HOPR Governance v0.7 Results and Analysis
The results are in for the seventh HOPR governance experiment!
The topic before the community was whether to invest in a newly incorporated HOPR holding company in exchange for equity.
The proposal passed almost unanimously, with a 96% vote share for YES!
The Proposal
This company, HOPR rise holding AG, will support the development of products on top of HOPR, including RPCh. Once established, the loan granted by the community will convert to equity which will be held by a new HOPR Community Trust. This Trust will be governed by token holders using the same processes as the HOPR governance experiments.
The precise valuation of the HOPR rise company will depend on upcoming investment rounds, but the contribution from this experiment will convert to shares representing between 10 and 24% of the voting rights.
This is an amazing development for the HOPR community and an exciting milestone in our governance. These kinds of opportunities are usually reserved for VCs and other traditional investors. We’re privileged to have been able to expand what’s possible in web3. You’ll be hearing a lot more about HOPR rise over the next months, as well as our planned evolution to the HOPR Governance system.
Participation
This was another high participation governance round for HOPR, with over 100 unique discussion participants and over 350 votes. You can see the full vote results on Snapshot: https://snapshot.org/#/vote.hopr.eth/proposal/0x40760c8440daf1fbfff80080752dd113010d80599ef96eb4af67594ae51f3c43
We built a new Snapshot voting strategy for this vote, which calculates your vote power quadratically at the strategy level rather than relying on the Snapshot frontend. (This explains why the vote totals on the proposal page are much lower than usual: all voting power is square rooted before submission to the frontend.)
The largest single vote had a vote power of 1.4k, while the smallest was just 1. Due to the quadratic formula, that high vote represents a token holding of almost 2 million HOPR tokens, while the 1 power vote is just one token. This shows the clear power of quadratic voting to ensure that smaller holders have a significant voice.
Rewards will be calculated and distributed soon.
Moderation Quirks
The HOPR governance discussions are a breeze to moderate: we have extremely constructive participation with almost no aggression, trolling or Sybiling. As is normal, we didn’t have to flag or delete any posts.
The worst thing we experience is a certain amount of noise from low content posts, usually expressing generic enthusiasm such as “Great!” or “I support this!”
But one thing has changed since the last experiment: the wide availability of AI tools like ChatGPT to help people write content. And the impact of this was very visible: there was a significant increase in posts which were obviously written using AI tools.
Some people used them deliberately and explicitly, which is cool. Others seemed to use them as language assistance, which we also support (we’re very aware that the English only restriction is a weakness in our governance). But there was a third group who seemed to use them to generate posts which would be high enough content not to get flagged as spam for the purpose of incentive calculations.
At the moment this is just an amusing quirk, but it’s something we’ll have to think about as these tools become more sophisticated and widespread. Indeed, our friends at MakerDAO have plans to explicitly integrate AI assistance to help with governance moderation and accessibility. There’s fertile ground to develop some really cool tools here, but we’ll need to do some more research.
What Next?
This proposal is a major milestone for HOPR on several fronts. First, the creation and investment in HOPR rise will provide huge support for the ongoing development of HOPR products. RPCh is the big story here, of course: its launch will place HOPR in rare company — one of the handful of self-sustained crypto projects generating its own sustainable revenue sources. And RPCh is just the first of many products to hit the HOPR ecosystem.
Second, the investment itself will give HOPR token holders unique access to a side of crypto usually reserved for VCs and conducted behind closed doors. Once the Community Trust is established and the loan converted to equity, token holders will be able to engage in governance using those shares just like any other shareholder. This is an awesome development that showcases the kind of amazing new things which are possible with web3.
Finally, the creation of HOPR rise and the HOPR Community Trust is the first step in the evolution of the HOPR governance system into something far more robust, dynamic and powerful. There’s been a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes to develop this, and we’re excited to finally be able to start sharing with you.
Sebastian Bürgel,
HOPR Founder
Website: https://www.hoprnet.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoprnet
Telegram: https://t.me/hoprnet
Discord: https://discord.gg/dEAWC4G
Forum: https://forum.hoprnet.org
Staking: https://stake.hoprnet.org
