As a DAO, voter participation is absolutely crucial to the success and security of Bancor.
Unfortunately, due to high gas costs, voter participation is low. While a gasless solution will ultimately be our saving grace, such a solution is likely lower in the priority queue.
In the meantime, I wanted to drive some discussion pertaining to potentially incentivizing voting on our gas guzzling medium.
In its current state, we are typically seeing less than 5% of outstanding vbnt actually participate in the voting process
This is dangerous for the protocol. It’s quite cheap from a relative standpoint to secure enough voting power to push through things that could be ultimately damaging.
What if the act of voting was incentivized? Some form of quadratic / flat distribution of rewards to voters would help to make this fairer for all participants.
I believe that at least compensating for gas costs in the form of bnt… perhaps even a bit more than gas… would significantly increase voter participation.
By assigning a native yield to vBnt in this fashion, we give users multiple points of utility for their voting power.
They can earn a native yield… stake their vbnt for fees in the vbnt/bnt pool… or leverage their existing LP positions to chase additional yield elsewhere or on bancor.
Once again, this is NOT a proposal.
It’s a discussion. Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on if this is a good idea / how we can make it work.
Proposals should be rewarded to improve speed and quality of successful proposals. There should be absolutely no cost to voting, and proposers should be rewarded for successful proposals (It would also be cool if the proposer had an option to donate that proposal reward to the voters)
Snapshot/gasless is a good possibility. Arbitrum is also another possibility. Writing up a proposal for both of these things.
I believe that the community should be able to kick the gasless solution higher in the priority queue.
Also, due to the insanely low participation that as you well mention, is dangerous for the protocol, some form of incentivizing vote - in addition - would be important.
There are many options for that. It can be implemented as a native yield, or even in a similar way that Balancer did: if you actively voted during any given week, you get a small increase in your LM rewards for the week.
While I agree that we should incentivize voting to get more participation, I think that we should implement some changes in voting first:
In the short term, It would be good if the DAO voted to increase the unlock period to 30 days for individuals that are creating any Bancor proposals (easy to implement; as they create the proposal increase their lock time). This will prevent malicious behavior from individuals that might market buy large amounts of BNT to stake in order to have large voting power for their proposals and influence voting for their on benefits. If they are not able to unlock their vBNT for 30 days then users are committed to the future of what they are proposing (this will also have the effect of increasing the quality of proposals in Bancor as a 30 day lock in crypto is long). Ideally, the unlock period should be incremental so that if a proposal is submitted at T0 then their unlock period is 30 days. If 7 days later they submit another proposal, then their new unlock period is 30 days - 7 days + 30 days for a total of 53 days.
In the long term, what I would like to see is for Bancor to move towards the Curve DAO model for voting. In this model, your voting power is directly proportional to how long you staked your CRV tokens (vBNT in our case). Four years will give you your full voting power, i.e. 200 vBNT lock for four years gives you 200 vBNT in voting power and 200 vBNT lock for 1 year gives you a voting power of 50 vBNT etc… As time passes, your voting power decrease linearly unless you increase your lock time. You can only unlock and withdraw your vBTN once you let your lock time expire. This is a better system as it prevents short sighted individuals from having too much voting power and those that do care about the long term viability of the project have more votes. We can potentially tie this in with the staking rewards idea that @atosm has proposed and I could see this working in such a manner that rewards percentage is directly proportional to the length of your lock.
Happy to hear any feedback from the community about implementing such a system. Note that most of the work for this has been open source by the folks from Curve:
The purpose of point #2 is not really to make profit but somehow prevent people from spamming the same proposal over and over. bBadger/bDigg as an example. 3 proposal for the same thing? Don’t want someone to spam 2000 proposal for the same thing. Might as well capitalize if they want to spam.