[HGP-50] Proposed Epoch 7 Governance Changes

Summary

As described in the State of the Foundation 2024 blog post (https://hummingbot.org/blog/state-of-the-foundation-2024/), below are the Proposed Governance changes for Epoch 7:

1. Extend poll duration to 14 days
2. Fix proposal quorums based on total supply
3. Allocate connector bounties based on pro-rata vote share
4. Approve budget for 2024 maintenance and support initiatives

Sub-Proposals

1. Extend poll duration to 14 days

Polls are the most important and influential proposals each quarter, and the community deserves more time to consider and debate them, We propose to increase the voting duration for Polls from 7 days to 14 days to ensure broad participation of the community.

2. Fix proposal quorums based on total supply

Currently, the required quorum for each proposal type is based on HBOT circulating supply. Since the circulating supply is expanding continually and requires updating in the Snapshot system, this creates uncertainty among HBOT voters as to what the required quorum should be at any given time.

To mitigate this opacity, we propose to fix proposal quorums at the following levels:

• Pull Request Proposal (PRP): 500,000
• New Connector Proposal (PRP): 5,000,000
• Hummingbot Improvement Proposal (HIP): 15,000,000
• Hummingbot Governance Proposal (HGP): 50,000,000

3. Allocate connector maintenance bounties based on pro-rata vote share

Epoch 6 introduced fixed bounty allocations to fund connector maintenance for the top CEX, DEX, and Chain connectors.

Each Gold connector received a 400,000 HBOT bounty allocation, while each Silver connector received a 100,000 HBOT bounty allocation.

Rather than fixing allocations for the Gold and Silver tiers, we propose to allocate HBOT bounties among the connectors for each Poll based on their pro-rata voting share, albeit with a maximum allocation cap. This per-exchange amount would be a public HBOT maintenance bounty allocation which the Foundation will use to fund bounties for bug fixes and upgrades related to that exchange's Hummingbot connector. HBOT holders could also spend this allocation by proposing exchange-related bounties via HIP. See the HBOT Allocations tab in in HBOT Tracker for the current allocations for each exchange.

4. Approve budget for 2024 maintenance and support initiatives

We propose to extend the two maintenance and support initiatives started in 2023 to regularly allocate HBOT tokens:

• Connector Maintenance Bounty Allocations: See HGP-45
• Community Support Bounties: See HGP-33

We propose following governance parameters related to these initiatives for 2024. If this proposal is passed, it would result in a 17.2M HBOT (1.7% of total supply) allocation from the Community pool, which currently totals 310.99M HBOT (31% of total supply).

See the blog post for a breakdown of the 17.2M token allocation.

• Types of Connector Polls per Epoch: 3 (CEX, DEX, Chain)
• Bounty Allocation per Poll per Epoch: 1,000,000 HBOT
• Top X Connectors Receive Allocation: 4
• Bounty Allocation Cap per Connector: 800,000 HBOT
• Connector Inclusion Threshold: 200,000 HBOT
• Support Budget Per Week: 100,000 HBOT

These allocations should be sufficient to fund ongoing maintenance and upkeep of the Hummingbot codebase. We invite the community to propose other HBOT bounty allocations, such as for research & development, liquidity, and other initiatives.

You may vote For or Against for each of the 4 sub-proposals, and the choices that receive 50% approval will be implemented, as long as this proposal reaches quorum. Feel free to participate in the thread below for discussion about this proposal.