Programmatic Tooling Rewards: A Proposal for Sustainable Governance Infrastructure

🗳️ Meta-Governance
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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).

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:fire:First of all, this is an incredibly interesting idea:fire:

Now that the service provider vote has finished I’m very interested in looking at alternative structures for service providers that didn’t make the vote (and new ones!) to continue to contribute to ENS and be rewarded.

This type of programmatic rewards structure would mean DAO tools (for the first time in history) have a chance to earn rewards/revenue based on the usage of these tools within a given DAO. There are lots of ideas to think about; How rewards are calculated, how much should they be, can the mechanism be attacked, etc.

But overall considering ~4 of the service provider asks were from DAO interface/tooling teams and none of them received funding (yet clearly we still need these interfaces) starting a program like this makes total sense.

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@dennison, this is a really interesting proposal.

Not as a sleight, but rather a curiosity - I am interested to understand your first hand experience from the Tally POV. Tally is obviously a great product, but my perception has been that Tally has been less active within the ENS ecosystem than some other providers. Why is this? Misaligned incentives?

This is compelling. There is nuance in how these things are measured, but at a high level if you build a good product that people use, you get paid.

The @blockful proposal included building out a full governance interface, but interface redundancy and promoting innovation are important.

This proposal seems like metric-based retroactive funding. I am all for it.

Possibly short notice for this week, but it might be worth jumping on the Metagov call (on Tuesdays) to discuss this: 🏛️📞 MetaGov Working Group – 2025 Meetings: Tuesdays at 2pm UTC (Currently 10:00 am ET) - #35 by cap

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I like the idea from the DAO’s perspective. But I worry that as retroactive funding, and depending as it does on metrics the provider cannot guarantee (and are affected by factors out of their control such as the number of proposals the DAO puts through), it may still be too uncertain as a funding stream.

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Maybe this is something to be discussed within Public Goods working group? I worry that adding extra category outside of WG budget inflates the overall spending when we already expanded the budget with labs’s L2 budget as well as SPP2.

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Yes, that is a fair concern, although as retroactive funding goes, it’s certainly more open and fair. You’re right the uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it has the advantage that it mimics the open market closer, in that if people like what you’re buying, you’re able to sell it.

I think a nice part here is we remove the politics and delegate bandwidth from the funding streams. Possibly to help deal with the uncertainty there can be some base line initial payment to registered participants. Still in ideation phase!

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Hey alls. New to this forum, but I’m sure some of you have seen me around.

Just throwing my 2cents here:

I like the idea of this kind of funding model for more of a “funding operational costs of decentralized tooling currently being used”. What I mean by that is this is a good mechanism for streaming funds to existing projects to help cover operational costs.

What this doesn’t do, however, is incentivize newer teams to innovate. It is a perfect recipe for creating an entrenched core of product(s) that are able to block out any new developments by having a strong user-base that will not try out new things that have a more challenging UX on first iterations. Or give one or more teams the resources to simply copy any innovations from other teams that aren’t able to iterate on UX as quickly after developing a new idea to test out.

So I would suggest considering two budgets and at least 2 mechanisms:

  • Operational budget to keep the existing teams funded based on how much usage they are gathering for their product.

  • Innovation budget that has much more strict goals and criteria that evens the playing field between entrenched providers and new innovators. Existing teams can access these funds by building towards innovative new features that the DAO needs, but other providers do not have to fight against the clout that the existing user-base gives the incumbent teams.

The goal of this system should always be to prevent entrenchment while maximizing for innovation. Worst case scenario would be one single provider slowing rising to the top and creating a moat around ENS DAO that they control.

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Hey Trigs, I talked about this in the ENS Delegates call and gave concrete examples of the opposite being true.

Agora started when Tally and Aragon where the dominate tools and they found a niche and were able to succeed. Lighthouse is a new tool that is making significant inroads with a stellar product.

Experience shows that the larger the org is the more opportunity there is for smaller teams to start from a niche and build a base of support and grow. So in practice I would say the opposite has proven to be true.

That said, I’m totally supportive of tools that allow for newer teams to enter as well. In general though there are plenty of grant programs that exist to help new teams build tools. So I think it would be up to the ENS DAO to figure out if they think thats part of their scope as well. But I’m supportive of both!

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Thank you @dennison for this proposal — it’s definitely a forward-looking step toward supporting the governance infrastructure that underpins healthy DAOs. I think the way to do it (after more iteration ofc) would be a pilot. Experimentation is good!

To test the model, ENS could run a six month pilot with a fixed reward pool (tbd amount of ENS) distributed proportionally based on tooling usage. Eligible participants tooling providers that support ENS DAO functions would be included, but this would be assuming transparent reporting and adherence to integrity guidelines (which need fleshing out).

Some guardrails for fairness could discourage gaming (some already mentioned):

  • Anti-sybil rules: Voting power–weighted metrics help with spam
  • No incentives for usage: Rewards forfeited if users are paid to interact
  • Transparency: Open dashboards + provider submitted reports
  • (maybe) Simple anti abuse committee: Community elected or delegate appointed reviewers (may add complexity)

This helps balance openness with integrity—important for a shared public good like governance infra.

Post-pilot, ENS can review:

  • Impact: Were higher use tools also higher-impact?
  • Fairness: Did new players get a fair shot?
  • Sustainability: Can this scale long-term without bloating budgets?

A feedback loop could then iterate on weights, guardrails, and even introduce opt-in peer reviews or user ratings down the line.

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