[Research] ENS-GR-01: A Ten-Proposal Governance Record for Delegation Incentives
Draft research, not an ENSIP or an implementation-ready specification.
This is an early mechanism proposal for discussion. I hope it can be challenged and improved by ENS Delegates, contributors, researchers, and technical participants.The full mechanism, definitions, formula, assumptions, and historical stress tests are available here:
ENS-GR-01 · A Ten-Proposal Governance Record
The current Delegation Incentives Program is valuable because it moves ENS Voting Power toward active governance participants. However, it mainly rewards a Holder who is delegated to an Active Delegate at distribution time, using time-weighted ENS balances. It does not clearly distinguish sustained personal voting, considered delegation, and delegation made only near the end of a round.
This research proposes a Ten-Proposal Governance Record. The goal is simple:
- full personal voting should have the highest unit return;
- delegating to a consistently active Delegate should still be valuable;
- a Holder should revisit an early delegation choice rather than delegate once and disengage;
- missed Delegate votes should reduce both the Delegate’s reward and the associated delegator reward;
- new participants should begin accruing from their first governance action, while fresh wallets should not immediately outperform mature participants.
All eligible records use one shared settlement rule based on three inputs: a behavioural coefficient, time-weighted Voting Power, and a smooth diminishing-return curve. The detailed formula is in the full article.
Personal voting
| Personal votes in the last 10 closed proposals | Reward coefficient | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 10/10 | 1.000 | Highest-return path |
| 9/10 | 0.810 | One missed vote has a meaningful cost |
| 8/10 | 0.640 | Still valuable, but clearly below full attendance |
| 7/10 | 0.490 | Eligible, but not equivalent to sustained participation |
| 0–6/10 | 0 | No settlement-eligible record |
Delegated voting
A sustained delegation relationship creates two reward components:
- a Holder component for making and maintaining the delegation decision;
- a Delegate component for representing externally delegated Voting Power.
The figures below are behavioural coefficients, not a fixed split of any individual ENS payment. Final rewards still depend on the shared settlement rule and relative Voting Power across all eligible records.
| Delegate qualified votes | Holder reconfirms within five proposals | Holder coefficient | Delegate external-VP coefficient |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10/10 | Yes | 0.700 | 0.300 |
| 10/10 | No | 0.350 | 0.300 |
| 9/10 | Yes | 0.567 | 0.243 |
| 9/10 | No | 0.284 | 0.243 |
| 8/10 | Yes | 0.448 | 0.192 |
| 8/10 | No | 0.224 | 0.192 |
| 7/10 | Yes | 0.343 | 0.147 |
| 7/10 | No | 0.172 | 0.147 |
| 0–6/10 | Irrelevant | 0 | 0 |
The reconfirmation would be a gasless signature initiated by the Holder within the first five closed proposals after delegation begins. It cannot prove that someone read every proposal, but it requires an active revisit of the delegation decision.
If a Holder does not reconfirm, only the Holder component is halved. If a Delegate misses votes, both components decline. Below 7/10, the Delegate is no longer eligible under this program and the delegator component also becomes zero.
Newcomers, concentration, and wallet splitting
A new participant begins accruing from their first personal vote or first delegation. However, the first cash settlement unlocks only after ten closed proposals. A new wallet therefore starts a new record rather than receiving an immediate mature-participant return.
The proposal does not claim to solve Sybil resistance completely. A person who can maintain multiple hidden identities for a long period can still benefit from splitting under a diminishing-return curve. The narrower claim is that splitting into fresh wallets does not immediately outperform stable governance participation.
What the public Round 2 data can show
The public Round 2 data cannot fully replay this design because it does not expose every address’s voting history, delegation changes, or confirmation signatures. It can still illustrate how a continuous VP curve differs from the current hard cap for the seven capped Holder records.
| Scoring method | Largest Holder share among seven | Top-two share among seven |
|---|---|---|
| Current 250 ENS hard cap | 14.29% | 28.57% |
| No cap; linear allocation | 26.17% | 49.68% |
| Continuous diminishing-return curve | 20.81% | 40.57% |
The point is not to claim that this is a finished anti-whale solution. It is to replace a hard per-address cutoff—which creates a visible incentive to split wallets—with a rule that rewards sustained governance behaviour and reduces marginal returns smoothly.
The most important unresolved implementation questions are:
- Whether the proposed coefficient ordering is appropriate;
- How to set the first-period diminishing-return parameter;
- How to handle pre-existing delegations at launch;
- How records should behave after mid-window re-delegation.
I would welcome criticism on both the incentives and the assumptions.
References: Delegation Incentives Program, Blockful algorithm documentation, Round 2 public CSV, and Round 2 metadata.