A few years ago, Coinbase received a significant amount of ENS delegations, which are currently stored on a hard-to-access wallet at Coinbase. This situation has resulted in a substantial portion of the votable supply being effectively locked and unused. Increasing the votable supply to active delegates would enhance governance participation, improve decision-making, and ensure that the DAO benefits from a broader, more representative set of voices. Coinbase has expressed interest in freeing up this delegation to better support ENS governance.
Potential Solutions
We’re exploring two potential paths forward:
Upgrade the Governor
Using Agora, we could enable a redelegation strategy through an upgrade to the ENS Governor contract, allowing for more flexible delegation handling.
Run a Delegate Race
We could collaborate with Coinbase to host a delegate race, with the goal of moving the locked delegation to a chosen winner who would actively contribute to ENS governance.
Why Agora?
Agora has extensive experience addressing similar challenges:
• Uniswap Delegate Race (2023): We successfully freed a large amount of locked and delegated a16z voting power through a community-driven delegate race.
• Governor Upgrades for Redelegation (2023): For Optimism, we upgraded their governance contracts to include redelegation features, enhancing the flexibility and usability of delegated voting power.
Next Steps
We have a key stakeholder at Coinbase who is open to collaboration on this initiative. I’ve mentioned this topic in previous meta-gov calls and wanted to bring it to the broader community for input and feedback before we dive deeper into the technical and strategic work.
Let’s discuss! Your thoughts, ideas, or concerns are very welcome
Thanks for sharing. This is really cool. I think ENS DAO always looks for new ways to diversify delegation, improve decentralization, bring more delegates, increase participation, and so on. This is definitely a step in the right direction. I would love to see some takes from Metagov stewards, as doing this would fall under their jurisdiction I believe.
Thanks for the mention @cap. This is something that has come up in several Meta-governance calls. Here’s the general context from the calls:
TL;DR: Meta-governance strongly supports increasing delegated vote count and involving more responsible stakeholders.
However, the proposed change would require specific modifications to our OZ governor contract, so we’ve been deliberately measured in our approach to ensure delegates can properly evaluate this potential change. This thread should provide a good opportunity for that discussion.
There have been several proposed changes to the ENS governor discussed over the last 12-18 months:
1. Adding an $ENS token bond as an optional alternative to the 100k $ENS requirement
Received initial pushback from delegates, though largely based on misunderstandings. Link to discussion
2. Increasing block delay between propose() and vote() functions
3. Adding implementation to enable Coinbase’s delegated token participation
This is what we’re discussing in this thread
4. Various routine maintenance/security items from OpenZeppelin
Specific items previously mentioned by @nick.eth on MG calls
Given that governor upgrades are sensitive operations that we need to minimize, we’ve tried to facilitate individual discussions of each proposed change to determine what should be included in the next upgrade.
This Coinbase delegation enhancement hasn’t yet had a chance for proper open discussion in the forum.
From my perspective as MG steward, I’d like to better understand:
The technical implementation specifics or contract changes required to enable this feature
Whether this solution has been successfully implemented on other governor contracts
What alternative solutions might exist for the Coinbase delegation issue, particularly any that don’t require governor modifications
Personally, while I support the outcome Kent is seeking, I want to understand any risks surfaces it would create before supporting the specific approach.
As always, thank you to @kent and the Agora team for the continued engagement.
How would this work? Without a governor upgrade, Coinbase would need to give the winner the ability to sign votes as the account people delegated to. Are they offering to do this in some manner?
We believe it’s important to make the governance community active with an approach like your proposal that contributes to activate effectively-locked tokens for delegations and increase meaningful participations in the governance activities. And the DAO can also make it contribute to its decentralization.
One comment: what do you think about the main KPI for the proposed delegate race? If the community thinks one of the important targets is to aim for more decentralization by running a race, we suppose it’s good to set a token hold amount limitation for its participants; for example, limiting participants with less than 100k VP delegated. The rule should be simple but effective to increase more decentralization.
Delegate races +1! Could we tailor it for ENS DAO? Perhaps instead of awarding a single winner, we could run some competition where the top 10 share from a prize pool of delegated ENS.
As 5pence.eth mentioned, there are a couple of items that should be addressed first that modify the governor, such as the bond mechanism. I think it would be a big W if that could be implemented first.
That’s right! It would still involve heavy co-ordination with Coinbase as someone would have to approve and sign a few transactions, but it would essentially free up the votable supply.
It would still need to go to 1 winner, given that the delegations are currently sent to 1 address.
Or, we wait until we have a partial delegation strategy and they could delegate that to 5 different addresses and then we could award 5 different “winners”.
At least in the base case, the tied up votable supply gets out into the wild, even into the hands of one “winning delegator”.
The main KPI for the delegate race would be delegate engagement. For example, if we advertised this delegate race and no one raised their hand to “enter to win” the delegation, that would be bad. If instead, we had 10-20 delegates who wanted to win the delegation that would be a win as it shows that getting an ENS delegation is something worth putting time and energy into.
That’s a great idea Marcus! It’s solving a slightly different problem but let me make sure we are clear on the details:
Idea #1: Coinbase delegation delegate race
Problem: Coinbase has delegations to 1 address and that address is nearly impossible for them to vote from given security / ops reasons.
Solution: We run an election / contest / race for someone to earn that delegation for a given amount of time (to be negotiated with Coinbase).
This frees up the votable supply and increases participation and security for ENS governance.
Idea #2: The people who don’t win the Coinbase still get some extra ENS voting power from the DAO
Problem: While we are doing this delegate race, it would be cool for not just one person to win.
Solution: For those that don’t win, say the other 4 or 9 people if we do top 5 or top 10 respectively, they receive additional ENS delegation from wallets that the Foundation setups up to reward their efforts during the delegate race.
Does that sound like a good idea to you @estmcmxci ?
Agora is super excited to get 1. , 2. and potentially 4. in the Proposal Bonb proposal that we are reworking with all of your help.
@nick.eth where I can learn more about 4., we will be using OZ for the audit of the Proposal Bond work if that passes the next vote, and I am speaking to them frequently as we are building out new versions of Agora and collabing on the Gov Working group. If you have a contact there I can work with or details let me know and maybe we do it all in 1 upgrade as we collaborate with @bendi / ScopeLift.
Can you clarify exactly what is being proposed? Is the current delegate a multisig, and they’re offering to transfer it? Are they offering to sign whatever the appointed delegate wants, on an ongoing basis? Or something else?
Transitive delegation isn’t a thing, so they can’t delegate their delegated votes to someone.
There are two issues here that I’m aware of:
The delay between submitting a proposal and the start of the voting period needs to be increased.
The GovernorPreventLateQuorum needs to be added to the new governor contract.
Ah, okay. So, the Coinbase wallet can delegate to only a single individual. What about using the Multidelegate contract? I don’t have much insight into this since I’m not part of that workstream, but I believe it’s coming soon.
Edit: Not sure if this actually applies, probably best to ask @nick.eth or the DRI.
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That sounds good, but maybe we should first consider how to get there—like completing the bond mechanism project and other maintenance tasks, such as increasing the block delay between proposal submission and the vote start, as well as other tasks mentioned by the Meta-Gov stewards in this thread. :]
