[TPP-Draft]: Funding Research for a DAO Liveness, Security and Decentralization Dashboard for ZKNation

rspa_StableLab · August 25, 2025, 1:19pm

Title	DAO Liveness Research
Proposal Type	TPP
One Sentence Summary	This proposal activates a capped minter with 1.62M ZK (~$100k USD) to fund building a data-science backed DAO liveness and security Forse Terminal
Proposal Author	Raphael / Johannes (StableLab)
Proposal Sponsor	tbd
Date	2025-09-09
Version	v0.9
Summary of Action	Build a FORSE Terminal displaying vital DAO Liveness and Governance Security data in an easily shareable and real-time format.
Link to forum post	[TPP-DRAFT] DAO Liveness Research

Short Summary

ZKNation started with the ZKCredo, a manifesto with strong cypherpunk values and decentralization. But how does the Token Assembly know if it is on track to fulfill its destiny?

This Token Program Proposal (TPP) requests funding research and development of a governance liveness, security risks monitor and decentralizaiton measurement Forse Terminal for ZKNation’s DAO governance. The monitor will be an easily shareable and interactive website that documents the journey to decentralization.

Motivation

ZKNation relies on the integrity of the Token Assembly, Security Council, and Guardians. They’re also dependent on meeting quorum in as little time as possible in the case of emergency protocol upgrades.

Governance liveness, the ability of the Token Assembly to respond, can be quantitatively assessed, and this TPP seeks to develop and maintain a dashboard that builds upon the fantastic ZKSync governance Dune dashboard available here and extends it significantly, while making real-time data available.

Collusion, defined as coordinated actions to manipulate governance outcomes, needs to be detected early on. This TPP aims to develop a dashboard to monitor governance security risks, notify interested stakeholders and show a clear path to improving security for ZKSync’s governance.

At the same time the EU’s MiCA calls for meaningful decentralization and the CLARITY acts current progress hints at a similar direction, if a protocol wants to secure favorable regulatory conditions. In the US favorable treatment might result in being under the purview of the CFTC vs the SEC and in the EU it means avoiding the painful compliance costs of registering as a CASP.

The proposed Forse Terminal will consist of beautiful, easily shareable data visualizations that will help promote the progress the ZKNation is making towards governance security, liveness and decentralization. The ongoing monitoring and sharing of this pertinent data will help attract aligned participants to ZKNation governance and the wider Elastic Chain ecosystem and help keep the ZKNation accountable on its path to true, meaningful decentralization and security.

Specification

Research Scope

Governance Liveness parameters: Quorum as a percentage of active votable supply, Time to quorum, number of proposals, and potentially some deeper analytics into quorum likeliness per proposal, rating proposals on a scale of conscientiousness, etc.
Whale Address Behavior: Analyze token concentration, voting power, and transaction patterns of large holders.
Delegate Influence:
- Monitor concentration of delegated voting power among top delegates.
- Compare potential to exercised voting power. Identifying how often which delegates could have and did change the outcome of a vote.
- Analyze voting alignment among delegates to detect potential coordination.
- Delegation Network Analysis: Map delegation relationships to identify which addresses delegate to whom, visualizing the flow of voting power. Identify central nodes accumulating significant delegated power, detect circular delegation patterns, and monitor changes before key governance events. This will use network graph techniques to uncover hidden patterns of influence and potential collusion among delegates.
Address Clustering: Detects clusters of addresses potentially controlled by one entity.
Vote Buying Detection: Track suspicious token transfers or delegation spikes before votes.
Governance Body Collusion: Assess alignment between Guardian vetoes, Security Council actions, and whale/delegate interests. Analyse addresses in these bodies and find possible links to known whales or delegates.
Decentralization: Measuring meaningful decentralization and updating measurements to reflect regulatory guidance and case law. This will include the Gini and Nakamoto coefficients, the number of delegates and voters needed to pass or block a proposal and help identify singular sources of control and ownership.

Terminal Features

Real-time and per proposal metrics on governance liveness with time series of parameters.
Real-time metrics on token distribution, voting patterns, and address clusters.
Anomaly detection for unusual transfers or delegation changes.
Visualizations like network graphs for clustering and heatmaps for voting alignment.
Decentralization measurements and visible progress towards meaningful and robust decentralizaiton.
Integration with ZKSync’s governance data (e.g., vote.zknation.io, forum.zknation.io).
Open-source, with code and documentation on GitHub.
Notifications via Email or Telegram to alert interested parties on important events.

One example of how to display delegation is this wonderful analysis by Fritsch, Müller and Wattenhofer. (Source)

Budget

The final budget depends on the scope of features the community is most excited about. We’d offer very competitive conditions to ZKNation to make sure the DAO receives excellent value.

Timeline

Duration: 3 months (12 weeks) to development, dashboard will be maintained for 24 months.
Phase 1: Research and Design (Weeks 1-3): Gather requirements, design architecture, select tools.
Phase 2: Data Collection and Analysis (Weeks 4-6): Integrate data, develop algorithms.
Phase 3: Dashboard Development (Weeks 7-9): Build frontend/backend, test iteratively.
Phase 4: Deployment and Community Training (Weeks 10-12): Launch publicly, provide documentation/training.
Note: Personnel hours are distributed across phases, with flexibility for adjustments.

Team

Project Lead: Waldemar Panin, Project Manager at Forse Analytics by StableLab.
Team Members: To be assigned post-approval, with expertise in blockchain analytics, data science, and dashboard development. Updates will be shared on the forum. Forse Analytics has previously built dashboards for OP, Uniswap, Arbitrum and Sky / MakerDAO.

Accountability

Monthly progress reports on the forum.
Presentation of the results at the three-month mark in two community calls at different timeslots to encompass ZKNation’s global nature.

Rationale

A compass towards decentralization: This project can serve as a guide towards greater decentralization by contrasting governance liveness and security metrics into a single source of information.
Enhanced Security: Early collusion detection strengthens governance integrity. Uncovering hidden patterns of influence enhance the pull of decentralization.
Community Empowerment: Transparent insights enable proactive threat responses. Light is the best disinfectant.
Innovation Leadership: An open-source tool could benefit other DAOs, reinforcing ZKSync’s leadership.

Risks and Mitigation

Data Availability: Forse analytics has multiple data sources and has perfected its data pipeline to iron out errors in data acquisition.
Technical Complexity: Ingestion of a new chain with a unique architecture, something the Forse team has done before, though.
Delays: Buffer time is built into the 3-month timeline.

Call to Action

As a top 10 delegate, StableLab is committed to ZKNation’s success. This project is an important step towards transparency and will serve as a compass towards decentralization, in line with ZKNation’s cypherpunk ethos. We welcome feedback on scope or budget. Let’s build a secure, resilient ZKNation together!

theshelb · August 26, 2025, 9:50am

Hey @rspa_StableLab - one clarification request.

Can you confirm the ZK token request for this proposal to help Delegates assess the scale of the request (10k vs. 100k USD)?

rspa_StableLab · August 26, 2025, 1:56pm

Hi Shelby, depending on the feature set and desire for ongoing development and improvement the price tag is in th $60k to $120k range.

We will break it down into where exactly the spend goes and how the community can ensure nothing is paid that isn’t delivered as soon as the budget is finalized.

Curia · September 1, 2025, 6:35am

Thank you for this proposal and for providing the budget range. To help everyone asses better could you elaborate on the tiered deliverables? It would be helpful to see a sample breakdown of what the community would get at the ~$60k, ~$90k, and ~$120k funding levels. This will allow us to make the best possible decision for the DAO.

rspa_StableLab · September 2, 2025, 7:24pm

Certainly, let me break it down and come back to this Friday!

rspa_StableLab · September 9, 2025, 5:08am

Here is a breakdown of the budget for the full scope.

Budget

The budget outlined below is for the proposed scope and will adapted during and at the end of this RFC discussion to reflect the desired outcomes the ZKNation wants to achieve.

Total: $102,000, paid in ZK tokens based on the 30-day average price prior to approval.
Breakdown:
- Personnel: $92,800
  - Project Lead: $24,000 (10 hours/week for 12 weeks at $200/hour)
  - Data Analyst: $36,000 (30 hours/week for 8 weeks at $150/hour)
  - Developer: $28,800 (30 hours/week for 8 weeks at $120/hour)
  - Independent Auditor: $4,000 (20 hours at $200/hour)
- Tooling: $1,500 ($500/month for 3 months: API subscriptions, hosting, software licenses)
- Contingency: $7,700 (10% of total budget for unforeseen expenses)
Note: This budget supports a small, specialized team working over three months. The project lead oversees coordination part-time, while the data analyst and developer handle actual development and analysis of all relevant data.

rafa · September 15, 2025, 6:50pm

Hey @raphael - thank you for providing additional budget details. The Governance Team has gone through the proposal in detail and reviewed the proposed scope and costs.

In addition, we’ve reached out to multiple Delegates and the ZKsync Foundation to better understand reactions to the proposal. The feedback is consolidated below.

Contribution to Protocol Security and ZKsync Growth

As of the moment, there haven’t been any security risks raised related to delegation patterns or feedback on the need for additional delegation data analytics. Current governance analytics is seen to be enough with regards to support ongoing protocol upgrades.
The work in the proposal focuses on governance, but doesn’t seem to contribute any value over and above the current solutions and infrastructure deployed with regards to GAP1 priorities for ZKsync (Protocol Sustainability, ZK Chain growth, ZKsync App growth), or growth objectives that the Foundation has published, which focuses on driving Prividium adoption and growth.
One of the challenges with dashboard and data tooling is that it should be downstream from a key problem, such that there is clear line of sight on what would happen once the data is collected and analyzed. At the moment, this is also unclear.

Work Duplication

As you’ve mentioned in the proposal, there are already active governance analytics for key metrics related to governance performance and capped minters.
As the Governance Team is already managing governance & operational analytics work, the proposed seems like a duplication of effort.
As a result, there isn’t a compelling reason for the Token Assembly to either duplicate the work, or fragment responsibilities for significant additional costs mentioned above.

Benchmark Costs

After looking into comparable analytics offering, the budgeted costs of 100k USD is a magnitude higher than similar offerings.
As an example, 3-5k USD has been spent on the current governance performance dashboards to date. While additional work may be necessary in the future, the approach to all governance tooling should be minimum viable value first, prior to scaling or additional complexity.

Usage of Global Consensus

Token Programs should activate broad programs in the service of ZKsync that require Token Assembly alignment at top level, strategically. For example, a new mechanic or program should be a portfolio of activities with a clear strategy. The current proposal falls outside of this broad approach, asking to purchase single-tooling via global consensus.
In this case, the proposed tooling is a supplementary offering to governance infrastructure, not a unique core requirement for sustainable operations. It is also not part of a broader program supporting growth priorities.

rspa_StableLab · September 16, 2025, 9:23am

Hey Rafa, thanks for the detailed reply. Given the sentiment it seems to be better to wait for an RFP and then propose something more specific, and with a more limited scope.

I wanted to point out why the price tag is where it is.

The proposed dashboard would be a custom-made ZKSync terminal that analyses governance security and collusion, as well as liveness.
To do so, we would consult with renowned security experts and develop a data-science driven approach to spotting collusion and other potential threats to governance early on. We would also build a simulation engine to go with it, that could provide science-backed guidance on token emissions.

We have just seen at Compound how a single well-resourced actor can endanger the entire governance of the DAO with stealthy acquisition of massive voting power.

These events are often only spotted when the trap is already laid and the community has to scramble to avert the worst, as could be achieved at Compound thanks to their Governance Working Group with our involvement.

Another thing we would be building is a custom front-end library and a reliable, real-time data feed from multiple independent on-chain and off-chain data sources.

As such the scope and accuracy go well beyond what can be achieved in Dune. No offense meant. The dashboard you have is AWESOME.

I completely understand being cautious with the limited resources. We feel we offered a very competitive package here that is definitely not easy to replicate below that price.

We’re ready to build this for the ZKNation, but are more than happy to focus elsewhere and return once fitting RFPs are in place.