Proposal Title: New voting mechanisms and two-layer voting
Authors: Hec Perez
Date: 2022-08-23
How will your proposal, if activated, benefit BitDAO?
This proposal will improve BitDAO governance and allow it to scale — let alone many other DAOs. Moreover, it might become a profitable investment.
DAOs with frequent voting would benefit from new voting mechanisms. They could also introduce two-layer voting. This would allow members to build and use third-party voting mechanisms.
This is a discussion. If there is interest, a team will be formed to present a concrete proposal.
How to improve DAO governance
New voting mechanisms used in combination
Voting mechanisms could be used in any combination. For example, a DAO member could use the following mechanisms:
- A priority list
- A topic-based delegation
- An AI-assisted recommendation tool
Topic-based delegation system
People could delegate to different addresses depending on the topic, project, team, etc.
Priority list
If person A doesn’t vote but B does, vote as B regardless of C. But if B doesn’t vote either, do as C says.
People could create priority lists like Twitter lists. Everyone could then use them to delegate or be part of any voting mechanism. For example, someone could make a list of MIT professors — and use it in different DAOs.
AI-assisted recommendation
When a person is involved in many votings, an AI-assisted tool could be handy. It could vote for us depending on our past votes, the votes from people that we follow, etc.
We could receive a daily or weekly email with the AI votes so we can override them if we disagree.
As we will explain later, this would benefit from two-layer voting. That way we could use recommendation systems built by people we trust — even built by us.
Two-layer voting
A voting platform like Snapshot — or- or off-chain — could offer new voting mechanisms. Yet, members would be limited to the voting mechanisms that the platform or protocol supports.
What if DAO members could use third-party voting mechanisms — or build their own?
This would lead to more voting mechanisms. Also, you wouldn’t need to trust, for example, the AI recommendation system from above. You could build and host it yourself or use one from someone you trust.
How could a system like this work? By splitting votings into two layers and decoupling the following:
- The creation of proposals and definition of who can vote (1st-layer or L1 voting)
- The voting mechanism/s a member chooses to cast their vote (2nd-layer or L2 voting)
A DAO would use one 1st-layer voting platform or protocol. Then, people would use any number of 2nd-layer voting mechanisms — not defined by the DAO.
Implementation of two-layer voting
L1 would consist of the following:
- Creation of proposals to be voted.
- Definition of which eth addressees have voting power. E.g. addresses with at least N tokens of this concrete token.
- Definition of how the voting power is distributed. E.g. one vote per token, one vote per address, quadratic voting, etc.
Then, L2 would handle the voting of the proposals. This could be on- or off-chain.
In any case, any eth address — with or without voting rights — should be able to “vote”. If an eth address doesn’t have voting rights, its direct voting power will be zero. Yet, other addresses will be able to use their votes. They could delegate or use them in other voting mechanisms.
Some voting mechanisms could be smart contracts. Yet, others could be applications (providers hosted by someone). People would give their L2 voting providers permission to vote on their behalf for a period of time. But people could always vote directly to override their L2 voting providers.
If an eth address A delegates to B, A’s provider would subscribe to changes of B. That way, when B votes, A would also vote. Then, anyone else who cares about the vote from A would know. This would enable advanced voting mechanisms.