Now it’s up to us in the Polkadot community to make it a success.
Many have DOT tokens but not many vote using the power of those tokens. Knowledge gaps, dismissal of personal holding’s impact, and time constraints contribute to the history of low governance participation.
One of the best ways to jump-start your participation and OpenGov’s success is delegating your votes to an expert with the knowledge, reputation, and aggregated voting power to keep the Polkadot network on a wise path. “We all benefit when we delegate responsibilities to those who do them best (and taking them away when they fail or lose touch)" - @ChrawnnaCorp (…)
Today you can find a few apps that will help you do just that on OpenGov:
For Android and iOS mobile users, you can download and delegate through the Nova app. They combine their registry of delegates with stats to help you decide between candidates and tracks all from within the wallet app they provide.
For Web users on Kusama, you can connect your Wallet with Polkassembly’s Delegation Dashboard for Kusama, pick tracks, select your delegates, and share voting power with full command over conviction and value settings at each step.
For those unfamiliar with governance, you can try delegation.polkadot.network released today by @jeluard , @hamid , and @dnlklmn of Parity Technologies. It is designed to share and unshare voting power quickly and fluidly to encourage DOT holders to ‘learn the ropes’ and vote when they like. You can watch the Technical Explainer here.
No matter what you choose - you can’t lose. These apps make it easy to delegate and participate right away. Try them out and share your thoughts.
I think its worth people being educated as to what delegation really means.
This clearly isn’t going to be forthcoming from W3F or Parity - who i really think owe a greater duty of care to contributors than they are currently showing, so here we are.
When you make on-chain agreements, sure, things can just execute automatically, but this does not mean you escape from off-chain laws.
When you delegate, you inherit the voting power of others (who are likely all in different jurisdictions, have different sources of income and values) - this means you gain weight in your on-chain powers, but also open yourself up to inheriting their off-chain legal liabilities.
Many of the people here are part of big orgs with limited liabilities and the ability to pay lawyers, or pay fines, many do not - this is for those people.
Yes delegation opens up a simple way to ‘fix’ low participation on-chain governance and to send votes towards ‘experts’, but it opens up issues elsewhere that people should be made aware of before they do so.
These learnings have come as we’ve tried to pick our way through some of the basic assumptions around the ecosystem in its current state, to ensure community members, contributors and those we bring in, don’t find themselves in legal and compliance peril at a later date.
It’s likely we won’t see either Parity members nor W3F delegate their votes openly for these reasons. This should be a cause for concern.
Would be great to here from W3F/Parity lawyers on this point.
I’m not a lawyer, but I know the world is made up of many jurisdictions and legal/regulatory regimes–are you referring to a specific policy statement, law, or ruling in any particular jurisdiction, and is there somewhere we can go to examine it ourselves and/or run it by our counsel?
In very simple terms delegation means when you receive or delegate votes, you take on a set on unknown legal liabilities, tax and compliance.
Are you personally doing KYC/AML on these accounts? Probably not…
Talk to any (non crypto) lawyer experienced in KYC/AML regulations and ask them about delegations.
The challenge will be you might be in one jurisdiction - say France, but you receive delegations from say, the US. Or maybe you’re in the UK, and you delegate votes to a ‘verified on-chain identity’ who happens to be in North Korea. You can see where it gets to become a real mess…
Having already been on the receiving end of VAT issues here in the UK VAT on Services in/to the ecosystem based on on-chain services, I am counselling you to be careful. The implications are real.