We receive constant positive feedback from our community and depositors. We allow for their assets to be productive and support their interests as large stakeholders. We do this while allowing depositors a voice with VLT which was a fairly distributed. These are some of the biggest and most long-standing investors in the protocol who have directly supported game development- voices that should be heard. It’s pivotal to note that it is a very loud minority constantly spamming conspiracy theories and, often, personal vitriol against the Vault and its leadership. It’s concerning from a personal and macro-investment perspective that there is interest in kowtowing to this conspiratorial minority. We support this community, its investors, and its contributors. I agree with Bearded that an opt-out standard should be considered, but we will continue to advocate for our shared community and depositors’ voting power.
Somehow I cant edit my post - I just want to reiterate that we did in fact confirm that any XP related issues are non existent, so please disregard that part of the discussion, as it was a red herring based on outdated information that we should stop propagating.
I don’t think it’s correct to downplay the genuine concerns expressed by the community as a “conspiratorial minority”, it’s similar to Justin Trudeau calling a large amount of Canadians a “fringe minority”.
It’s not unreasonable to think that the GotchiVault could one day accumulate a majority share of voting power as they provide an amazing service. If one doesn’t currently have $VLT then they are exchanging their voting power for automated yield. We have to consider what’s best for the long-term success of the AavegotchiDAO & all of its’ stakeholders.
Hated seeing that twitter beef. We are the frenliest community in all of crypto! I’m confident we can find a solution where everyone is happy without insulting each other.
I agree and would like to apologize for the unmeasured response above. I think the majority of the community wants the project to succeed, and we shouldn’t disparage raised concerns.
In short, I believe the Vault serves to advocate for asset holders in the entire Aavegotchi community, not just the Vault. I truly view it as protective and effective, especially as I know the intentions of the Vault depositors (VLT holders) to be good. I think it would weaken our DAO for asset holders to lose advocacy as the DAO is ultimately responsible for protecting the protocol assets.
How would this change weaken advocacy for the asset holders? Their voting power would be returned to their addresses, and they could still vote and receive XP for their Gotchis. All that would be changed is the delegation of said voting power to the Vault addresses.
If they are too busy to follow the conversation and vote, that’s on them – it would just make reaching quorum a bit more difficult. In short, they could keep their assets in the vault to earn the yield, but voting power would remain with their original address.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect massive asset holders to obsessively follow every DAO forum thread and the thousands of discord posts. Marc Zeller, Felon, Urkann, and other prominent members of the Aavegotchi have a lot going on outside of our little world. It’s very unfair to say they are not invested in the success of the game and protocol when they are literally the most invested. They have entrusted their assets and voting power with the Vault. We take that responsibility really seriously. The idea that “they must not care because they missed the 5 day window on a vote” is ridiculous and egocentric. Moreover, we already have mechanisms in place to punish these individuals by not providing XP to their gotchis should they not manually vote.
The bigger concern should be if the votes from the Vault didn’t accurately reflect the Vault depositor’s wishes. This is simply not the case as there are no Vault user complaints regarding the system. We have votes that are accurately representing the asset owner’s intentions and wishes. This is healthy as we meet quorum and are more effective as a DAO. I argue we get the best of both worlds by reflecting the asset holders’ intentions but only fully rewarding them with XP if they pay attention and manually vote each time.
I’ve just reviewed the code for XP airdrops and I can confirm that GotchiVault asset owners only receive XP for their Gotchis if they do go and manually vote in AavegotchiDAO snapshot – even if they only have 1 GHST worth of voting power.
So that’s not a concern. Apologies for the confusion, since it’s pretty complicated code that I haven’t thoroughly reviewed in a while.
If I had accomplished to install a proxy-voting-protocol that gives me 50% (or even 40%) of VP within a DAO-protocol, I would – obsessively – try to retain this power.
You would have to take this power from my cold, dead hands -
or I would have to experience some serious back-lash hurting my revenues.
I surely would even go so far as to – hypocritically but – earnestly argue in all seriousness,
that the fact that I am able to sway any vote, is an expression of decentralization at work,
that any questioning of my position makes me the victim of a conspiratorial attack.
I am aware that such a stance would seem to most people as ridiculously egocentric, but I am dead-certain that anybody in my position would act the same way.
It seems like there’s really two issues at play here. I haven’t really seen any persuasive arguments against proxy voting in general, which many other projects use. Hell, even coderdan was out in force on twitter asking for us all to delegate our pp for the aave vote to get GHST listed on aave.
It seems like what people actually have an issue with is not proxy/delegation voting in general, but the fact that the vault has accumulated a decent amount of voting power. That’s not an issue of centralization, its a lack of competition. I expected multiple Vault forks to pop up within weeks of us launch, but alas here we are. I don’t think the solution is to back away from the trustless voting system we’ve created, imposing ad hoc rules to target a single project, but rather more competition in the space.
Re: us being the frenliest community, I used to feel that way too, but don’t feel that anymore at all. Our community calls have been taken over by a small and loud-spoken group of individuals who spew vitriole at me and the Vault project any chance they get. I have no idea how this started, I thought that Aavegotchi was a decentralized protocol to build on, and that’s all we’ve done. We’ve been met with contempt at every step of the way. People like Hardkor, Bin Laggin, Nofuturistic, etc, make the space incredible hostile to come into and build on top of. Honestly, if I could go back in time, I would save myself the trouble and not work on this project. The community and the project are not anything like they were a year ago.
I appreciate all the steps The Vault has taken to conduct its governance in a fair and transparent manner, but the potential future issues that could arise extend beyond the example of the Vault.
This is still the question I’m pondering:
Hypothetically speaking, let’s say I were to start a service for land owners to deposit their gotchis and realm parcels in a smart contract- I borrow the gotchis from the contract and perform services like reservoir emptying and channeling. The service is free, but as the owner of the smart contact, I use your voting power as I see fit.
Have my customers delegated their voting power to me because our interests are aligned, or have they handed over their voting power in exchange for receiving services in return? Would the DAO trust my customers to hold me accountable for my voting decisions?
There’s a distinction to be made between businesses that offer a service to their customers and an organization that exists primarily for the purposes of voting representation. The latter would have a platform similar to a political party, PAC, or labor union- so that constituents clearly understand what they’re supporting. The potential mixing of these two functions concerns me as it clouds the true intent of the asset owner.
If we feel proxy voting is beneficial, isn’t there a better way to delegate voting power to a third party via an on-chain designation of a proxy that doesn’t conflate the use of a smart contract with entrusting the owners of the smart contract to vote in your interest?
This is why I suggested an opt out solution above. This way folks could opt to retain their VP if they didn’t agree with the way their VP was being used.
As an aside, I haven’t heard a single suggestion that the Vault is abusing our VP at all. I don’t think there’s been a single vote that we swung the vote one way or another, and our votes are decided in a decentralized fashion using our own governance token.
What was the reasoning behind opt out and not opt in? When I have to opt in or out of things in the real world, I have noticed that the person throwing the option out there generally would prefer I went with the default.
Gm Gotchigang,
I’ve been silently following this topic for a while, and I feel that It’s time to speak out loud about my position.
I have much respect for @Bearded and the Gotchivault team, but I see many reasons why this topic was raised. I think that Gotchivault’s primary goal is to acquire as much voting power as possible and monetize it. For any other market participant (you, fren), it is rational to aspire to limit its ability. And there is nothing bad in both sides: we all want the same. Don’t blame Gotchivault for their success.
Any DAO has voter apathy, and we shouldn’t flatter ourselves that we are the most active DAO. Yes, we incentivize members to vote. But let’s ask ourselves, how conscious are these voters? Are they read a proposal or randomly click a button? We allow members to vote on such complex things as game mechanics. Some proposals were complicated and tricky to understand their impact on the game. How many frens understood [AGIP33] Change Harvester Recipes and checked its simulations?
Let’s ask ourselves how we solve it. One of the possible solutions I see is voting power delegation and proxy-voting we are discussing. People should be able to entrust their voices to the most involved and successful Gotchiverse members. But it should be an accessible, transparent and open system, not the one we have now.
Having a chance, I also want to ask @coderdan. How far are we from onchain voting? How difficult is it to implement a smart contract for simple polls? From my humble knowledge of programming, it should be pretty straightforward.
Thanks,
Egor from @Metaguild
I echo this and also @Bearded 's suggestion that there be some sort of opt-in or opt-out selection
Maybe a combination of implementing voting power delegation at the smart contract level on Aavegotchi’s behalf and integrating an opt-in or opt-out feature for any members either participating in the vault or otherwise would be a reasonable solution
I could see many guilds or even organizations like GMI pooling our voting power amongst like minded individuals
I don’t know exactly what % of the total circulating supply gets utilized in DAO voting, but perhaps there would be a greater amount of ‘votes’ being cast this way
After some reflection on what everyone has said both here and in the DAO discussion, my thinking on this has shifted somewhat.
Personally speaking, I do not like that voting power has become as concentrated as it is in the protocol. It makes it feel less rewarding to participate in DAO discussion and governance knowing that ultimately enacting change is dependent on convincing a few individuals who control a large portion of the voting power. Though this is how I feel, I do not fault anyone for the state of things- it’s just the way the market has played out.
That being said, I have come to believe that banning delegation is not the answer, nor is it feasible to do so in a fair way. Determining the “true owner” of a crypto asset contained in a smart contract is not as straightforward as it might seem. You could imagine a lot of gray areas in the future where one might transfer assets to a smart contract for a variety of reasons that can cloud ownership of the asset.
It’s not up to the DAO to adjudicate who owns what assets. The blockchain does that for us. The owner at any given point in time, as far as the DAO is concerned, should be whoever can sign a transaction proving that they control the address that holds the asset at a given point in time.
If we can’t eliminate proxy voting, then I think we’d be better off making transferrable voting power a feature of the protocol. Among other benefits, this would create a pathway for custodial solutions to have more flexibility in how they exercise their voting power, including splitting their voting power among voting options, or perhaps delegating voting power directly back to their customers to exercise for themselves.
I was struck by the idea @hefe briefly mentioned on the DAO hangout last week involving issuing transferrable voting tokens on a per-vote basis. The address that holds the assets claims the tokens and can distribute them as they see fit or burn them to vote. I don’t know if this is the answer, but it seems like a good place to start.
Moralis and Filecoin are holding a hackathon, and two of the topics are P2E games and DAO Governance.
There’s a LOT of prizes, so it would be a good place to try to solve some of our code issues, and it would be great visibility for the protocol.
The core concept I’d like to see us accomplish, is a voting tool that actually delivers an accurate vote, can’t be “carpetbagged”, and has full granular delegation powers built into it. Simply solving one of those problems, will win you a prize…
Snapshot does this now. There is now no need to bundle delegation with services.
Now is a good time to resolve this unnecessary security hole.