Rewarding Active Participation in OpenGov: Stake & Vote Proposal

Governance
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This proposal aims to encourage active participation in Polkadot’s governance through OpenGov, while ensuring that participants also contribute to network security via staking.
We propose an annual incentive program of 1 million DOT to reward accounts that:

  • Participate regularly in OpenGov referenda
  • Maintain an active staking position
  • Demonstrate behavior aligned with the long-term health of the network

OpenGov is a major breakthrough in decentralized governance. However, despite its powerful design, participation remains too low, leaving space for a small group of active users to steer decisions on behalf of all.

Personally, I’ve helped onboard many friends to Polkadot. Some hold DOT, some even stake but none of them vote.

When I ask why, the answer is always the same:
“Why should I? What do I get out of it?”

And that’s the issue. Currently, the only real incentive to vote is indirect: ensuring that OpenGov decisions align with your vision for the future.

But let’s be honest:
If someone has no vision for the future, they won’t participate. And if they do, not participating is a mistake.

What we’re missing is a clear, measurable and visible incentive that fosters a real on-chain civic culture.

As Elinor Ostrom demonstrated in her groundbreaking work on commons governance, decentralized systems can work without centralized authority if local rules, trust mechanisms, and meaningful incentives are in place.

This proposal follows that logic.

We propose a one-year pilot program funded by the Treasury.

  • Proposed annual budget: 1 million DOT
  • Duration: 1 year

Eligibility criteria:

  • Participation rate ≥ 75% in eligible OpenGov referenda during the period
  • Active staking ≥ 100 DOT for at least 75% of the time
  • Balance above existential deposit (to filter out dormant or spam accounts)

Optional bonus weighting (to be refined with the community):

  • Diversity of tracks used (Root, Treasury, Fellowship, etc.)
  • Staking lock duration (longer = stronger commitment)
  • Engagement on Polkassembly (comments, analysis)

Eligible accounts will share the 1M DOT based on a weighted participation score:

score = participation_score × staking_score × track_diversity_score

  • Bots are not a problem: they need to hold DOT, stake, and vote all actions we want to encourage.
  • Passive holders will likely remain passive, but this gives semi-active users a real reason to get involved.
  • This mechanism helps activate a new layer of voters and creates a more robust participatory culture on-chain.

If the idea gains traction, I’m ready to collaborate on:

  • Clarifying implementation thresholds
  • Identifying on-chain data sources
  • Drafting a formal proposal for OpenGov submission

Maybe this proposal is garbage.

But I’m putting it out there to spark discussion and reflection.

Today I saw that over $600,000 was allocated over 6 months to fund the KAITO program, which rewards social media activity and impact mainly on X (Twitter). I don’t say that’s wrong.
But if we’re spending that much to reward visibility, maybe we should also be investing at least as much to reward on-chain, long-term participation in governance.

This proposal may not be perfect, but I believe it’s pointing in the right direction.

Let’s talk about it.

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Goodhart’s law says: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

There is a danger of creating bad incentives, if you simply reward someone for voting.

If you truly put in energy in evaluating proposals, that’s different, but I think above mentioned participation_score can’t measure that.

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Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I really appreciate it, and I totally agree that Goodhart’s Law is a real warning for anyone designing incentives.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Absolutely. That’s why I don’t believe raw vote count should be the only driver.

What I’m proposing is not a “per-vote” reward system. It’s a yearly treasury allocation, requested via OpenGov, which would sit unused until the end of a 12-month pilot period. At the end of that period, we evaluate who actually participated in governance, and distribute the DOT according to a weighted score.

This score would include:
• Participation rate (≥ 75%)
• Staking activity (DOT staked over time, lock duration optional)
• Balance over existential deposit
• Optional bonus factors like track diversity or Polkassembly engagement

I do think it’s fair to reward people who show up consistently (even minimally) because participation in governance is like voting in a democracy: it needs to be culturally normal and valued.

But I also fully agree that not all votes are equal, and we should explore better proxies for informed participation.
That’s why I’m including things like argumentation on Polkassembly as a potential signal imperfect, but a start.

I’m currently planning to simulate different outcomes using real voting data and staking activity to model how the DOT might be distributed. I think that exercise will help reveal what kind of behaviors this proposal would actually incentivize and where it might need tuning.

Again, thanks for pointing this out. I believe we can design better incentives, as long as we remain transparent, open to criticism, and ready to iterate.

Let’s keep pushing the conversation forward.

Just to be clear this might totally be a bad idea.

I mainly wanted to put something out there and see what kind of feedback and discussion it would trigger.

Also, the 1M DOT number is obviously exaggerated it would probably be much less in reality. The point was to frame a direction and open the door for refinement together.

Thanks again for the thoughtful replies so far.

And by the way in your view, what are the actual incentives today for someone to participate in OpenGov, aside from what I described in the initial post?

I’m genuinely curious, because if the only answer is “alignment with the future you hope for”, then we clearly need to do better.

And the worst part is voting actually has a cost, and for smaller holders, it’s not negligible.

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Yes, I think it’s not realistic that small token holders can partcipate in OpenGov. That’s why the DV program was created I guess, and it’s a good initiative.

If we can reach that point where there will be entities, to whom people delegate significant amount of tokens, I think at that point it is reasonable that they will vote in a way that it will be good for the network. Because large amount of money is at stake.

These entities, to whom people delegate, might receive compensation, for example, from those people, who they are representing. So, they get a salary for their work, and that salary comes from the people who are giving them power.

Obviously you can do this off-chain, but probably this should be implemented to the protocol. That Delegated Entities would get a salary.

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Thanks for joining the conversation it’s really cool, and you’re right, the DV program is clearly moving in the right direction.

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As we saw with the 1kV program, incentivized voting will just lead to automated voting, which isn’t actually helpful beyond artificially juicing voter participation numbers. Sheer turnout isn’t valuable in itself; what we must incentivize is engaged participation, and I’m still not sure how to do that in any way that scales. In fact, I’m tempted to see this plan as a non-solution for a non-problem.

We are at this point already. ChaosDAO, for instance, has nearly 6 million DOT in total voting power thanks to its delegatoors.

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Personally, I’m not entirely satisfied with the current situation even though things are evolving and some healthy discussions are emerging.

The reality is that participation remains low, and it would take many active entities to truly reduce the impact of this and shift my perception.

This is simply an observation and a line of thought aimed at encouraging both staking and voting, not just voting.

As for bots, personally, I’m fine with them.

They have no real advantage in my proposed approach, because they must stake and actively participate in governance.

Even having multiple accounts wouldn’t allow someone to earn more DOT, since the reward would be weighted, just like our votes are.

As I mentioned earlier, the only real incentive for the average user today is knowing that the protocol is moving in a direction they generally agree with.

But I often hear people around me say, “I just don’t have time.”

And as you pointed out, in that case, they should be able to delegate their voting power.

However, even that (delegation) comes with no real incentive either.

When I look at how airdrops work across the ecosystem and even our own case with the KAITO program.

I honestly don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to seriously explore and propose a well-thought-out incentive mechanism that encourages meaningful participation.

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I think a lot of people are willing to explore this, and it’s even been tried on Kusama already (as well as in the 1kV program I mentioned above). I might personally support a “well-thought-out incentive mechanism that encourages meaningful participation”–but so far I’ve just seen incentives that will yield meaningless participation.

This isn’t a knock on you, to be clear–it’s the issue with every plan put forth so far (and there have been many). So while I expect that a lot of people agree that more network participants involving themselves meaningfully in governance would be a net positive, we haven’t found a way to produce that outcome (yet?).

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I don’t see the problem that you are trying to solve here.

Please clearly formulate a problem that you are trying to address instead of immediately concluding that incentives are the answer.

Are you trying to improve the decision quality of OpenGov? How would you measure the impact of your approach?
Or is it something else? Just “low voting participation” is not a problem per-se.

Honest question: Why should they vote if they do not care? Just let them not vote, it is also a choice.

It is their choice, we should not coerce them to do anything.
Not everybody needs to vote.

But it should be easy enough for beginners, sure. It should be in every Polkadot Wallet app readily available.

This is how conviction voting works. People with most conviction and tokens get to decide. It is literally the design.
No amount of incentives will change this.

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I’m trying to avoid unnecessary spending or at least spend more intelligently, with meaningful incentives to support onchain activity.

Low voter turnout isn’t really the issue? Well, that’s what you say.
You should probably take a closer look at the Swiss governance model.

Who’s going to want to participate when doing so actually comes at a cost? Pretty much no one.

But sure, let’s just keep everything the same because apparently, everything’s fine. Spoiler: it’s not.

Oh, and by the way, interesting timing: Chainlink published this yesterday. Worth a read: Introducing Chainlink Rewards: Season Genesis | Chainlink Blog

Honestly, what I think now is that OpenGov has basically turned into a charity, one that some people take advantage of, and others see as an unlimited, bottomless well.

Here’s a reflection I recently shared on X. I’m not pretending to be the smartest person in the room far from it. My only goal is to improve the current situation and help spark a discussion on how we can evolve governance models toward something more sustainable and ideally consensus-driven.
https://x.com/Cyphertux/status/1919874144218280187

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I don’t buy your assumption that increased voter participation will cause Treasury spends (& other OpenGov votes?) to more closely align with your personal preferences, but more saliently you still haven’t offered a solution that will yield meaningful participation rather than perfunctory rewards farming.

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Not at all, I just want to encourage participation, it’s as simple as that. Aligning with my preferences? Not necessarily, why do you say that? It’s true that I haven’t suggested another incentive yet.

Anyway, it seems like everything’s going well on your end. If you want a plan, I’ll try to think it through on my own and come back here, because honestly, I get the feeling that since the system works for most people, someone like me pointing this out comes off as disruptive.

If we could encourage that, we’d have succeeded because as it stands, this system only benefits a small group who maintain each other’s positions, and of course, they’re all lining their pockets from every angle!

I don’t have a magic formula, but one thing is certain: reputation and identity have a role to play in my vision.

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Sorry if I misunderstood, but here’s my take:

  1. You think it will be good to have more governance participation
  2. When asked why, you said it’s because you are “trying to avoid unnecessary spending or at least spend more intelligently” (which, since it’s subjective, I interpret to mean you have your own preference for how spending should be done and you would like treasury spending to be more aligned with that preference).

With those premises, I suppose I assumed that you think incentivizing (1) will be conducive to (2). I could be misinterpreting, of course.

All that said, I don’t think your posts are disruptive at all and I’m always up for thinking about ways to improve governance. It seems to me though that we’re hitting the familiar roadblock: How to incentivize engaged, thoughtful voting without incentivizing reward-farming voting. I don’t have an answer, but I’ll be interested if someone arrives at one!

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The key is reputation and identity.

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Yeah, that’s sorta the way to get to a “democratic” one-person-one-vote system. I can’t know for sure, but I expect that tokenholders’ appetite for KYC is low, so it will have to be some kind of DID, maybe the “personhood” thing Gavin has hinted at in some interviews.

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Good proposition. Maybe an additional kind of view : When some people stake Dot they will be rewarded with a “special Dot” which could be use only to vote. So that they will use it, no choice they couldn’t use the token for another thing. And in addition to this we could reward people with Dot when they vote. The first proposition encourages people who stake to vote and the second closes the loop by giving rewards to people who vote.
What do you think?
Nice week-end Cyphertux

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@kbconsulting45 What you’re proposing seems to be a significant departure from what I initially understood. In your approach, it’s important to recognize that claiming your special DOT likely involves certain requirements, possibly including a form of KYC otherwise it might not be viable.

My original idea was more about providing retroactive rewards based on, say, the past twelve months of activity. This would be a way of telling the community: our DAO model is powerful and advanced, and those who actively contributed have been rewarded. It’s a bit like a community-driven bounty unannounced but meaningful which sends a positive and motivating signal.

There may not be a second reward drop like this in the future, but doing it now could shine a light on the ecosystem and indirectly encourage more participation in staking and OpenGov.

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I think it’s important to keep on discussing this (after all, OpenGov is still an evolving experiment and hopefully a future success story that will provide several blueprints for action for other large-scale decentralized organisations).

However, coming up with incentive without properly studying the agents and their motivations and obstacles is like shooting into a pitch-dark room and hoping you’ll hit a target. Any shedding of light on the agents will make that room a tad bit lighter and will make it easier to aim.

Firstly, it’s difficult to quantify this, but there is a positive side to non-voting. Holders thinking it works just fine and ‘they don’t need me’. People tend to show up when they’re angry and want a change.

Secondly, while I agree that incentivising voting in some way would make sense, if people show up for monetary incentive, they get extremely frustrated once the incentive doesn’t reflect their expectations. Incentive design that works with reputation building might make more sense in this context.

And last - proper UX research should take place before launching expensive programs. There are still many improvements that can be made to get OpenGov more user friendly and make it bit easier for people to vote. From sorting proposals by categories based on their area of impact (tech, marketing, research, etc), through fack-checking tools or ecosystem impact overviews.

Launching monetary incentives would not be relevant reflection of OpenGov’s functionality and could bring more harm than benefits at this point.

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