Authors
Mahesh Murthy (Founder of Karma)
mZeroNine (mStable)
Summary
This RFC would like to gather feedback around utilizing the governance contribution analytics suite from Karma in order to distribute voting power in the mStable ecosystem away from inactive stakers, and empower active stakers as well as other ecosystem participants that positively contribute to sound governance.
It is intended to achieve this via Karma’s analytics suite which can help identify active contributors across various systems mStable utilizes for governance and use their NFT Badge Minting Service that can be unlocked and subsequently claimed or airdropped to relevant wallets after fulfilling a set of criteria that the mStableDAO can freely define.
Abstract
Largely inspired by Vitalik’s blog post on coin voting, a fairer and better governance system is still something that eludes most DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem. It is now suggested to more closely look at the work that Karma has been doing in this space and discuss a potential opportunity to utilize their analytics system in our own governance system to distribute the weight that each MTA token has in the ecosystem towards incentivizing actively participating members in mStable’s governance for both native MTA stakers, as well as users that do not hold a stake in MTA.
Karma tracks and analyzes governance contributions across various systems such as Snapshot, Forum and Discord. Activity from these sources can be weighted differently to fit individual needs to generate contribution scores for active contributors. Based on these scores, governance power can be assigned to contributors to participate in mStable’s governance.
Below are two example scenarios to help understand how this works:
Contributor A stats in the last 6 months
- Has voted on 90% of the snapshot proposals
- Has created 3 RFCs on the forum
- Has created 2 proposals that went to a snapshot vote
- Has discussed 10 proposals on the forum
- Has posted 200 messages in governance or other relevant channels in Discord
Contributor B stats in the last 6 months
- Has voted on 70% of the snapshot proposals
- Has created 1 RFCs on the forum
- Has discussed 5 proposals on the forum
- Has posted 100 messages in governance or other relevant channels in Discord
Weights for each metric:
Snapshot Vote pct: 3
RFC created on forum: 5
Proposals created on forum: 10
Proposals discussed on forum: 1
Messages on Discord: 0.01
Contributor A score = (90 x 3) + (3 x 5) + (2 x 10) + (10 x 1) + (200 x 0.01) = 317
Contributor B score = (70 x 3) + (1 x 5) + (0 x 10) + (5 x 1) + (100 x 0.01) = 221
To reiterate, the above are only examples and community can decide the definition of contributors and their activities.
Issue governance power NFTs to contributors
Based on these scores, contributors can be awarded different tiers of NFTs. Example: Any contributor with a score above 300 is issued an L1 NFT, 200 - 299 is issued L2 NFT and so on.
A new snapshot strategy can be implemented to give different governance voting power to L1, L2, L3 NFT holders.
Further down the line, and if proven to be successful, an integration of this system would also allow for further NFTs to be created and distributed in order to continuously expand and diversify governance rights away from inactive users, and give the power instead to wholesome participants without needlessly punishing passive hodlers of stkMTA.
Motivation
Given that the Top 5 staking addresses in our governance hold over 50% of the voting power, yet only one of them actively participates in our proposals, it is clear that we require more active contribution in our system without needlessly diluting or punishing active stakers.
With this way of distributing additional governance power to both active stakers and active participants, it is believed to only marginally dilute inactive stakers in the system, which should be seen as a net positive for both participants, as well as mStable governance overall.
Pros
- Take initiative and tackle the issue of coin voting first-hand
- Distribute governance power to active participants, no matter if they stake MTA or not
- Set a foundation for further distribution of power to beneficial ecosystem participants
Cons
- Marginally dilute passive and inactive stakers of MTA
Cost
We request a grant amount of $10k for setup and development of this project. You can find the milestones and breakdown below.
Milestone 1: $3k - Work with community and core team to flesh out the requirements, implement all necessary features in smart contract, build snapshot strategy and make changes to our backend application.
Milestone 2: $7k - Successfully issue NFTs, assign governance power and see the voting with new governance power in action in Snapshot.
Next Steps
It is suggested that the community comment on this RFC in the coming days, and bearing no significant opposition or change in ideation, we would move ahead with this RFC in the coming weeks and create a formal draft proposal on Github to be used for review.
Meta Governors are encouraged to provide as much feedback as possible until then, so we can create the best possible outcome for mStable and its users.
