It doesn’t make sense to exclude delegates from incentives just because they’re active in multiple DAOs, even if they’re on different L2s. I became a delegate by promising to support new builders, especially those creating consumer dapps.
I’m committed to helping DAOs create strong grants programs and using my voting power to build a supportive environment for builders. If I’m putting in the time and effort as a delegate, I should receive the same incentives as other delegates. Don’t you agree?
Agree on all counts with all comments.
I want to emphasize one key point: ZK technology has a natural, inherent advantage compared to other L2 chains like Optimistic rollups. This advantage includes faster tx finality, enhanced security and privacy, and the different use of cryptographic proofs across various dapps and industries.
This may naturally guide any onchain development toward privacy-preserving solutions, such as privacy payments, identity-related apps, enterprise solutions, or even social networking platforms that prioritize privacy, or dapps and projects where fast tx finality is necessary. We’ll see.
Our role, in my view, especially early on, is to create fertile ground for developers, creators, and innovators, to build and grow their dapps, networks, and communities, and remain ‘neutral’ towards any industry and offer equal opportunity to everyone who brings value.
I believe ZKsync has the capacity to support everyone equally, allowing the market and other external factors to determine what flourishes on the chain. Once we have some data, we can make more informed decisions.
Thanks, @drnick for writing this up, it’s a solid foundation for the discussion ahead. I appreciate the detail you’ve provided on the governance mechanisms and their potential.
I agree this is the right time to align on the DAO’s long-term direction. Balancing governance minimization with fostering a strong culture is crucial. Your points on ZIPs, TPPs, and GAPs are spot on, and ensuring accessibility for smaller actors, especially with TPPs, is something we need to focus on.
I also resonate with your concerns about culture. We need to avoid becoming purely economically driven and find ways to invite creativity and community into the DAO. Clarifying the role of the ZK Credo and its impact on proposals will also be important as we move forward.
This is a great starting point for the conversation, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can collectively shape the DAO’s future.
I didn’t say exclude. I don’t think delegates that are active in multiple DAOs should be excluded from delegate incentives. I do think delegates that are exclusively active in one DAO should be rewarded highly than others.
it doesn’t have much choice tbf 
This is no doubt, at the very least, a weird phenomenon to see. It does seem like it creates a meta-centralisation effect across DAOs. Not only do we have a small pool of delegates, but the same pool of delegates are congregating into positions of (non-linear) power across all of the DAOs. Even ones effectively in direct competition with one another.
On a long enough timeline this will at least create a kind of homogenisation of approach, if not direct conflicts of interest. It does seem like incentive schemes shaped towards people focussing on individual DAOs might make sense, although the notion of exclusivity does seem antithetical to the DAO idea. A curious problem. It would be interesting to think about an incentive scheme as the means to shape the structure of power in the DAO towards diverse high quality delegates. I’ve seen arbitrum wrestling with this problem recently and ending up at qualitative assessment technique, which could get messy.
I’ve been saying something like this for a while, but I do think there is space for a market of a handful of generalist Ethereum aligned L2s. I also think it’s likely the time is now passed for more of them to meaningfully have a chance at making it into the pack, but I do think ZKSync might have been one of the last through the door.
From there, it’s going to be down to how the ecosystem is cultivated over time, which probably does need to start with some kind of values based selective pressure towards particular use cases until there’s enough of a baseline economy for permissionless take off. It’s probably going to settle at which L2 spends it’s treasury the best and which one develops a cultural moat around it’s core affordances. The (perhaps) good news is, no one has cracked this yet so the market is very open.
The brand question generally is an interesting one. If you think about the brand of say Bitcoin, or Ethereum you could easily say that they don’t really have one, or you could say they are two of the strongest brands in the world, depending on your perspective. What is true is that they didn’t have a top down branding exercise determine what it is. In decentralised systems culture is the brand.
Like @cap said I think ZK is a huge hook and once the world gets ZK-pilled there’s a huge brand advantage to be had as people get curious and come looking for what’s possible with ZK. So certainly it would make sense for ZK enabled applications (this would be a great hack focus) to be something to encourage to find a home here. As @polar pointed out it’s all a bit generic ecosystem at the moment and if anything the ecosystem page gives a bit too much prominence to the products at the top of the page (which might explain some of the current delegate weightings).
regarding the brand issue, I feel it’s not a fair comparison to use Ethereum or Bitcoin brands as a reference here. It’s much fairer to use Berachain, Optimism, and Base, for example. and nobody can deny that these ecosystems have very deliberate and competent branding executions. I would even venture to say, that they have totally top down defined branding, and I think they are winning, in part, precisely because of that. I think it would be a great exercise to try to define a brand, that is community generated for something like zkSync.
There are a lot of discussions about decentralized vs centralized sequencers these days and I think the decision for zksync is crucial. There could be a uniquely position zksync ecosystem if it max decentralizes and pushes privacy. At the same time I am not sure that this combination is a huge market vs potentially faster centralized L2s. Still zksync obviously needs a distinct positioning that will likely be driven by both tech and values.
+1 with regards to the treasury spending. We can only spend every ZK once and only if it’s really spent in the best possible way this will have an impact. I think this means (parts of) delegates should study other L2s and how they spent their treasuries, results, feedback.
Yeah, I think the Ethereum / Bitcoin examples are kind of outliers and I used them to set a kind of boundary case example for totally emergent brand that’s dictated by culture. I suspect it might be impossible to ever replicate again, certainly in the current market context, but still I think it shows that decentralised brands can be (are) different.
Whether the likes of berachain’s pre-market hype remains once the token is live remains to be seen and Base’s brand feels really quite corporate and bland to me. Optimism is an interesting one because it has developed a strong DAO culture, but has spent an awful lot to get it.
There could certainly be a middle ground that is more curated from the community, which I think would be a stand out thing to do.
One thing worth flagging is the notion of Psychological Ownership if people feel like they have genuinely contributed to something (ilke an organisation, or a network) they value it a lot more. The wider and more meaningful the participation the better generally. But again, I think this gets us into the question of how much of that happens here, and how much of that happens further away from the DAO and deeper into the ecosystem.
Even Arbitrum with it’s massive treasury is unable to spend enough to be fully generalist. They did a 200mn bet on gaming but good luck getting another sizable program through. ZkSync has a significantly smaller treasury and I think we would be quite misguided to not pick 2-5 pressure points at least for 1-2 years (and then add more maybe).
What @cap is putting forward here is a good place to start exploring
When I say generalist L2, I mean a chain that doesn’t have an overtly bounded use case or domain of focus e.g. the IP chain, NFT chain, gambling chain or whatever. ZKSync hasn’t bounded itself around a particular use case, neither has aribtrum or optimism. My point is that future chains probably will have to, but ZKSync has the potential to compete in the generalist set.
This doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t prioritise supporting particular areas of focus. I also suggested ZK enabled tools and privacy focussed tools, given it’s clear alignment with the technology and brand so far, but they aren’t as sexy as gaming (but perhaps more valuable culturally).
The reality is, the best chains will have a broad distribution of diverse consumer level applications that can play into and ideally seed some of the narrative trends that occur in the space. For example NFTs are going to bang again at some point, it would make strategic sense to have the tools and projects down necessary to monopolise on that when it happens.
We also need very clear paths to novel token flow. Discovering new tokens is the prime user driver of economic activity on any chain, the first one that gets beyond the pure vapour token frenzy that is memecoins into a consistent flow of sustainable token economies could generate a massive market advantage.
What is also interesting here is that the ZK architecture lends itself to that kind of domain specific focus on its ZK Chains in the wider elastic chain ecosystem, which can bootstrap their own DAO treasuries and run focussed funding there, with perhaps a more classic grant model.
For example, web3 gaming chain sets up as ZK Chain, bootstraps a treasury and then funds gaming projects on their chain. This effectively achieves what arbitrum did with their gaming fund but without being a drain on the core ZK treasury.
In which case the activity here becomes more about tools and support that all those future ZK chains might need, making this more of a metaDAO structure.
Ok, so we have two opposite views:
Bringing these together, we have a nice design space to play with staged innovation pipelines: having some responsive mechanism to deploy increasingly big amounts of capital (not just financial capital but also network access, human capital, brand backing, etc. ) as new ideas mature and are derisked.
In system design, a common principle is to design a handful of systems optimised for the key use case(s), and then have a ‘high variety’ (generalist) backup system that can catch that which the main systems don’t. We can apply that principle here to both focus and keep open to emergent opportunities.
I would caution against only doing a generalist pipeline as those lack depth (instead of exploring everything we tend to explore nothing), but a combination can work wonders:
With regular assessment cycles across the pipelines, and the ability to allocate extra funding to emerging needs, the whole system can be operated quite dynamically.
Hey folks! I wanted to drop a reminder in this thread that the first standing Delegate call is happening tomorrow and it might be a good opportunity to discuss some of these points in person.
You can see the thread of suggested conversion topics for the call here. Feel free to add themes from this thread there as well.
You can subscribe to the Delegate call calendar here to gain access to the invite and call details.
Your post is great but I think this point and your subsequent post hit the nail on the head as to the answers to your questions–culture comes from apps, not from ‘governing’. When, as and if apps take off within the ZKsync ecosystem, that will filter ‘up’ to governance as naturally those cultures will want to have and be able to achieve a strong voice
I think ZKsync eco is well set up for this, due to the very governance-minimized structures you have some concerns about. It creates the conditions for credible neutrality, which creates space for true organic cultures to emerge and eventually fight for governance power. Contrast with Base and their recent kemonokaki controversy–this shows how bad things get when ‘governance culture’ as such runs out of control. Culture (including the governance culture) should organically grow from real communities based on non-governance people doing what they love rather than growing based on governance people’s ‘love of governing’ as with many DAO cultures
I’d also like to challenge the very concept/idea that delegates should ‘align on a DAO strategy’ or something similar here. Who should align and how can they align? And how would this ‘alignment’ be subsequently enforced, assuming it is agreed upon?
The delegates are not a joint venture collectively running the system as a business, nor should they try to become anything like this. Positively that may be considered ‘alignment’ but a negative interpretation of it is ‘collusion’.
IMO we should stick to the real facts and mechanisms. Those are the onchain voting/delegation mechanisms with each delegate (including any self-delegates) having an independent voice, power and evaluation responsibility. ‘Alignment’ in this context could only mean that certain delegates pre-commit to vote together or vote a certain way on certain issues, but the first sort of commitment is collusion which should be discouraged as it defeats decentralization, and the second sort of commitment is practically unenforceable on a group basis and therefore not super useful.
this post is being made in my capacity as a delegate and not any other capacity (eg Guardian)
I see the current ‘professional delegates’ as hopefully being placeholders for delegates from communities that rely on ZKsync. One of the biggest delegates now is a DEX (which may include individuals with ties to those communities or may include DAOs). This sort of approach is what the makes the most sense imo and I think it can emerge organically as, frankly, a long-term ZK holder will probably be best positioned by delegating across a range of popular ZKsync apps plus some governance junkies like us guys. Right now it’s too weighted toward governance junkies imo but that should naturally change over time if ZK ecosystem is successful and has strong apps.
This would also tend to suggest incentivizing delegation is not needed and possibly is undesirable as could incentivize entrenchment rather than encouraging this long-term natural evolution toward app communities having governance power. But I see both sides of the issue.
this post is being made in my capacity as a delegate and not any other capacity (eg Guardian)
Thanks for the response @lex_node. This is very much the kind of conversation I was trying to shake out with the post.
Reading between the lines of the system design, I presumed we were looking at a more governance minimised approach than is current convention.
I don’t actually have concerns about this, I think it’s incredibly refreshing actually. The more i’ve been thinking about how the Token Programme structure might shape up long term the more I think this is the right basis for a really ground breaking DAO structure. As I said in the OP, I think this is cutting edge. The only concerns I have are about getting it off the ground given the new adoption barriers, but i’m starting to see paths towards it happening.
I do agree with this, thinking about it. Chain culture is better than DAO culture, which as I think we’ve seen in many other DAOs ossifies early and to the point where even governerds like myself can’t see a path at all towards navigating through the mess of working groups, forum threads and garbled processes. And actually, despite building a career out of governance, I do hate it for the most part, especially when it descends into endless talking shops and little action. Much of what attracted me to DAOs was the cybernetic vision of zero squabble productive action. Maybe it could happen here.
Also completely agree with this. The less we fall into the standard management consultant toolbox the better and the less we act like a conventional organisation, onchain. Which no doubt with your legal hat on you see as problematic.
I guess the challenge of all this is, this new paradigm of DAOs requires some radically new thinking.
I do think your point about a deeper ecosystem chain culture will ultimately grow a more substantial one, and it is possible a ‘DAO culture’ could be a turn off to the wider ecosystem who perceive there to be a kind of system that they are in service to, rather than the other way around.
The question is, how do we develop that ecosystem? The DAO has a treasury here that can assist in seeding that activity and probably needs to considering the dearth of consumer level applications in the space. With that, comes the opportunity to subtly shape that culture through its votes, which are themselves a signal to what is desired in the wider ecosystem.
I think the professional delegates as placeholders is an interesting view point and perhaps a healthy one. It is also an interesting signal that the biggest delegate by far is a DEX, which does in fact signal a desire from the token holders that (at least a good chunk of them) want to delegate to ecosystem applications rather than people.
And yes, that would imply that a delegate incentive programme could further entrench the governance people rather than elevating the apps.
I will say though, this is perhaps a double edged sword. Token holders rarely de-delegate and re-delegate and we could see some early mover applications gain a un-healthy degree of power in the DAO that could compound over time, which could be perhaps used to defend or expand a market share and drive out competition. Worse, this power advantage is there largely by virtue of being early, rather than for meritocratic reasons. I call this the ‘OG Effect’. As I hinted to earlier, there’s a way incentives could be used to shape the power in the DAO gradually over time towards those (probably should be mostly apps) who contribute to the DAO productively. I don’t know what that incentive structure is yet, but it’s worth thinking about.
This has been my experience lately as well. The more I think about it the more I’ like it. There are some really fun, engaging, competitive, and fully transparent mechanics you can design through TPP that would allow only the best onchain builders to emerge. But I also want to emphasize that deviating 100% from tried and tested ways other governance structures work would be rather unfortunate. A balance between the two is ideal.
I saw this in NEAR, where elected delegates were paid nothing. There was still clamoring for the titles in the street. ‘The volunteer’ delegates ended up sitting in all the other councils taking awesome salaries. Sure they were unpaid delegates, but it didn’t mean it cost the DAO nothing. Pay the delegates, but make sure that’s all they can do for the network.
Very interesting thoughts.
I think what is coming through is zkSync’s differential is its purely onchain structure. Which acts as a sort of control on governance bloat. We can probably take that as lesson learnt from how other L2 DAOs have grown unwieldy and difficult to navigate. Certainly I struggle to understand how many really operate at this stage. To do so you effectively have to be part of the ‘OG effect’ @drnick mentioned, a professional DAO delegate or really, really dedicated.
Where I am somewhat sceptical is with the idea that emergent culture will be expressed from onchain communities of zkSync via dApps. I expect this will occur and is preferable to culture-by-diktat. But I don’t think that is what @drnick was suggesting with alignment (a term used once!). Not let’s create culture-by-committee through DAO mechanisms, but rather we should encourage authentic, emergent communities that ‘align’ with our values (Credo, etc.) to come here and for that we probably do need to actively pursue or entice them. I think it’s possible for us to design onchain token mechanisms that do this transparently and responsibly, without creating a vague piggy bank grants program that anyone can dip into. I particularly like the idea of bringing into our world already-existing emergent cultures that have lived by similar cypherpunk values. TLDR While it’d be nice to wait for these emergent cultures we might also nab some of those out there already.
Regarding delegate incentives, this one will just have to go to a vote I think. I believe DAO work is work and should be paid. Not handsomely, but somewhat. I’ve worked in academia all my life and watched how people work for free for publishing houses with huge ‘treasuries.’ I don’t like that DAOs repeat this model, which in my experience just encourages people to then see DAO work as indirect career-climbing. I also have seen at LIDO recently where a delegation incentive program was required to essentially address what appears an inevitable situation for DAOs over time: a DAO with unpaid delegates is over time susceptible to being a DAO with no active delegates (except, perhaps, those very DAO professionals who can afford not to be!).
Finally, since DAO posts are often sort of negative or critical I just want to say how I really quite like the direction we are going in.
We should also consider the possibility that having delegates is a fundamentally flawed model (alas one that’s operable right now).
Delegate programs suffer form serious principal-agent problems, and trying to remove conflicts of interest by making the delegates unable to participate in other (rewarding) activities requires delegates be paid a lot or have poor quality delegates (and a few altruistic ones but this is not reliable), and worse, limiting the involvement of delegates can exacerbate incentive misalignment as they’re less embedded in the ecosystem!
Citizen Assemblies are rapidly gaining in popularity amongst democracy researchers outside of web3 for these very reasons. And in Web3 we can reinvent this mechanism as Multi-Stakeholder Assemblies by inviting the multiple stakeholder groups to participate in structured deliberation. Multi-Stakeholder Assemblies largely bypass principal-agent problems of direct and representative democracy and also reduce some of the negatives of majority voting like polarisation.
So we can consider ways to mitigate for the downsides of delegates (incentive programs, conflict of interest declaration, etc.) but let’s not just limit ourselves to “put lipstick on the pig” when we have credible alternatives being tested at scale (e.g. EU and French citizen assemblies have taken place for years, with the biggest issue being the elected representatives over rule them).