[Proposal] - Integrate NFT Gated or Token Gated Quadratic Voting via the Influence.Vote dApp

đź—‚ Proposals đź“‘ Formal Proposals
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Author

Derp Twerks (Matt / Finance.vote)

Motivation

Idle DAO is committed to the vision of a globally available decentralized capital pool, administrated by a community of token holders. finance.vote is a decentralised organisation with a DeGov dApp “influence.vote” that can make Idle’s goal of community administration a reality.

The DeFi industry standard for governance is 1 coin, 1 vote “token-weighted voting”. However, this leads to plutocracy, meaning whales make all the decisions (think Uniswap). The quadratic voting technologies built into influence are designed to reduce the impact of whales. Ultimately, it transfers power from the few to the many.

​​​​​​​Implementation

influence.vote is a customisable decision-making dApp that uses quadratic voting and vote justification to help communities find signal in the noise.
By integrating influence.vote, Idle can carry out token gated - any user holding $IDLE - quadratic votes with an open-ended number of holders creating consensus and collecting dialogue on IIPs via nuanced voting. Influence also allows a range of alternative strategies including token-weighted voting to build bespoke governance designs.

The native use of the influence.vote system is for each user to receive 100 voice credits per proposal. These voice credits may be spent (quadratically) on the different options on the ballot. Alternative voice credit strategies are also possible to give some users more say than others.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
We will use the list of IDLE token holders to whitelist every $IDLE community member in the voting contract. This means that all holders will be eligible to vote at zero cost.

Users will be able to mint a special Idle NFT that will be numbered (in order of minting) and connected to their voting rights. This means the voting rights can be transferred (or sold) at a later date. Custom art for the NFTs is available for a price. See details below.

Program outlines

  • finance.vote integrates a custom influence.vote “nation” for Idle (24 Hours)​​​​​​​

  • finance.vote pre-loads the nation with a few example proposals

  • Idle defines voting parameters and their first serious proposal

  • Idle defines NFT implementation. Three options:

    • Elementary: A clean and functional “Voter ID Card” NFT with the Idle logo that identifies Idle and the NFT

    • Generative: Autogenerated art that follows your brand

    • Commissioned: Why not make the next token-weighted vote “Which NFT artist shall Idle DAO commission for our NFT ID’s?” A bonus effect of custom art is the interest generated for the protocol via the buzz and resale opportunities in the secondary NFT art market.

  • finance.vote deploys a merkle root for the NFT issuance. The users can then choose to mint these at a small cost to be negotiated (24 Hours)

  • Idle token holders will be able to vote for free on any token-weighted IIP’s

  • Idle NFT holders will able to vote for free on any NFT-gated IIP’s

  • Idle IIP’s are passed through the Influence “nation” where voting is conducted

Next steps:

Please feel free to ask any questions. Myself and the team will be available on here and in Discord to answer any questions. Thanks!

This post will be open for discussion for 7 days . If no material concerns arise, the Leagues will launch the Temperature Check to approve this program.

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Thanks for posting this @DerpTwerks. I’m a fan of quadratic voting to give a more distributed voice to the entire community of active contributors. I’d like to better understand a couple of points here:

  1. Is finance.vote supposed to substitute our Snapshot off-chain voting system, the on-chain voting system, or both? For the on-chain voting system I think it would be quite difficult as we’re based on GovernorAlpha contracts, so we should change the entire governance smart contract infrastructure to have the quadratic voting happening for the actual implementation of changes in the protocol.

  2. Using the token mapping provided by us (Idle DAO) to whitelist every $IDLE token holder in the voting contract, seems to me this is still prone to Sybil attacks. What if I spread my IDLE across 100 different wallets before the snapshot to whitelist $IDLE token holders? I have 100x voting power without the “voting cost” introduced by quadratic voting. Since a single vote has the potential to tilt a majoritarian group decision, prevention of sybil attacks is an important priority in ensuring the security of quadratic voting. I’m sure you already thought about this, can you provide more color on this?

  3. What is the business model for finance.vote, if any?

4 Likes
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Hi Teo, Thanks for your questions. Please find the answers below. If you, or the community have any more questions, please feel free to reach out.

1. Is finance.vote supposed to substitute our Snapshot off-chain voting system, the on-chain voting system, or both? For the on-chain voting system I think it would be quite difficult as we’re based on GovernorAlpha contracts, so we should change the entire governance smart contract infrastructure to have the quadratic voting happening for the actual implementation of changes in the protocol.

Influence.vote is an off-chain voting mechanism that allows for quadratic voting on IIP’s and reaching consensus on what your community wants to focus on. We are not proposing that you change your GovernorAlpha smart contracts​​​​​. influence.vote is not a protocol changing tool but rather an consensus mechanism that allows the DAO to filter signal from the noise. So yes it is far closer to a snapshot alternative or a tool that can be used supplementally to that.

You can think of it more of a tangential tool to your core governance infra, which is designed to take the rougher consensus formation into a new space which leads up to the high stakes on-chain decision making. The team calls this second-layer governance.

Influence.vote has an interesting spin on QV, which gives users a budget of voice credits which are distributed as votes across a list of items, which can then be justified with dialogue. So the outcome is a sorted list of preferences AND a tagged list of dialogue (justifications), which provides a very rich data set for discovering what people care about in the DAO.

2. ​​​​ Using the token mapping provided by us (Idle DAO) to whitelist every $IDLE token holder in the voting contract, seems to me this is still prone to Sybil attacks. What if I spread my IDLE across 100 different wallets before the snapshot to whitelist $IDLE token holders? I have 100x voting power without the “voting cost” introduced by quadratic voting. Since a single vote has the potential to tilt a majoritarian group decision, prevention of sybil attacks is an important priority in ensuring the security of quadratic voting. I’m sure you already thought about this, can you provide more color on this?

Yes, sybil resistance is generally a big problem with QV and the team are very aware of it.

For the most part a simple snapshot will work effectively, there has to be a significant incentive for people to bother splitting their coins to gain marginal gains in voting power, you have to spread tokens across potentially hundreds of wallets to really get the benefit of maximising vote power, and then essentially the game trends back to the efficacy of 1 token, 1 vote. Since the votes are more dialogic and signalling based the marginal utility of sybil attacks is low and probably not worth the gas fees (or the time spent on making multiple justified votes). The team are working on ways of taking QV towards on-chain voting in their “decision.vote” app and have some interesting ideas for how to maintain sybil resistance to do it.

The most interesting is using an NFT gating system, which you may want to try out, whereby each token holders has the right to mint an NFT which gains equal voting rights (100 voice credits each for example), meaning that at snapshot there is totally egalitarian voting power across every user regardless of token stake (or weighted through any metric). Then each NFT can generate an identity (some IDLE specific avatars could be generated etc) and individualised reputation (vote weight) can be assigned to identities for a range of things such as participation, commitment, impact etc. The team are quite keen to work with some innovative DAOs to experiment with these reputation dynamics.

There are other solutions such as post hoc cleaning of votes using data analysis techniques if the votes get more contentious down the line etc, but you’ll probably find that these aren’t issues in the near term.

3. What is the business model for finance.vote, if any

Each of the applications in the dApp suite have a unique business model, for example the liquidity mining and auction dApps collect fees from their use, but in the case of influence.vote the team are looking for early partners to work with and it is essentially free to use. If you wanted to arrange an NFT voting identity distribution, there’s a small per mint fee that’s taken in the background on mint.

Please feel free to checkout our litepaper at finance.vote for more detail.

finance.vote lite paper