Governance 101
Control of the PoolTogether Protocol rests solely in the hands of the community holding the POOL tokens. This is a revolutionary new way of organizing and it takes some education. The post explains how governance works.
How Governance Works
Changes to the protocol are submitted as governance proposals. Anyone who either holds 10,000 POOL tokens (0.1% of total supply) OR has 10,000 POOL tokens delegated to them can submit a governance proposal. Once submitted governance proposals are voted on for five days. After five days, if the majority of votes are in favor AND at least 100,000 votes have been cast in favor, the proposal will pass. There is a two day “timelock” before the proposal is actually implemented.
Voting
PoolTogether governance exists on the Ethereum blockchain and is not limited to the Pooltogether.com website. There will be many different interfaces you can use to view governance proposals and vote. However, it will also be supported on the “Vote” tab of app.pooltogether.com. Whenever a proposal is live, you can cast a vote there.
Delegation
If you hold POOL tokens but don’t want to actively participate in governance you can delegate your voting power to others. This action keeps the POOL tokens in your wallet but allows someone else to vote for you.
If you’d like to have more voting power, you can announce yourself as a Delegate on Sybil.org and then others can delegate to you. This is a great way to have a bigger voice in governance.
What Proposals Do
A proposal can be submitted to do anything but practically speaking, proposals will likely center on a few main topics.
Controlling governance managed prize pools
The governance managed prize pools are the ones that display on app.pooltogether.com. Some parameters on these prize pools are very simple to change, for example, adjusting the number of weekly winners or changing the frequency with which prizes are distributed. We expect proposals will be submitted to adjust these parameters.
The community has expressed desires for new no loss prize pools with different asset types or special rules. A prize pool using Tether as the deposit token could be created or a prize pool that only lets wallets deposit a fixed maximum. Governance proposals can be submitted to create new governance managed prize pools with different variations
Deciding governance managed prize polls
All prize pools are generated by the prize pool builder. The prize pool builder is fully “permissionless” meaning anyone can use it to create a new prize pool or add a new yield source. However, a certain subset of prize pools are managed by governance and can receive POOL depositor rewards. Governance serves the function of deciding which prize pools should be governance managed and endorsed by the protocol.
Distributing the POOL token
The broadest category is controlling future distribution of the POOL token. As more people contribute to the protocol by depositing, referring deposits, developing the protocol and other activities governance should continue to distribute control of the protocol to these people. Practically this can look like a referral rewards program, a grants program, a deposit reward program, or direct transfers!
Submitting Proposals
This post serves as an overview on the types of proposals we expect to see. If you would like to submit a proposal, the best place to start is by discussing it in the governance forum and community Discord.
When it comes time to actually make the proposal, you can review the documentation and use the proposal creation interface (Launching February 23rd, 2021). You can create proposals without this interface but the interface helps make it more simple for non-technical people.
