How to increase voter turnout

The website doesn’t have too much in the way of explanation. If it’s built on ETH but isn’t an airdrop then users must pay gas to claim? Can you expand on how it could make revenue for the protocol? I like that we could potentially offload effort.

1 Like

This is exactly correct. A balance accumulates at a constant rate, and at any time the user may withdraw up to the balance. I don’t think we should plan around gas costs, since ETH2 should drive them down to negligible, but if we wanted to mitigate them in the short term, there’s always the aforementioned gas tokens; they could potentially prove useful even after ETH2 goes live.

Of course.

Compounding streams use the Compound protocol to leverage a technical aspect of how the system actually works to accrue interest on the stream. The stream is deposited as a lump sum, and the portion that the user is permitted to withdraw is increased as a function of time elapsed out of the stream duration set during initialization. The deposit is put into Compound, and is drawn from as the user withdraws their balance.

Not exclusive to compounding streams: At the end of the stream, whatever balance remains is transferred to the recipient; if the sender cancels (which they may do unconditionally), the ‘streamed’ portion of the deposit is sent to the recipient and the ‘unstreamed’ portion is returned to the sender.

The interest accrued can be split between multiple parties, if I’m not mistaken, but it can at least be directed to an arbitrary address.

The obvious consequences of this are that it’s best not to withdraw from your stream and let it run its course untouched if you are getting a portion (if not all) the interest. Which, in the context of voting incentives, leaves us with exactly one choice; the staker must be given a portion of the interest in order to reward them for their patience, but to support the protocol a portion must go to the DAO.

It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: the patient, considerate, consistent voters will get the greatest rewards by default; Compound gets a supply of capital in the form of BNT (assuming they whitelist it); and we get revenue, and higher quality governance.

1 Like

Yes, I see. My comment about the airdrop was in relation to previous ideas in this thread about voting rewards being airdrop (nothing to do with how sabier distributes funds) but I think we have shifted that to rewards being claimed by the user instead. This will give us some advantages:

  1. Discourages splitting vBNT across multiple wallets (since you are paying fees to stake and to claim)
  2. Some potential integration with letting you restake your rewards directly into Bancor (we get to lock that liquidity directly into the platform)
  3. Potentially integrating with your “rewards” wallet so that if you do withdraw then you could lose your multiplier on BNT rewards

I think this is a great platform for the specific use case of paying project contributors in a controlled manner. I am not sure it’s best suited to what we are looking to accomplish (voter incentives) but would love to hear other members opinion to see if this make sense? As you touch, there could be some potential snags with Sabier in that it lends out the funds to compound (for which BNT is not acceptable form of collateral yet) until they are ready to be claimed. Even if we could opt out of that, I am not sure the advantages trump keeping voter incentives rewards in Bancor. (for reasons above) Note that the Bancor team is working on boarding BNT as a form of collateral on Maker and Aave (my guess is that compound would come after).

1 Like

Didn’t catch it until just now; if I’m not mistaken, that would be bad.
IF vBNT < BNT
I can stake, get my vBNT, sell it for more BNT, and get a bigger stake, but only a limited number of times before I run out of value juice. That is, I’m subject to diminishing returns.
IF vBNT == BNT
I can stake, get my vBNT, sell it for BNT, and get a bigger stake; my stake grows at a consistent rate so long as I am able to pay for gas to keep milking the system. My returns don’t diminish, but they don’t grow and are expensive to get.
IF vBNT > BNT
Bad. I can get vBNT, sell it for BNT and restake as many times as I like, theoretically without end and my stake grows by a larger amount each time. My returns grow and get proportionally less expensive to get.

This is all assuming I’m understanding correctly the system as it stands. Not directly related to the topic but it’s our governance mechanics so maybe it qualifies?

1 Like

While I know the Bankless podcast does not show us any love, the end of their 📺 AMA with Scoopy Trooples of Alchemix - Bankless Shows touched on the very issue we seek to address. Scoopy proposed the use of some sort of shard that “can’t be used for voting, but it can be used to buy NFTs and other power-ups that you can use for your character in the DAO.” Their goal is to “make DAO’s fun” because people aren’t “going to participate in high numbers if there’s no reason to come back and check in every day.” This is way over my head technically, but I thought the concept of an NFT was worth including in this discussion since it would cause zero inflation.

2 Likes

Now there’s an interesting idea… You get an “avatar” NFT and instead of voting with vBNT directly, you earn it (maybe via reward streams :stuck_out_tongue:, analogous to a ‘mana regen’) by voting with your avatar (which has a base voting weight, maybe based on your LP stake?) and instead of staking it, you spend it to get “powerups”, which increase your avatar’s voting weight and can grant other perks (a common one might be “vote weight +1%” or “Reward stream +0.1%”, a super rare one might be “gas subsidies”, a unique [non-transferable] one might be for contributing something great to the DAO in some way and would grant significant rewards and/or voting weight bonuses, things like that). Not necessarily RPG-like but we can use the model in governance to make it a neat little game-type-thing.

We could even make the powerups a lootbox kind of thing, where certain grades of powerups are only available at certain thresholds (only one type of box, you can just dump vBNT into until you’re ready to “crack” it, a process known as “steeping”); the more vBNT you steep your box in, the more powerups and the better powerups you’ll get (i.e., if you reach the max threshold and continue, you’ll just get more top-level gear and/or obscene amounts of common gear), steeped vBNT is burned (this is important because when you steep, you’re realizing your voting power into your upgrades, and keeping steeped vBNT around creates inflation). Basically what I have in mind is, when you’re at a threshold, you have a chance to get one of the powerups for that threshold, OR one or more of a lower-grade powerup, the quantity depending on how far “down” you “roll”; if you have enough to get more than one powerup for a threshold and not necessarily enough to reach the next threshold, the rule applies to each possible powerup “roll” individually, but you will always get something.

I really like this idea, @Jefe-fintechv1. Good thought!

Though I think if we were to do this we’d have to come up with a different name for vBNT, make it sound like some kind of liquid that you can soak things in so it helps with the visualization. Maybe “Viscor” (“Viscous Bancor”)?

1 Like

I’m picking up what you’re throwing down. Great stuff! This could be a governance game changer that creates a mutually beneficial relationship between whales and smaller hyperactive community members with good ideas.

Thanks! I wish I had thought of it myself. When I heard it I immediately thought of this discussion thread and that we could do it better because we’re Bancorians. Actually, Banclords!

I like it. Also I think something like Virtuous would work.

2 Likes

Participating in Bancor on a daily basis is overkill. There will certainly be, and maybe are now, happy participants who are cruising through the governance discussions and forums daily, but this is too much to ask from most people. Something in the weekly range sounds more appropriate. As a sidebar to this discussion of participation, I wouldn’t mind a better summary page format for the tokens and their current and future respective whitelisting and LM rewards status. Right now, I have to burrow through tons of topics and discussions to even keep track of what’s happening with all the whitelisted/LM rewards tokens – and there’s only a couple of dozen. Some day, we will have hundreds. There will be no way the vBNT voters are going to keep track of all the proposals, LM extensions, co-investment modifications, BIPS, etc. All we have now is the proposal list page, and you have to click on each one to figure out what each one is doing and ‘do I care’ and ‘do I need to vote’ or is it futile. There is going to have to be a more ‘at-a-glance’ dashboard for voting.

4 Likes

if you give rewards for voting you will soon see bots vote just for the sake of voting to get as much rewards as possible.
i think every address should be limited to a certain amount (50k?) of voting power and every address without history (only holding and staking vBNT, no transactions ) should be excluded from voting.

also account age (3 month or longer) could be used to limited voting

1 Like

Maximum 1 vote per wallet.
Wallet that are less than 365 days old should be excluded from voting.

1 Like

I think the aim should be to include people, not make it harder for people to participate. Sure, you want to reward people for long-term participation, but there is probably a better way to do that.

1 Like

I think what we largely need to do is give a small % monetary incentive to voting on every proposal with rewards being calculated on a weekly basis. if you give 2-3% inflation to all wallets that do so you are still only increasing the supply ever so slightly compared to LM and it should serve as a good 2nd place prize to the vortex. Overall this would probably heighten the scarcity of vBNT tremendously while at the same time getting people engaged in the voting process. You can add a cap to it but at the end of the day that is opening the door to mindless bot voting when we could just have large stakeholders be rewarded for being individually involved.

4 Likes

I was thinking that the quorum percentage needed should be based on the BNT co-investment amount. Huge difference in risk between 250k and 2 million. This should be reflected in the quorum difficulty. Obviously people are still free to vote no, but this would give better opportunities to medium size investment amount proposals.

3 Likes

Agreed, and I don’t think anyone makes that ask.

This is an idea that has been discussed, but may require dev resources that are currently focused on higher priority efforts.

I think that is unfair for newer BNT token holkders, who may be actively engaged in the community. Instead, any exclusionary aspect should be based off voting inactivity.

This is what I think would happen, and it would be inclusive (@gdhurst).

The concept of voter decay is something @mbr mentioned and since I’ve become more familiar with it I believe it is a strong potential solution.

Longer term, I also would like to explore Conviction Voting because “voters are always asserting their preference for which proposals they would like to see approved, rather than casting votes in a single time-boxed session.”

However, short-term I think the simple quorum change proposed in Proposal: Lower WL quorum to 30% and remove inactive voters from quorum calculation will achieve our immediate goal of approving more WL proposals.

3 Likes

I’d like to re-ignite this discussion in light of the arrival of delegation.

These two ideas are interesting. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, either. We could blend them in a balance mechanism. Maintaining a stance on a proposal gives you Conviction continually (or streams it), but continual failure to speak on a new proposal streams Decay from that proposal to you.

If your Decay outweighs your Conviction, your Conviction is no longer counted. Voting FOR or AGAINST a proposal you’re getting Decay from will stop the stream of Decay and start streaming Conviction. How much Conviction and Decay you get could be a function of your voting weight.

1 Like

Can you prepare some code examples for how these conviction and decay processes are expected to work? I am still a little confused as to whether your model is in some way tied to earnings on the network, or addresses voting power exclusively.

1 Like

Sure! I hope you don’t mind Haskell notation, because I do not know anything else well enough (or of anything else clean enough) to do it in anything but.

1 Like

Are there any good videos on bancor governance and voting? Most I seen aren’t relevant to voting, I’d like to just not sure how.

1 Like

I figured it out but all my BNT is on Metamask which is not supported by the voting website, how can that be changed. Lots of people use metamask so maybe that is reason for lack of votes. People don’t want to have to pay transaction fees or lose bnt if they have to leave the pool early just to vote.

1 Like

You’ve got to first stake your BNT into a pools, Once you do that you will get an equal amount of vBNT. that vBNT must be stake here Bancor Network. You won’t be able to vote on proposal currently live but on future ones.

1 Like