How and why to use delegation

A short description of Tokenvote’s delegation feature and how to take advantage of it.

TLDR: Use our delegation functionality to delegate the voting power of your tokens to a hot-wallet. This will protect your tokens and make using Tokenvote about as easy as you could ask for.

Any crypto user worth their salt will agree that the safest way to store crypto assets is offline, either in a hardware wallet, or other method for cold storage like a paper wallet. While these methods for storage are certainly best practice, they posed a significant challenge for us when we were designing Tokenvote.

For users to cast a vote or support a petition they need to be able to make a transaction from the wallet holding the tokens relevant to that particular proposal. I.e. if you’re voting on a Swarm Fund proposal, you need to make the relevant transaction from your wallet with Swarm Fund tokens in it. For users who’s tokens live in a MetaMask wallet, this is really easy to do in as little as 2 clicks. MetaMask is by far the easiest way to interact with anything in the Ethereum world that we’ve seen yet, but many hodlers understandably do not want to store their tokens in a hot wallet (especially if they have a lot).

Thankfully, Tokenvote offers you the best of both worlds — vote from your MetaMask wallet while your tokens are safely stowed on that Trezor buried under your mums back porch. On the Tokenvote ‘Account’ page, users will find a section titled ‘Delegation’, whose steps if followed, will allow a user to delegate voting authority from one wallet to another e.g. cold storage to MetaMask! The steps are:

1. Select whether you’d like to create a ‘Global’ (all the tokens in the wallet) or ‘Token’ (just one specific token) delegation. Selecting ‘Token’ will open option 1b and allow you to choose the token relevant to you.
2. Input the address you’d like to cast your votes from regularly (in this case, our MetaMask wallet), and hit ‘Generate Transaction’
3. Publish the transaction from the cold storage address currently holding those tokens (yes you might have to do a dig up and rebury, but only once!)

Once the transaction is verified, you’re good to go! If you selected Global, any tokens in the transaction-publishing wallet will now be recognised by Tokenvote when you cast a vote or support a petition. Note however, that you won’t see the balance appear in the UI as you would if the tokens were actually in your MetaMask wallet, but standby for this feature update in a later release.

If you’re asking yourself “Could I use this feature to delegate my token’s voting rights to another Ethereum user?” the answer is, absolutely! We’ve all got that friend who’s obsessed with that one token and spends 4 hours a day engaging with its content. Why not let them vote on your behalf so you can focus on something else? It’s a personal choice and we leave it totally up to you. If you ever need to reset your delegation, simply publish another transaction from the delegating wallet with its own address as the input.

Setting up delegation will allow you to regularly interact with Tokenvote, without the pain of drawing up your Ledger Nano S from the bottom of that well each time.

We hope you in enjoy it!