Evolving Occam.fi’s Governance
OCC Stake-based Voting, OIPs, and the Occam Forum
It’s the start of a new week at Occam, and the start of yet another step towards true decentralization. Your feedback helps shape our protocol, but hosting these discussions exclusively on Telegram has made it difficult to keep track of all the great ideas we see from our community.
That’s why last week, we launched the Occam Forum, and rolled out the first version of the Occam Improvement Proposals (OIPs). This week, we’re bringing you stake-based voting, ensuring that not only does $OCC retain a key role in our ecosystem through a tangible governance utility, but also ensuring that your voice as a token holder is heard.
Before we get started, we want to make it clear that OIPs and stake-based voting is currently in beta, we are trialling out what works well and what doesn’t. Everything in this article may be subject to change as we learn alongside our community what makes a great governance system. If you have a suggestion on what we could improve… make an OIP!
This is also a good time to remind every user to create a forum account and follow us on Snapshot. If you propose something in Telegram, please be aware that we will not be able to act on it unless it’s written into a formal proposal, so make your voice heard and sign up to our forum here!
Telegram is a place for informal chats about our news, and the Occam Forum is the new destination for discussions about Occam’s future. Let’s discover how you can participate.
OIPs and Stake-based voting through Snapshot
We’re standing on the shoulders of giants to make our stake-based voting possible. Like UniSwap, SushiSwap, BadgerDAO, GitCoin, and many others, we’re using Snapshot to power our voting mechanisms.
Snapshot is an off-chain, gasless, multi-governance community voting dashboard. Although it’s off-chain, Snapshot links to user’s MetaMask to ensure they are actually stakeholders in our ecosystem (i.e. $OCC staking participants) and enables stake-weighted voting. It’s gasless, which means users don’t need to spend funds to participate in governance — you simply need to sign transactions from the wallet that you stake OCC from.
How do OIPs make it to Snapshot?
Once an OIP reaches a quorum through our forum, it can move to stake-based voting. Currently, proposals require 50 likes/votes to qualify for stake-based voting, but this will increase in the future once we have more active users on the forum to stay proportionally representative. We give a guide on how to write an OIP here.
In the screenshot below, we highlight in red the button you need to click to cast your initial vote on an OIP in the forum. You must have a Occam Forum account to do this.
Countering an active OIP
If you disagree with an OIP, please do not make a separate proposal to counter the original OIP. Instead, comment in the OIP thread with your counter-argument and rationale. Please note — just like the OIP itself, counter-arguments must be well formed and provide adequate rationale. You cannot simply state that you disagree with a proposal without providing a reason why.
If other users agree with your counter-argument, they may vote on your comment in the same way as they would on the original OIP. Counter-arguments must reach a quorum of 30 votes before the parent OIP reaches its quorum of 50 votes to be considered. If the parent OIP reaches quorum first, it will be assumed that it is the will of the majority and it will be moved to stake-based voting without considering the counter-argument.
Some OIPs may require more complicated decisions than a simple Y/N answer. On these OIPs, there will be multiple options to choose from, and any counter-arguments must reach a quorum to be considered before the voting window closes.
OIP acceptance and rejection
The Occam DAO reserves the right to reject OIPs if they do not fulfil the below criteria. So, how do you know if your OIP is accepted for voting or not? That’s easy. If your OIP is accepted, it will be left open on the forum. We moderate active OIPs once per day.
On the other hand, if your OIP is rejected, we will lock the proposal and post a reason for rejection in the thread (shown in the screenshot below).
Rules and reasons an OIP may be rejected include:
- Formatted incorrectly, please follow the OIP formatting guidelines here,
- Your OIP is not numbered clearly in its title,
- Not a clear proposal or not enough rationale given,
- The proposal is totally impossible or irrelevant,
- The proposal has already proposed and another similar OIP is still open,
- The OIP topic has already been rejected via stake-based voting,
- The OIP topic has already been passed via stake-based voting,
- The OIP topic is already being put into action by the Occam.fi core team,
- Generally poor quality proposals.
We will always quote the reason for rejection, and a possible resolution, in our rejection response. See the screenshot below. The thread will be closed once an OIP has been rejected.
We must maintain exacting standards for OIPs as they will come to define our protocol and your experience using our products. This is not an attempt to limit discussion, but to ensure it is targeted and actionable. Do not be disheartened if your OIP is rejected, we welcome all resubmissions, but we must maintain quality.
Voting via Snapshot
Once an OIP has reached it’s quorum it is escalated by the Occam team to stake-based voting via Snapshot. Let’s explore how you can vote on OIPs on Snapshot. First, go to Occam.fi’s Snapshot portal here.
Connect your MetaMask using the ‘Connect Wallet’ button in the top right hand corner and clicking ‘MetaMask’ on the lightbox which appears, as shown below. If you’re signed-in to MetaMask, you will be prompted to sign a transaction that approves your address to use Snapshot.
You will need to connect the MetaMask address that you stake OCC from. You must have OCC staked — simply holding OCC does not make you eligible to vote.
Once your wallet is connected, click onto the OIP you want to vote on. In the example shown below, there is just one active OIP: ‘OIP #01 — Remove Cool Off for Ardana’. In this interface, you will see more details about the OIP, as well as a proposal status (active/closed), author, start date, end date, and current results.
Scroll down to ‘Cast your vote’. You will see all available options here. Think carefully about your vote, you cannot change your vote once it has been cast. Select your choice and click ‘Vote’.
A lightbox will appear showing you your selected vote and your voting power. It will prompt you to click ‘Vote’, at which point your vote is cast and final — please double check that you have made the right selection. If the ‘Vote’ button is greyed out, it’s likely that you don’t have any $OCC on stake and your voting power will show as zero.
Once you are absolutely sure of your decision, click vote, and sign the MetaMask transaction. Your vote is now cast. There is no further action required.
Once votes are concluded and a decision is reached, the OIP will be closed both in Snapshot and the Occam Forum, and after a period of time moved to the archive.
What happens once a vote is passed?
Once a vote is passed, the relevant changes will be made at a product or protocol level. The time in which changes take place will depend on current development milestones and the availability of relevant Occam.fi core team members. Once changes are made they will be communicated in the forum on the original OIP thread.
Here, we want to make an important point — if an OIP reaches a quorum and is voted through via stake-based voting, it is considered the will of the majority. This is a community led and decentralized process. Occam will not revert changes that have been passed by community consensus unless a new proposal and successful vote opts to revert a passed OIP.
If you disagree with the outcome of a vote, feel free to create a new OIP in counter-argument, but please be aware that neither our core team nor community managers will be able to influence community-led voting mechanisms — this is true decentralization in action.
In other words, Telegram is not the place to dispute or vent frustration at passed votes that have been passed democratically. Please accept the outcome of votes gracefully and remember it is a community-led process. You may wish to keep your voting preferences private.
In the rare event that we encounter a hung vote, for example no consensus is reached or votes are distributed equally among the available voting options, we will either 1) reiterate and revert the OIP to reflect raised community feedback, 2) make the decision at a advisory and DAO level after weighing all options for time-sensitive and critical decisions.
That’s all there is to voting on an Occam Improvement Proposal. Remember — this is an evolving process and your feedback is welcomed. Now all that’s left for you to do is sign up to our forum here, and sign up to our Snapshot here!
Follow Occam.fi’s social media channels to stay up to date with the latest news:
- Telegram official community : https://t.me/occamfi_com
- Telegram announcements : https://t.me/occamfi
- Medium : https://medium.com/occam-finance/occamx/home
- Twitter : https://twitter.com/occamDEX
- Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/r/OccamFi
- Discord: https://discord.gg/9eQbAkPj7K
- Occam Forum: https://forum.occam.fi/
