Decentralized Voices: Cohort 2 - Lucky Friday 🍀

Governance
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Dear Polkadot Community Members:

I am submitting this brief overview on behalf of my employer/our company, Lucky Friday Labs, LLC. We are applying for a Decentralized Voices delegation during this second cohort, and we hope this short statement provides some insight into how we’re currently thinking about OpenGov.

We believe providing Lucky Friday with a delegation presents a unique opportunity to the Polkadot community. Whereas we had single individuals (e.g. Jimmy Tudeski) or decentralized entities (e.g. ChaosDAO) in the first cohort, we would be the first centralized entity to have a delegation should we receive one in this second cohort.

Since its inception, Lucky Friday has supported the Polkadot ecosystem in a number of ways, from providing institutional grade hardware for infrastructure provision to novel concepts such as Teddy DAO that provides 100% of funds to charities. We hope to continue to serve this community in a new capacity as OpenGov delegates, and we have drafted our philosophy and posted it below for all to read.

:four_leaf_clover: Lucky Friday OpenGov Philosophy :four_leaf_clover:

Governance, represented by one of the leaves on the four-leaf clover on the Lucky Friday website, is a cornerstone of our mission. Our team, and its individual members, are proud to be at the forefront of on-chain governance, a movement poised to become increasingly important as decentralized networks evolve.

Our Director of Protocol Relations, has been a regular panelist on The Kusamarian’s Attempts at Governance (AAG) and other members of our team are frequent participants. Our team also includes lawyers who are experts in corporate governance and bring a wealth of perspective to Polkadot’s unique governance mechanisms. For more than a year, we also have maintained a dedicated governance channel in our company Slack, a forum that sparks dynamic discussions among our team on current referenda.

We firmly believe that visible, active participation in these conversations and governance decisions shaping the Polkadot ecosystem is a responsibility for individuals and teams seeking to become ecosystem leaders.

Our core beliefs:

Shared Risk: The treasury should be used to help build out the ecosystem, but in a manner that risk is a shared burden between referendum proposers and the DOT token holders.

Social Reputation: Funds should be prioritized for builders who are known actors, with verifiable track records and who seek to advance the Polkadot network and its attendant parachains.

Internal Consensus: The Lucky Friday team is composed of numerous individuals, sometimes with very different perspectives. Our votes will be cast only after internal deliberation that is accessible to all team members.

Actionable Feedback: Governance is an iterative process that requires thoughtful, direct suggestions from all stakeholders in the network in order for the ecosystem to maximize its potential. In some cases, we also believe that it is appropriate for governance participants (including those receiving delegations from W3F) to publicly articulate the rationale for their vote.

Future-oriented: Decisions must be mindfully made, knowing they will have lasting effects, some of which may be difficult to discern in the moment.

On behalf of the rest of the Lucky Friday team, I thank you for taking the time to read through our OpenGov candidacy post.

Gratefully,

Ryan / Phunky

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Thats pretty interesting if you guys are the first centralized entity to hold DV delegation.

How many members is the team comprised of? Would there every be a tie or does the vote ever have to be unanimous? Are there different ways for voting when it comes to things like 1 million Dot big spend request?

Also, you seem like you touched on being more cautious with treasury spends and making sure it’s going to credible requestors. Which is good.

A social Reputation is needed or some type of reputation system that allows for people/enterprises with a high reputation to have access to big spend tracks.

People/enterprises with a low reputation should have limited access and should have to first build their reputation up to unlock big spends/ medium spends etc. I think this will be very beneficial to our governance system.

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You need to chill. You are taking my text out of context. The social reputation is a response to his idea.

It would be great to expand on that and implement that in governance that only allows for people with high reputation to propose big spends. Base tracks off of a reputation system. The lower the reputation the more limited you are with tracks.

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Hi! Here Adrián from Coin Reference, just want to leave here me totally support to the Lucky Friday team within Decentralized Voices programe. Really great team and projects secured by Polkadot. Also they represents a big and great Polkadot community. Ty!

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Hey! Sorry for the delay (just saw your reply now)

The entire team is 16 people. In terms of internal voting, no, it would not have to be unanimous, simple majority rules. In most uncontroversial cases (e.g. technical referenda that no one will quibble over), I’d imagine we would all just vote AYE and move on; for large spends or ones that the voting is close, we would likely allow time for more internal deliberation. We’ve also discussed having a standing meeting once a week just dedicated to OpenGov matters should we be provided a delegation.

Our co-founders are very much aligned with the idea of shared risk. They do not like seeing money given to actors who have not at least: 1) put in a lot of time and energy building a product OR; 2) spent some of their own capital to get their idea off the ground.

For example, when all the numerous providers kept asking for quarterly payments for RPC provision, Lucky Friday chose not to do that. We only put up one referendum on Kusama (before OpenGov was live on either chain) for a small amount (~11K USD). This was to help us offset the cost of buying our own servers, which cost well over six figures. We have largely provided these services for free until we were incorporated into the new RPC bounty, and we will likely ask for a one time payment for the duration for which we provided our services without asking for payment (which has been well over a year on both chains now). But even then, we are not going to ask for much, only for something that will help defray our costs. Bottom line: we don’t expect the treasury to pay for anything in full.

In terms of social reputation, most of the known actors are not the issue. It’s those who show up to our ecosystem that we’ve never heard of that are seemingly trying to bilk the treasury and DOT holders that is our primary concern.

I hope these answers help provide some additional clarity and context, @TheeWeb3Patriot :handshake:

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DrCAO, founder of AIWeb3 focusing on Chinese content creators and community building in Polkadot, would like to share my support to the Lucky Friday team, Phunky is really active in the eco and made a lot of contributions to the eco, I usually use the Lucky Friday RPC, it is super fast to connect! I like the social reputation part they proposed, we know the OpenGov is decentralized, but we should also understand the importance of reputation, a lot of proposals got NAY from community because we didn’t know who they are and what they have done or will do for the community, the treasury should support those who keep building on Polkadot!

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Lucky Friday is a great example of a good working DV.
Also, special thanks to Ryan, who is the most diplomatic person in the entire ecosystem. Despite any storms, he always responds with a smile to any necessary questions.

An interesting feature (and value!) of Lucky Friday is the tg chat, where you can always find all the active participants of the ecosystem.

tnx frens!