Programmatic Tooling Rewards: A Proposal for Sustainable Governance Infrastructure
As DAOs like ENS continue to mature, the expectations placed on governance tooling have increased. Delegates expect better interfaces, more accessible voting flows, improved delegation experiences, and deeper integrations. Tooling providers like Tally, Agora, and others are stepping up to meet those needs, often building and shipping based directly on community feedback.
However, the current funding model makes this difficult to sustain.
Tooling teams today must rely on individual proposals or grants, a process that is time-consuming, political, and often uncertain. This makes it harder to plan ahead, prioritize features for specific communities, or build long-term roadmaps with confidence. It also creates barriers for new teams entering the space, who may have great ideas but lack the political capital to get funded.
A New Model: Programmatic Tooling Rewards
I’d like to propose a new approach: Programmatic Tooling Rewards a fixed annual budget set aside by the DAO to reward governance tools based on usage.
Instead of approving individual grants or proposals, the DAO would allocate a single budget for the year. Tooling providers would receive a share of this budget proportionally, based on measurable usage metrics like:
- Voting activity through their interfaces (tracked via signature)
- Proposal creation or delegate actions
- Other meaningful interactions over time
The key benefits:
- Market-driven rewards: Tools are rewarded based on real use by tokenholders and delegates.
- No politics, no bottlenecks: The DAO doesn’t need to approve or deny each tool, it only needs to allocate a pool and let usage speak.
- Open ecosystem: New tools can enter the space and earn rewards without needing a governance proposal.
- Transparent feedback loop: Providers know what’s working, and DAOs know what tools are delivering value.
Implementation Path
To start the system doesn’t require any contract changes. Voting signatures can already be attributed to specific frontends. (When using Vote With Signature) Data can be submitted and verified manually (for example for off-chain interactions), through lightweight scripts, or optionally via ZK proofs if needed. The system can be simple to start and grow more programatic as needs evolve.
Proposal creation and similar lower-frequency actions can still be tracked manually, or incorporated later.
We can also establish simple guardrails to prevent abuse — for instance, disallowing rewards tied to usage incentives or paid voting schemes. Providers can make pledges against this, or a committee can review abuse. The obvious concern would be providers paying for usage, but in rewards are tied to votes based on voting power this is unlikely to be a meaningful issue. That said, we can prevent it easilly.
Governance tooling is a shared public good, but public goods still need sustainable support.
This model allows ENS to reward impact, promote innovation, and reduce friction all while supporting the tools that make decentralized governance possible.
Would love to hear thoughts and feedback from the community. (Note: the genesis of this idea came from a conversation with Rafa the builder).
First of all, this is an incredibly interesting idea