This RFC is based on changes made by BIP-300 and the AIP resulting from this AURA Temperature Check changed the way that voting works such that 100% of AURA’s vlAURA is always registered as either (yes, no or abstian). With 3+ million vlAURA locked, this means that the current quorum of 2 million votes will never fail to be met. Quroum has been rendered meaningless.
These changes are being made to restore the Quorum while making minimal changes to the intended voting dynamic.
Yes Based Quorum
This BIP proposes quorum is moved from counting total votes, to requiring a minimum number of Yes votes as well as a majority of Yes votes for governance to pass. As the current quorum is 2 million votes, a new Quorum of 1 million Yes(affirmiative) votes should have the same intended effect, without large wrapper abstaination resulting in the passage BIPs that do not have a quorum of supporting interest.
Specification
Going forward the votes counted towards Quorum will be determined by adding the total number of affirmitive votes. The quorum will changed from 2 million votes in any direction, to 1 million Yes votes.
Agree with @franklin’s comment. Abstentions traditionally count when it comes to determining if a quorum has been satisfied.
RE: the above, in addition to the “Abstain” option (assuming it has meaning), we may want to change the voting options a bit to something like, (1) “Yes, let’s do it” and “No, this is not the way,” or (2) option voting for different results, similar to what we saw with BIP-161 (Close the Year 2 Funding Gap - Options A, B, and C along with “More discussion is needed”) and BIP-57b (2% v.5% Gauge Framework cap options).
If a change like this is made, the second bullet of the structure would have to also be adjusted accordingly.
Let’s say that I am a vlAURA voter, and I want to not vote for something. If I don’t vote on the Aura snapshot, then my votes are just lumped in with everyone else.
If I explicitly wish to note vote for for a matter, I can indicate that by choosing abstain. Then those votes will not be counted towards Quorum.
Make sense?
Are you looking to add 4 options? I don’t think this needs to be so complicated, but if there are voters who also wish to abstain and help Quorum, but not vote in a direction we can deal with it. The foundation members said it was fine and they can just stay out of the things they shouldn’t take a position on.
Putting aside the abstention issue for the moment, for the sake of clarity and consistency between this BIP and BIP-163, I would just incorporate the current 3 options referenced in BIP-163 [+ abstain if it goes that way] into the “Structure of Snapshots” part of this post, so the first bullet would read:
Going forward, all Snapshot votes shall be posted as Weighted Voting with Options consistent with BIP-163 [+ abstain if this is modified]
And just so we are clear, my use of brackets is to indicate that the text between the brackets isn’t included in the current proposed language, unless this BIP winds up being changed to incorporate abstentions for quorum purposes in the future.
Abstain means that you do not want your share of the vote to be used to count towards quorum nor that you want to vote in any direction. This makes it possible to indicate as such.
BIP-163 already has Abstain in it. It was just not clear how Abstain was handled, and precident so far has been to count it towards the quorum. This BIP changes that. Am I missing something?
If the Aura Delegate(s) wants the ability to abstain but push quorum we can figure that out by adding a 4th option.
Yes, let's do it.
No, this is not the way.
Abstain - with quorum support
Abstain - without quorum support
It just seems quite complex. We want to make governance accessible and understandable and transparent.
Apologies - I didn’t reread the whole thing today. It’s a great proposal but is a lot of text. I still recommend incorporating BIP-163 by reference for the sake of consistency. If modifications are needed then they can be made by doing something like," The Options are set forth in BIP-163, except ‘xzy…’"
I agree. That’s why it seems odd to me to have abstain as an option without it counting towards quorum. That in and of itself is already confusing to me.
Would incorporate it here too. Otherwise, the question of whether there is flexibility to vote with other options besides yes, no, abstain, becomes confusing. Per BIP-163:
Yes, just a little bit/baby steps
We could do 500=600k yes to meet the quorum as well
We just saw that if Solarcurve actually votes with his Aura, he can get more than half way there on his own. In the end voters have to be less lazy, and seem to show up when it really matters, and 750k requires less than 10% of the total veBAL electorate (almost all of whom vote from time to time for emissions) to pass.
At best we can get our voters more involved, and move back to 1 million yes votes. Was thinking about adding to this BIP or another BIP, some guidance (social) requiring DAOs and wrappers to actively participate in governance most of the time or delegate to someone who does. This is probably the easiest group to get engaged.
Disagree with capping as well, and hardly enforceable. Maybe a little clean-up and better organization on Discourse to remove the gauge voting from the landing page would help voters and delegates access the relevant BIPs?
I’m afraid that leaving Aura’s abstentions out of the [AIP-27] weighting might amplify a minority (or even a single voter). So I would support ignoring Abstention votes for quorum calculations.
That being said, as of today, four Maxis delegates together have ~1mio veBAL, so 750k is not good. In case Aura abstains, it will push too much decision-making power towards an entity with great influence in the community already. From that POV, 1,5mio looks better (just because I’m afraid we can’t reach 2mio). Ofc this has nothing to do with competence, but with the risks involved in perceived centralization in governance.
1: The maxis will remain active and vote on things that are important to them.
2: The quorum will remain as it is but redefined as 1 million yes votes.
3: Votes in which the delegates who contribute to balancer have to abstain for technical reasons will count their abstain votes towards the yes quorum.
We could even move to 1.25 million yes votes under those conditions it seems.
It would also be nice to see a bit of a marketing push from Aura to try to engage large holders to move their delegate to some other delegates and/or be a little more active voting directly on important/contentious governance matters.
it’s gonna take a big effort to reach 1.5M votes on everything. but I guess that’s kinda the intention here, to start making us work for every proposal. hope everyone with a delegation will remain active. the shareholders are unlocking most of their veBAL so maxi delegation will only decrease from here
I’d just do 1M quorum. if aura delegate wants to stop something makes no difference if quorum is 1M or 1.5M. only reason to do 1.5M is to increase the amount of work the people tryin to keep this place going have to do
Ok so i thought about it more. In the end, the goal here was first and foremost to fix our broken quorum, not change it.
I therefore suggest we do a simple BIP to change the quorum to at least 1 million YES votes to pass, simply restoring things to the way they were.
We can discuss a quorum increase later in a separate BIP.
I welcome anyone else who has participated in this conversation to propose a BIP with the parameters/style you see fit, but if no one does, I’ll post what I suggested above on Tuesday for action next week
I still recommend incorporating BIP-163 by reference for the sake of consistency. If modifications are needed then they can be made by doing something like," The Options are set forth in BIP-163, except ‘xzy…’"