Recently a proposal to allocate BAL for Tokemak Core bribing was posted and there was some controversy over how it went down.
For one, the circumstances of this vote required less than 24 hours between forum discussion and going to snapshot. For a proposal that uses 3-4% of our total treasury BAL, it seems incredibly irresponsible to push this vote to snapshot without more than a day of discussion on the forum.
For the safety of our treasury, I propose we require a minimum 1 week waiting time between a proposal being posted on the forum to when it’s put on snapshot. This ensures that we can work with the proposer to make sure the proposal is properly well defined and the community has enough time to discuss the implications of such a big decision.
Pros:
Ensures that any proposal that takes money from our treasury is properly discussed by the community
Makes sure that proposals have the chance to be added to in order to ensure it fits the criteria of a “well defined proposal”.
Cons:
Might slow down some proposals
Might make it infeasible to take part in certain strategies
Do we need these types of hard requirements? Sometimes the “urgency” for an opportunity can’t wait. The opportunity cost could backfire this demanding requirement, especially in defi where one week is one year IRL.
When we have proposals that are pushed through trying to use 3-4% of the treasury in less than 24h, I think some sort of requirement should be necessary when it comes to something as significant as our treasury. I’m very open to adjusting the period, I think 3 days is a decent middle ground. I am of the opinion that all proposals that result in funds being moved out of the treasury should undergo thorough community discussion. Someone could get on a flight an miss the entire discussion period as it exists currently.
They could miss the discussion but not the vote. I think implementing a mandatory discussion period as a knee-jerk reaction to a vote you strongly disagreed could be a bit short sighted. There is flexibility in being able to move to a vote quickly if required. It’s not totally clear to me what we gain by forcing a discussion period - we could discuss the CoRE3 bribe for weeks probably and everyone would not agree.
I don’t see how a 3 day waiting period would result in us missing many opportunities. I think proposals that deal with %'s of our treasury should be absolutely given time for people to discuss and digest prior to having to vote on it. The discussion is almost as important as the vote itself in my opinion. What if we has minimum requirements i.e. anything greater than 1% of the treasury needs to go through a 3 day waiting period prior to going to snapshot. It seems wild to me that I could watch the entire harry potter franchise in a row and wake up with a vote halfway concluded that drains 25% of our treasury. I see very little downside to ensuring enough time has passed for discussions to take place.
Are there any proposals in the past you think wouldn’t have passed with this proposal in place? (3 day waiting period, minimum 1% treasury value)
dunno what you mean exactly by wouldn’t have passed. I imagine every proposal involving the treasury was discussed for 3 days at least (left on the forum for 3 days prior to voting). obviously things like bribing CoRE3 where we were up against a very tight clock would be missed opportunities depending on your opinion of course.
Life goes on even if we miss those though. But that’s kinda my point - this rule doesn’t really stop anything bad from happening far as I can see. so it is cool to add it but I don’t see the point really.
To clarify, it stops proposals from going to snapshot with less than a day of discussion. While this does not stop everything, it prevents proposals with significant impact on our treasury from slipping through without much discussion. What is the point of posting on the forum if it can just go to snapshot instantly?
the point of posting on the forum is so it can be discussed. if a vote is posted to snapshot instantly, it’s likely veBAL voters will vote no because it hasn’t been discussed (even if it is a good proposal potentially). The more discussion that happens the more likely it is for the vote to pass. This in itself is enough of a motivation for a proposer to allow sufficient time for discussion imo and we do not need an official rule about this.
I see your perspective and think its a fair way to look at it. My one concern is that given the struggles we have had in hitting quorum with some votes, I feel like a lot of veBAL voters are voting yes to everything without reading it, but perhaps thats a consequence of decentralization. How do you feel about an increased quorum for treasury proposals?
Do you see any value in having multiple quorum tiers depending on the proposal type? i.e. gauges need 100k, treasury needs 150k, contract whitelisting needs 150k, etc…
Not trying to overly complicate things but it seems like a treasury proposal is orders of magnitude more impactful than a run of the mill gauge proposal. I want to make sure the quorum is high enough to protect our treasury but low enough to make sure gauge proposals will pass under normal circumstances. There are a lot of votes going on right now and voter fatigue is a thing.
Just for clarity, all I want to do is make sure our treasury is protected during these turbulent times. The bear market is here, our treasury is the cheese, and the rats are going to try come eat. We must make sure our community has the chance to thoroughly discuss proposals prior to voting, thats all I want, and whatever means to make sure that happens will ease my concerns.
I’m not sure about treasury proposals being orders of magnitude more important than gauges. I imagine many large veBAL voters have a strong financial incentive to prevent a gauge being added that stands to dilute whatever pool they happen to be farming or one that stands to earn a lot of BAL emissions but generate very little or zero revenue for veBAL.
but I don’t have a problem with tiers of quorum if the community feels that is valuable. We’d have to remove the static quorum on snapshot and manually write in the quorum for each vote (snapshot only allows one quorum setting). Personally I like the simplicity of one quorum for everything.