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.
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).