introduced the finalization step into the governance process and also at the referendum stage we prolonged the discussion period and add a bit more pauses in between each phase and what's quite special is that this discussion is moderated so authors are actually encouraged to make to merge their similar proposals in order to prevent the vote splitting and we also introduce a targeted

incentive to reward those high quality contributions and engagement and this time we also took the approach of hybriding one person one vote in the discussion and a referendum phase and then one token vote in the final voting phase uh as we learned from previously um we put we just lift the bar so that the quorum is higher for proposals to pass to final vote and hopper tokens i can actually be included from everywhere and not just those one that are either in your wallet what does it mean so if you hold a lot of tokens from different projects um guess what you can actually have the

the similar uh many kinds of uh tokens just with hopper so harper lives on mainnet it's an erc777 token and they can be bridged on exact chain because we have run our test net on the xdi but to still benefit the feature of 777 it can be swept it can be wrapped into wx hopper which is going back to erc777 and coming back to the ethereum mainland side so over the past few months um there's uh since our token launch there's like a huge unit swap v2 pool uh living on ethereum and also given we have offered the yale farming program

so there's like a um hopper farms program of farms smart contract that people can stake their tokens into so all together topper tokens exist in so many various forms on two chains and despite those forms one thing it's very clear that we don't want to leave any helper holders alone in the governance process regardless where their tokens are so we want to put provide them a very smooth experience into the voting so we created a cross-chain strategy on snapshot page to make sure that the

open tokens of any form they can be captured in the voting so the native snapshot strategy we use that the erc20 balance off for the hopper token on the mainnet and then we extend that to so that it can capture two tokens on the at the same time on the x side chain but due to the fact that a snapshot only works for the voting it actually needs a predetermined block number and then these two chains they don't share the same block number so we need to actually translate the block numbers and the way we do that is to introduce the we use the um the graph to combine those two chains together and then does a

translation and the last five pieces is the uni swept v2 token and our farmers so we those two tokens we need to be careful is that these two tokens they don't share the same value as hover tokens um but we extend it so that the calculation of nominal hopper balance is out of the box and with that we actually basically allows all the our other token holders to label and invoke and vote this is all actually really neat um so we have this strategy published under the

snapshot strategy page and if your project is under the same situation please feel free to check out our code to use our 4kit so i also would like to take this opportunity to thank snapshot team because for their effort into building such like a gasless off-chain voting uh system and also for being very supportive in our governance experiments so coming back to our dow by the end of may we have already in notice that the participation of our second and the first open uh dowel experiment was actually pretty

high we observed around 15 of all the circulating helper was actually was used into the second vote and we thank our community for participating in this and finally until now the entire journey what we have learned so far is that the longer period and the more incentives actually engaged the participation so there are 257 participant in discussion and among them 220 active contributors with dozens of users giving very very high quality inputs and even though the topic was a little bit more technical and less in

the self-interest of participants so the participation participation rate was still high and this time we reduced the barrier for voting and so we offer this smooth experiments to our community members and we actually noticed that although that we put more effort into uh moderating the entire process but there's less support from the community front uh into the voting technically voting process um but did this experiment give us the perfect mechanism for doubt for our decent golf not yet we still want to explore that

if or is the delegation is necessary um the referendum made contact accessible in our decent this gisenchaf experiment and it's easily digestible for community members to make their own choices so we want to know that if delegation still needs or not um and the final vote was still significantly influenced by the whales so we want to actually improve the process to incorporate other voting strategies for example quadratic voting and the fun fact is that if we do the retrospective calculation of our vote the result could be different if we have adopted the quadratic voting in the beginning

and last question is will the participant anticipate incentive mechanisms and behave differently for example will they mindlessly support some proposals yeah all in law to summarize community is definitely at the heart of decent golf so we believe that the community actually knows more than our small team and it is crucial to engage the community and encourage the participation into the governor's decisions and we will definitely walk together with our community to reach this engulf thank you very much i've already included some of the

sources here if you want to read more about our experiments and i'm open for question thank you [Applause] thanks i'm happy that my presentation is clear and yeah uh there is also source code online uh about this strategy of snapshots so feel free to check it out i have include everything um on the in my slides so yeah i think it will be available online yeah thank you very much have a nice evening

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