HOPR DAO Voting Games
The HOPR DAO governance system is designed to balance the needs of different types of community members. The three-phase system is designed not to exclude anyone, regardless of their level of knowledge, engagement or token holdings. We’ll be expanding on the first two points in future articles, but this week we want to explore the ways in which smaller token holders can balance accounts with high voting power, particularly in the context of quadratic voting. We’re running a series of simulated votes to help explain and demonstrate the power of QV. If you’re interested in participating, please register your interest here before 2pm CEST on Friday May 6th.
The games will run in three phases from May 9th-11th. Phases start and end at 5pm CEST. Participants will receive a HOPR Boost NFT and a share of up to 25,000 HOPR tokens.
Quadratic Voting and HOPR
When people talk about balance issues in crypto governance, they’re usually referring to token holdings. It’s generally agreed that large token holders (whales) shouldn’t be able to unduly influence vote outcomes. On the other hand, there should be rewards and incentives for holding more tokens. Quadratic voting is a promising approach to balance this: each additional token you own brings more voting power, but a little less than the previous token.
The power of QV is clear from our governance experiments. In the first experiment, which did NOT use QV, a single voter was able to dictate the outcome of the vote. This is less of a problem than it might seem, because the first two governance phases ensure that only proposals which have general community support can even reach a vote. In these forum phases token holdings are ignored so everyone is on a level playing field. Still, it’s obviously suboptimal for a single token holder to have so much influence.
In the second experiment, which did use QV, there’s a striking difference between the actual results and the results when remodelled using one token, one vote. Although the same proposal would have won in the DAI portion of the vote, the result would have been very close, with whale votes almost swaying things. Under QV, the voice of the community was heard much more clearly. For the HOPR token portion, using QV produced a different outcome entirely.
Unfortunately, analysis of our third DAO experiment suggests that many participants are not using QV to the fullest, particularly in combination with the weighted choice mechanism which allows voters to split their preference between multiple options. A large number of voters allocated 100% of their tokens to a single option, which massively dilutes voting power compared to splitting between options.
It’s also clear that the community has not always been able to successfully coordinate, allowing whales to swoop in later in the vote and strongly affect the outcome. We hope these voting games will provide a fun and thought-provoking introduction to the power of QV and the issues surrounding coordination in governance decisions.
DAO Voting Games
Anyone who is staking at least 100 HOPR tokens in Season 3 of the Staking Program can participate. You need to register your interest in this form by 2pm CEST on Friday 6th May. Eligible participants will be airdropped a new token, qvHOPR, which is non-transferrable and used only for this game. The airdrop will be to the same wallet that you stake HOPR from.
Participants will be randomly assigned to Team A or Team B.
- Members of Team A will each be airdropped 100 qvHOPR tokens
- Members of Team B will each be airdropped 10,000 qvHOPR tokens
There will also be a single account on Team C, which will receive 1,000,000 tokens. This account is the whale in this experiment and will be controlled by a member of the HOPR team.
Once the airdrop is live, check your qvHOPR token balance to find out whether you’re on Team A or Team B. You can add the qvHOPR token to your MetaMask or other wallet using the following details:
Token Name: qvHOPR
Chain: Gnosis Chain (xDAI)
Contract Address: 0xCE3E729264ec6d2C08B12F87E340752d046E306A
Decimals: 18
Remember to set your wallet to Gnosis Chain. The token is non-transferrable and Snapshot does not need gas, so you won’t need any xDAI to participate.
The games will proceed in three phases. Each day, connect to the Snapshot page for the voting games and follow the instructions.
Phase 1: Explanation
The first phase will have basic scenarios demonstrating how Snapshot voting and quadratic voting work.
Phase 2: Coordination
The challenges in the second phase will require users to coordinate to hit particular conditions. You might need to make a particular option reach a certain vote threshold, or work with your Team to make a particular option win.
Phase 3: Competition
In the final phase, you’ll see the power of quadratic voting to balance the power of whales. Teams A and B will work together to thwart Team C. You’ll see how it’s possible to stop Team C from controlling the vote, even though this single account holds more tokens than all the rest of the participants combined.
Rewards
Every participant will receive a HOPR Boost NFT. The more phases you successfully complete, the higher the rank of NFT you’ll receive.
In addition, there’s a 25,000 HOPR token prize pool. Each challenge will have a token prize attached. The prize will be awarded if the victory conditions are met. In the early phases this is just as simple as following the instructions, but in later phases everyone will need to work together to unlock the prize.
We hope this will be an instructive and entertaining look at the power of quadratic voting which will feed back into future governance experiments.
Remember to register your interest in this form to be eligible to participate. Then follow us on Twitter and Telegram to stay up to date with the phases of the challenge. The NFTs and rewards will be distributed next week once the challenge is complete.
Sebastian Bürgel
HOPR Founder
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Testnet: https://network.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hoprnet
Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Github: https://github.com/hoprnet
