Adding vesting schedules to the conviction locks of individual voters & Introducing limits to instances of referendum voting by delegates

Governance
1

Currently, users who participate in OpenGov have the following options:

  1. Vote Aye, Nay, Split, or Abstain
  2. Add conviction locks to their votes
  3. Delegate their votes to different individuals, across different tracks, and with/out conviction locks

With option 1, voters can spread their votes across different responses to truly reflect the nuances of their decisions.

Option 2 allows voters to signal strong interest in decision-making. However, this also means that whatever amount they commit to conviction voting will be fully locked throughout.

Option 3 allows voters to defer decision-making to others. But they have no means to ensure that these voting rights will not be abused by trigger-happy delegates.

This post seeks to collect ecosystem participants’ feedback on the feasibility of the following functionalities:

  1. Adding vesting schedules to the conviction locks of individual voters. This new functionality would allow the balances locked in voting to be gradually unlocked and (potentially) used ad hoc for other ecosystem-related operations (transfers, swaps, funding rounds, NFT purchases, etc.). The objective is to bring in even more flexibility in voting and mitigate the restrictions of conviction locks.

  2. Introducing limits to instances of referendum voting by delegates. This new functionality would allow delegators to set an upper limit to the number of concurrent referenda in which their delegated voting balances can be used, and beyond which the delegated voting balances will be temporarily unavailable to delegates. The goal is to create a feedback mechanism in delegation and encourage mindful voting by delegates.

Please share your corrections and suggestions. Any link to existing documentation, publication, or PR on this specific topic would be very much appreciated.