SIP-15 Reducing quorum from owner changes from 30% to 9%, for parameter changes from 15% to 3%

Simple Summary

At the moment, it is difficult and slow for the swerve governance mechanism to achieve a quorum of 30% and 15%. For the governance system to function, the threshold must be lowered so that decisions and votes can be made quicker

Abstract

It is proposed to reduce the quorum threshold for accepting Owner changes from 30% to 9%, for parameter changes from 15% to 3%. Motivation

The current quorum numbers are a carryover from the Curve fork, it’s inapplicable because unlike Curve, swerve does not allocate tokens to founders/team and investors, hence it’s substantially harder to meet quorum numbers for Swerve.

At the moment, it is difficult for the governance mechanism to achieve quorum. The first treasury SIP-2 proposal failed due to lack of quorum, and it passed due to a massive social media campaign for holders to lock their tokens. While this may work on an adhoc individual vote basis, it’s extremely slow and in-efficient as a governance mechanism. This is due to approximately 400,000 veswrv that is locked for 4 years by farmers who farmed the initial 2 week token emissions and now are not actively participating in governance. This problem will constantly get worse over time as governance is a major threat to decay out of control. Which means over time, reaching quorum will get harder and harder as more and more 4 year lock and leave farmers increase the veSWRV pool. The later we leave this problem, the harder it will be. Whatever number we reduce quorum to, over time that number will get more difficult to reach due to the factors outlined above, hence I am proposing an aggressive quorum number of 9% for ownership changes and 3% for parameter changes.

Reducing quorum also protects Swerve governance from drop offs in engagement in the future, so that a core group of holders can always work to improve the protocol even if large groups of holders are currently disengaged.