ZKnation Delegate Dashboard by CuriaLab

[Curia]

GM ZK Nation community,

We believe the strength of ZK Nation comes from all of us. For our shared mission to govern, defend, and grow the protocol to succeed, our governance process must be open and clear to everyone. That’s why we built the ZKnation Delegate Dashboard.

Our goal is simple: to provide a clear, data-driven view of our delegates’ activities. It’s a tool built on the principle of “don’t trust, verify,” enabling any member of the community to see how governance is functioning. This transparency is crucial for the Collective Action needed to keep ZKsync governance effective and truly decentralized.

Live Dashboard: Link
Gitbook: Link

This thread will serve as:

• A hub for updates and new features.
• A space for community feedback to help us refine this tool for ZK Nation.
• Where we can work together to define what makes a great delegate.

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Dashboard Overview

The dashboard provides delegate-centric insights to make ZKsync governance more accessible, reinforcing the ZK Principle of Accessibility and enabling the effective participation of all stakeholders.

Key Features

1. Delegate Tracking

Gain detailed insights into the role of delegates within governance, including:

• Delegate Name: Displays the name or ENS (Ethereum Name Service) address of the delegate.
• Delegated Token (% Voting Power): This represent the percentage of total votable tokens that have been delegated to a specific delegate.
• Delegators: This number of delegators who have delegated their tokens to a particular delegate.
• Forum Score: This score is designed to provide a quantifiable measure of a delegate’s activity and engagement in DAO governance discussions.
• Onchain Vote: This represent the participation rate over the first proposal delegate start voting.
• Most Onchain Recent Votes: Shows the latest 5 onchain voted/not voted/not member by the delegate.

Status:

• Active: A delegate actively engaged in voting. They’ve either voted on over 50% of the proposals since their first vote or participated in the latest 5 proposals.
• Inactive: A delegate with limited voting activities, having participated in less than 50% of the proposals since their first vote.
• Ghost: A delegate who, despite receiving delegation, hasn’t exercised their voting power.

2. Forum Score Integration

To get your Forum Score to appear, you need to link your accounts. It’s a quick process to prove you own both your wallet and your forum profile.

How to Verify Your Score

1. Connect your wallet to your delegate wallet on https://zknation.curiahub.xyz
2. Link your forum account by entering your forum name.
3. Sign a verification message to confirm your identity with your forum handle.
4. Post the generated signature text:
   • Copy the message.
   • Go to the forum and post the generated signature text under this thread.
5. Return to https://zknation.curiahub.xyz/ to complete the verification process

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What’s Next

The dashboard today is just a starting point. To make it truly useful, we need your help to shape its future. Here are two key areas where we’d love your input:

1. Delegate Score

   A meaningful Delegate Score should reflect our collective values. What does a great delegate look like to you? Here are our initial ideas for metrics to start the conversation:

Metric	Definition	Why It Matters
Voting Participation Score	Measures the percentage of proposals a delegate has voted on since their first eligible proposal.	Ensures delegates consistently represent ZK Nation, upholding the Reliability of our governance system.
Voting Impact Score	Evaluates how often a delegate’s vote aligns with the final passing outcome, adjusted by the voting power they used.	Highlights delegates who effectively contribute to securing the protocol and advancing the ZK Credo through governance.
Voting Timeliness Score	Tracks how early in the voting window a delegate casts their vote, rewarding proactive participation.	Encourages proactive participation, allowing for deeper community discussion and alignment before decisions are finalized.
Rationale Submission Score	Assesses how frequently a delegate provides explanations for their votes, both onchain and in forum discussions.	Promotes Integrity, allowing any member of ZK Nation to verify the reasoning behind a delegate’s decisions.
Forum Score	Quantifies offchain governance engagement, such as forum discussions, proposal feedback, and proposal initiations.	Recognizes vital offchain contributions that Strengthen the ZK Community, a primary goal of our governance system.
Number of Votes Cast	Simple count of proposals voted on, adjusted for activity windows.	Offers a baseline indicator of a delegate’s overall activity level.

2. Activity Status Definitions

   Are our current definitions for Active, Inactive, and Ghost fair and useful? What would you change?

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How You Can Help

This is a community tool, and your input is what will make it truly valuable for ZK Nation. We’d love for you to get involved by:

• Share feedback on the current dashboard features.
• Discuss about the Delegate Score. Are these the right metrics? What did we miss? How should they be weighted?
• Help us improve our definitions. Your perspective is essential to making this tool fair and accurate.

[Curia]

Following our recent governance call on this topic, we wanted to share a summary of the different viewpoints discussed. We’re posting these notes, captured by our AI notetaker, in the hope that they provide some helpful context and can serve as a jumping-off point for the conversation here:

• @alisha asked if delegate scoring systems exist in other DAOs and invited delegates to share their experiences

• Varit confirmed that similar systems exist, like Obol’s Delegate Reputation Score, where the delegate score influences the computation of compensation.

• @404Gov(Rika) asked if the criteria being discussed—for example voting participation and rationale—are the right ones and if they’re used elsewhere. She agreed that these are standard metrics in DAOs like Arbitrum and Uniswap, and she believes a dashboard for ZKsync would be beneficial since one doesn’t currently exist.

• @SEEDGov(Ivey) notes his positive experiences with Curia’s work in other DAOs. He thinks a ZKsync dashboard should also touch on the staking proposal and consider how governance relates to it, along with the specific parameters delegates should consider. He trusts that Curia can customize the dashboard to fit the DAO’s needs.

• @alisha presented a strong case against delegate scoring systems. She explained her experience at ENS, where they intentionally avoided scores because the metrics often used (like forum activity) do not, in her view, capture a delegate’s true value. She introduced her “volunteer firefighter” analogy to explain her position:

  • She compared a governance vote to a fire alarm in a small town that can’t afford full-time firefighters. When the alarm sounds, volunteer firefighters drop whatever they are doing to show up and fight the fire.
  • In this analogy, some delegates are like firefighters who hang out at the station all day (constantly active on forums), while others are out in the world working on their own projects but reliably show up when the “alarm” (a vote) sounds.
  • Her core point is that the delegate who just shows up to vote is no less valuable than the one who is constantly present on the forums. For this reason, she has always been hesitant to value any metric other than the vote itself.

• @404Gov(Rika) strongly agrees that voting should be the most heavily weighted metric because it’s the primary reason a delegate exists. She noted that in other dashboards, voting is considered most important. She also argued that rationale is part of a crucial feedback loop, as a well-written rationale can influence other delegates’ votes.

• @kaereste offered a counterpoint to Rika’s position. He argued that while voting is important, simply casting a vote is not the most valuable contribution. He stressed that governance needs to incentivize informed decision-making. He pointed out the disparity in effort: casting a vote takes seconds, while reading, understanding, and debating a proposal can take hours or even months. He believes the process should reward those who add value through deliberation and help improve proposals, not just those who show up for the final ballot.

• @SEEDGov(Ivey) highlighted that governance programs often miss the connection between delegates and their community. He believes delegates should represent their community, and if someone can’t provide a rationale, it’s okay because they are likely contributing in other valuable ways. He sees the Curia dashboard as a tool to quantify these community contributions, moving beyond the “old model” of just compensating for rationales. He repeated his call to thoroughly think about what contributions are valued from a community perspective and how to incentivize them.

• @alisha added to the discussion on incentives by noting that the quality of any tracked system is only as good as the tangible metric used to express it, which is difficult in nuanced situations. She questioned how one can objectively tell if a voter is an “informed delegate” versus someone just “taking a ballot,” using the example of an informed delegate being able to spot a bug in the calldata. She concluded by asking what is a reasonable expectation for a diverse set of governance participants, calling these kinds of complex conversations “part of the fun of governance.”

• Varit concluded the call by thanking the participants and emphasizing the value of the discussion. He clarified that while it’s unknown if the dashboard will be used for any future initiatives, it serves as a valuable benchmark for both delegates to monitor their own performance and for delegators to make more informed choices.