Governance participation is an issue and thanks to Delegated Voting created by the W3F we in most cases can as an ecosystem make the right decisions. A good mix of DAOs with enough weight allows this to happen, I believe that DAOs should have “skin in the game” and prove themselves as good contributors to the ecosystem and its well being. I do believe that the Giotto factor needed a full frontal solution, and it seems that “attitude” applied to all project looking for some kind of funding is counter productive to us welcoming creativity and discovery of novel ideas worth pursuing. We are still maturing on that front.
I do believe that Governance participation is a high ask for anyone new coming to the ecosystem given the stakes, even for someone with experience from voting since Referendum #1. This is an issue that needs to be resolved with a new approach, one that can also deal with Inflation and how we do funding of projects.
The following content is a mix of ideas that I have been playing around with, probably too hard to implement at this point due to OpenGov, nevertheless worth hashing it here to contribute in some ways to the conversation.
1- As proof of stake, in the process of staking your assets instead of staking them with a series of Validators why don’t we make the system gives us choices to support Initiatives with clear deliverables as in DAOs with specific diverse Focuses (this can be anything that comes to your mind). The user funds will get the returns from staking, which in return supports the selected DAOs by way of the validator fees. This will bring many different points of views on the referenda themselves, having a multidisciplinary groups, is a Bonus and participation can be expected to increase many times over, the DAOs have to have readymade tooling to achieve this, and today we do have some working well.
2- Decentralizing the DevOps/Validation functions. We will need to decentralized the way that the Validators model works today. Today DevOps run the show on the infrastructure side that should change so DAOs will benefit from running Validation function, but we can not assume that the DAOs will have full time DevOps to maintain their validator network of 2 or 3 Nodes. The DAOs will have a contractual obligation to pay for the Infrastructure necessary (data centres) to run the operation, DAOs should also cover the Operators (devops) of their systems (there are many ways this can be done to achieve same result and even improve the latency that takes to do an upgrade to the node software, networkwide)
3- Inflation, The Staking Rules need to change, we can not have one blanket rule for all staked funds. What can work well is “returns set in a stair manner,” the longer you are committing your funds to stay locked in the network, the higher the returns you will have, the shorter time you are able to stake/lock them, the lower your returns will be. This rules will create the financial incentives to choose from high yield, to minimum yields for your funds, creating better incentives for long term investment and way less incentives for speculators of the coins, still being able to fast unstake your coins would be a plus where conditions will also apply.
Whales, DAOs holding a considerable weight in voting will always be a problem, and possibly a mix of Quadratic and weighted voting would alleviate some of those issues we do have today until we achieve better distribution within the ecosystem.
Hope this triggers more ideas within the community of how we can change and improve the systems already in place.