🚨 Please formally review the official draft of the proposal on Discourse before voting. It includes full details on the proposed change and implementation. 🚨

This post revives the Remove name registration fee proposal and resubmits it for formal review so it can meet participation requirements and move into the final phase of governance.

Proposal Champions

Nassar Hayat - @nas | nas#9634 Abbey Titcomb - @abbey | abbey#5646 Cloudhead - @cloudhead | cloudhead#2904

Description

This proposal is to set the Radicle name registration fee to 0 ("setRadRegistrationFee(uint256)" 0).

The goal of this initiative is to support the adoption of Radicle features by reducing the cost and effort required to create & link on-chain identities (ENS names).

Purpose & Background

Today's hosted platforms benefit from the network effects that come with centralized server-side data hosting. Peer-to-peer systems lack this global namespace and the discoverability that comes with it. With Radicle Registrar, you can register globally unique names under the radicle.eth domain (e.g. cloudhead.radicle.eth) for Radicle profile and Orgs. These are interoperable and self-sovereign usernames that resolve to an Ethereum address. They can be used to recognize users not only within the Radicle network, but also throughout the global Ethereum network.

In order to register a name with the Radicle Registrar (to acquire a radicle.eth name) it cost 10 RAD:

Reasoning & Analysis

To register a Radicle name, if a user doesn't have RAD they have to exchange something in order to get RAD (cc @bordumb for the user flow).

This incurs 3 bits of overhead:

• The time it takes to exchange something for RAD
• The opportunity cost of making that exchange (e.g. volatility of RAD)
• The gas costs to make that exchange

For a feature that's meant to be as easy as registering a username, the current RAD fee introduces a barrier to entry/adoption that diminishes user experience. Additionally, current L1 gas prices add far too much cost to be assumed by the average user.

While the fee was originally set as a way to create utility and drive demand for RAD, the positive effect of value captured with the fee is nominal when compared to the experienced negative effect of user drop-off when onboarding. We believe that the positive network effects of designing for easiest adoption & onboarding will result in a more substantial net-gain for the project.

Technical Implementation

Drafted proposal code can be found in the alt-clients org, in the radicle-governance repository.

https://app.radicle.network/alt-clients.radicle.eth/rad:git:hnrkeoptyqxgg5rwjdaqxo47y6odkxitgc51y/tree/64dcc28bdec74e0f0c7649853c635c30dc1d3559/proposals/set-name-registration-fee-to-zero.proposal

This change to the registration to remove a RAD fee will be in place indefinitely, unless superseded by a future proposal reinstating the price.