Hey, noturhandle from Butter here.
Great proposal—we’re excited to see it go live.
I had a few points on the program’s design:
- Rationale: Increased Participation. I expect that though there may be an initial spike in participation due to delegation, it will likely drop over time without incentives. If the council can attract the majority of the delegated voting power by introducing explicit expectations, this effect may actually be limited.
- Rationale: Expert Decision-Making. Experts tend to have a higher opportunity cost to participate. Retaining their interest may be harder if they don’t directly benefit from the protocol.
- CoW DAO Delegate Council: Balanced Representation: Is the number of seats a fair representation of each group’s relative interests? Should we be concerned if a single trader is elected but two core team members are elected, granting them double the opportunity to acquire voting power?
- CoW DAO Delegate Council: Council Responsibilities: What happens if they don’t participate? Who monitors and enforces these rules?
- Council Decision-Making and Interaction with the Broader Governance Process: Is there no concern that a council election will concentrate voting power in the council? What happens if delegators do not re-delegate when council members leave?
- Criteria for community-nominated delegates: Self-delegation and self-limiting criteria are really useful. I wonder how this will intersect with the relative power of each group in the council if everyone aims to maximise their delegation. In the above example, the two core team members will have a 60m limit versus the trader’s 30m. Perhaps the limit should apply to categories instead of members (though this may introduce an incentive to misreport).
- I’m also a fan of split and transitive delegation. Excited to see these in use.
Overall, it’s a great proposal. It’s simple yet introduces some innovation without adding risk.
It is still subject to the usual issues with delegated token voting regarding apathy and principle-agent problems, but those shouldn’t be an issue initially.
Given the maturity of the delegate ecosystem, I’d introduce a review in 3-6 months rather than 12 months to determine if the participant’s existing incentives are enough to produce the behaviours you expect.
We’d be happy to help once you begin considering incentives.