Delegate to Voter Enfranchisement Pool — Event Horizon

Republication Note: The first publication of this proposal ( https://www.tally.xyz/gov/arbitrum/proposal/109425185690543736048728494223916696230797128756558452562790432121529327921478 ) should be ignored in favor of this publication of the proposal. The reasons for the republication being:

1. The former was posted outside the approved calendar window of Thursday 12:00 UTC and we like to avoid ineligibility

2. A correction was made on the ARB sum values

3. The executable has been simplified to a single tx to avoid any potential execution issues

Summary

Event Horizon is a public good. It is a public-access metagovernance block. With the aim of enfranchising the tens of thousands of small voters, this proposal suggests we delegate (not grant) 7,000,000 ARB to a public access-voter block subject to a non-optimistic 1-year renewal. This delegation gets mobilized by Voter Pass functionally giving underrepresented DAO citizens multiplied voting power and therefore more incentive to express their voices.

The Gitcoin DAO has recently passed a proposal supporting Event Horizon, thereby making our Citizen Enfranchisement pool the #6 delegate on Gitcoin.

We also request a grant of 200k ARB to help the team maintain this public good across this 1 year experiment in addition to retroactively awarding the team for the fully-functional product thus far built out of pocket for the Arbitrum community over the past several months. In addition, to ensure community alignment, a separate 125K ARB grant will be paid to the 5 member Oversight Committee in monthly installments. Grant Grand Total: 325K ARB.

Problem

Today, the typical Arbitrum voter participation rate floats in the low single digits. However, there are thousands of individual voters who participate in each vote despite having effectively no meaningful say. They should be rewarded with a voice. Moreover, there are likely tens of thousands more incredibly talented community members who are very capable of adding to the collective cognition of the ecosystem, but simply lack the capital means to have a voice and are left discouraged from voting at all. Voting when you only have, say, $500 worth of ARB doesn’t make sense, it’s a drop in the bucket. Sitting out governance proposals is, unfortunately, the rational decision but collectively makes everyone worse off. The strength of the DAO is directly related to the number of participants having their voices heard by the community. The governance platform and vote multiple that Event Horizon gives to these citizens incentivizes greater participation and surfaces greater cognition from the community.

Mechanism

Arbitrum Citizens interested in governance may mint a free, soul-bound Voter Pass which allows them to take part in mobilizing this voter enfranchisement pool subject to an additional Gitcoin Pass requirement to prevent sybil attacks. As detailed further below, this model:

1. Grants a clear and meaningful voice to statistically low-capital DAO citizen voters regardless of their financial means
2. Incentivizes participation with additional governance authority, not inflationary rewards
3. Incentivizes participants interested in governance itself, not financial gain

DAOs today rely exclusively on individuals and company entities to serve as network delegates. However, this isn’t the only option. While individual delegates certainly add incredible value to the Arbitrum Ecosystem, so would a governance allotment dedicated to the greater body of smaller citizen participants.

In this regard, Event Horizon slots into the Arbitrum ecosystem in a similar fashion to a standard delegate. However, rather than the block voting based on the decision of one individual, it votes with the collective cognition of hundreds of individual voter pass holders.

This serves two functions:

1. It provides a clear and designated voice for smaller, citizen voters.
2. It drives participation through a game-theoretic process called Implicit Delegation.

One of the greatest barriers to participation is a lack of voice due to lack of capital. Implicit delegation and public access governance changes this. Implicit Delegation is a model by which the full public governance block mobilizes in favor of the consensus of those who do vote, thereby implicitly delegating the authority of those who don’t vote to those who do.

When participation is low… each voter receives a larger slice of the public access pie. This means the fewer people there are voting, the more incentive there is for someone new to come and participate.

When participation is high… there are more voters splitting the same pie, however, citizen participation is high, which is a win for the ecosystem.

Implicit Delegation represents an effort to offer a new paradigm around means of influence. A shift from today’s entirely capital-centric to a more citizen-friendly, participation-centric model.

Where Direct Governance allocates influence along the lines of capital, and Explicit Delegation allocates influence along the lines of popularity (which often reflects capital), Implicit Delegation allocates influence to those who care most: people showing up to vote. Because the carrot is governance voice itself, implicit delegation attracts governance-interested citizens, not capital-interested citizens; more on that below.

Because the entirety of the block is always mobilized, those who are most vested are rewarded for their participation by having a larger share of the voting pie. In this regard, Event Horizon’s model leans into a systemic lack of participation to create a solution.

Rationale

Delegation rationale

7,000,000 ARB would place the Event Horizon community as around the 15th largest delegate. Based upon significant dialogue with existing Arbitrum delegates and stakeholders, we think this places a fair amount of power into the 3rd pillar of governance, namely citizens (the other two being organizational and individual delegations) without being large enough to flip any typical proposal.

This proposal reflects two of Arbitrum’s core mission values:

1. Socially Inclusive: By constructing a dedicated block of governance authority with lower capital barriers, our community greatly expands who gets a seat at the table.
2. Neutral and Open: By making the thoughts and ideas of this broader swath of individuals heard, we further broaden the spectrum of possibilities for the evolution of our ecosystem.

Grant rationale

1. While we initially didn’t want to ask for compensation, several delegates pointed out that doing this magnitude of work for the DAO for free sets a bad precedent for future builders. It sends the wrong message of “do not build here, your work is not valued by the Arbitrum community”. So despite our initial hesitation, and multiple refusals to do so, we now think it important to ask for some compensation.
2. As for the specific grant amount, LTIPP committees members were paid 25k ARB each for 7.5 weeks of work, approximately $50,000 on proposal execution day (February 21, 2024). We’re asking for 200k ARB total (roughly $100k at today’s ARB prices) for the work already done + 1 year of work from the four members of the Event Horizon team and all associated build costs and ongoing maintenance expenses. This is not to depreciate the value of LTIPP committee members, but to draw a humble comparison of the value of our engineering and governance labor both already done and yet to come in this next year. In fact, this pricing (adjusting for price action between LTIPP and now) explicitly values the work of LTIPP committee members at nearly 19x that of the Event Horizon team ($6.7k per LTIPP committee member per week vs. $480 per EH team member per week), not counting the previous year of work that went into building the already functioning product.

We will also have to pay for a Snapshot subscription which is $6k / year which will come out of the grant. Further labor expenses can be broken down by categories and priced as follows:

1. Launch pass minting on Arbitrum – 40k ARB
2. Maintain functionality through any changes in Arbitrums governance process – 40k ARB
3. Maintain and further streamline voter onboarding UX – 40k ARB
4. Bi-annual reporting including KPIs such as voters, participation rate, voters above key threshold amounts (say $1k worth of ARB), etc. – 40k ARB
5. Service fee – 40k ARB

Benefits compared to Token Incentivized Governance:

While token rewards for participation hold legitimate merit and are an intuitive remedy for low turnout, it has limitations.

1. Misaligned Incentives: Token-based incentives attract returns-interested parties. However, when it comes to governance, participation is most valuable when it comes from those int

... please visit link below to view full proposal

https://tally.xyz/gov/arbitrum/proposal/79529399410531589353911088395953830829384332193617716676855043534419270111970