[Temp Check] ENS Token 2nd Airdrop

DAO-Wide Temp Check
83

I voted for “Allowing each .eth a vote without needing to distribute ENS tokens that can be sold.” because I understand the concerns around $ENS being sold. Long term it still ends up as a whoever has most money wins.

I would like to say that the problem of voting distribution and engagement should be something that existing delegates should look deeper into. Again, 80% of the ENS users came AFTER the airdrop. They are simply unable to vote. A fews weeks ago, I thought that maybe people will buy $ENS but honestly, even if some do, the quantity will not be enough when compared to the top 5 holders of the token.

So again, my “plead” is for the existing ENS delegates to think if there should be more distributed and engaged voting in ENS. ENS has grown a lot of in last 12 months. It needs an improved structure for long term growth. The community is what uses ENS and what drives ever more adoption. Engage the community and ENS will do even better.

Here is a recent example from Uniswap where the holders improved their structure. https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2022/12/21/uniswap-dao-community-members-vote-in-favor-of-new-governance-process/

Devin Walsh, director of the Uniswap Foundation, said the proposal seeks to address inefficiencies in the governance structure with changes such as increasing the quorum – or amount of UNI represented – for voting and reducing the number of votes to pass a proposal.

“The intention of the off-chain votes is to provide a signal to the community that there’s consensus on a proposal,” Walsh told CoinDesk. “What we found is you only need one off-chain vote to achieve that benefit of a signal, and requiring the community to vote twice is redundant and unnecessary.”

The move to ease governance is part of an effort to empower community members to participate in the protocol’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

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84

Thank you for added information and research conducted.

85

This is all very interesting.
It is important to avoid gamification,
and preventing risks & vector attacks, to the ENS Protocol.

People getting paid for their work, is separate then giving all ENS holders free money.

  1. Giving a 2nd airdrop for the sake of a 2nd airdrop is not justification for a 2nd airdrop.
  2. Additionally, people would likely sell their ENS Votes…Then just demand a 3rd airdrop.
  3. What is the beneficial objective? The goals? The strategy; How do we avoid gamification?

This was an interesting quote-tweet:

Scenario: 5.4m tokens airdropped, ENS token price crashes to 15 cents, an attacker scoops up 3 million tokens and then starts voting to rob the DAO of all funds, increases renewal prices to $99999/yr for everyone else

gg ENS is broken. but keep voting yes because its free money
https://twitter.com/MAB/status/1625540696617762820

https://twitter.com/MAB/status/1625540696617762820

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86

Interesting resource. Optimism recently did a 2nd airdrop as well! – Airdrop 2 | Optimism Docs. “Optimism’s Airdrop #2 distributes 11,742,277.10 OP to 307,965 unique addresses to reward positive-sum governance participation and power users of Optimism Mainnet. A snapshot of addresses was taken on 01-20-2023 0:00 UTC.”

You can look into it and see all the details of how they did their airdrop to maximize governance participation. This is something very similar to what we need as well.

This is an oversimplification with a huge assumption predicated on, most likely, other DeFi projects’ airdrops where a lot of people dump immediately after. It can be avoided with carefully thought out criteria for the 2nd airdrop (see Optimism above as an example), or even other mechanisms such as linear vesting of newly airdropped tokens, something similar to what Gnosis Safe is currently doing.

I would, however, very much like to see how many people dumped after the first airdrop. Even that wouldn’t be that accurate because it was at the peak of the bull market and everything went crashing down in the months ahead.

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87

Of all scenarios you could have chosen to make an example of, why choose the absolute worst case scenario. Are you saying there is absolutely no upside to this proposal, only a downside? Are you taking a holistic view or singular bias view?

I believe with the right criteria/qualifier guidelines implemented, the 5.4 million $ENS tokens could be distributed fairly. First, we must get pass this stage to have that discussion, because inserting that conversation here would only derail the focus.

The 2nd airdrop would satisfy the foundational goal of DAO’s governance balance for the community %. A 3rd airdrop would be a moot point due to this. The only reason why a 2nd airdrop came into play was due to the remaining 5.4 million $ENS unclaimed. Prior to this temp check, I don’t think anyone has ever brought a legitimate case forward.

Thanks for the feedback GP.

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88

I think you may have misunderstood my statement based on response you made.
I don’t think that a paragraph of all caps is necessary. The brevity is enough to know that someone is yelling.

I did not declare that a person can not make a twitter poll. I simply stated my position is that I do not believe implementing results from twitter should be used to influence a decision that the DAO makes.

Reason being, twitter polls can easily be gamed and do not poll the community equivocally. Like @garypalmerjr said.

Twitter is not a controlled stable environment.Outside of seeing this link here on the forum page, I have not seen this on my twitter feed. You poll is likely to stay in the circle of your following and only receive the response that gears towards a specific agenda within your circle. While using this forum there is no argument against restricted visibility that would cause a proportionally greater sentiment to an initiative that may or may not reflect the opinions of all persons who wish to be active in the governance of ENS protocol.

Participation is voluntary and the mere fact that ‘having an ENS name warrants participation’ is a false narrative. You might be asking ‘but the first airdrop…?’. Yes that gave equal opportunity to those who fell within the parameters the project creators decided on.

Simply look at the badges page for the DAO and compare that to how many people received the first airdrop.

767 people have been active on the forum for at least one year and made a minimum of 1 post
197 people have received the role ‘Member’
26 people have received the role ‘Regular’
13 people have received the role ’ Leader’

Don’t forget that ENS doesn’t have the same type of income as other protocols. ENS needs to protect it’s future with the assets it has. Distributing them amongst the community just so that they will be dissolved into other economies is not the right strategy or securing the stability in ENS’ future.

@cap
Optimism also has a completely different income mechanism than ENS. On the lowest end of foreseeable income, ENS needs to estimate at minimum of 1 name registered per address, per year…again at minimum.
That metric is far different from using a protocol that has numerous ways of collecting an income which is based on a minimum of just one on-chain interaction. (correct me if I am wrong)

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89

The temp check proposes an airdrop of 5.4m ENS Governance tokens for which the benefits of decentralisation are proposed, with commentary to the effect that distributions will encourage more users & existing users to set records & further commentary that this airdrop would resolve distribution skew and garner more participation. More commentary is this encourages a type of adoption.

Various DAO members have shared views in opposition and in favour. Various DAO members have expressed concerns for which you can address.

For a temp check to pass a vote, delegates will scrutinise, ask questions and raise concerns. And benefits will stack against other downside risks. Some are acceptable risks while others are not. Whataboutism or deflecting does not explain away risks & concerns. And delegates have a responsibility & accountability in their role.

This is temp check has moved towards an angle to: ‘vote to spend/airdrop 5.4m governance tokens, or not’.

Absent the legitimate concerns being addressed & defended, and having the strategy & explanation for execution, it would seem irresponsible to approve an airdrop.

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90

It seems as though you have made your decision. You have expressed it several times (and that’s ok, I can respect that). You obviously see only one side and have not attempted to “think” about how this could positively impact the community from a growth-continuation perspective.

I honestly believe pre-airdrop ENS community is no comparison to the post-airdrop ENS community. Show me :point_up: example where the pre-airdrop community elevated an ecosystem with this type of content, marketing, and branding for one central goal: Building the ENS Ethos as a Community.

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FWIW,

I do believe that these are good questions to ask. But more important questions are:

How does ENS token distribution skew over time? Is it truly decentralised? So far nobody has answered that repeated question.

Can anyone defend the notion that the DAO is truly decentralised and not prone to governance capture? DAO members and contributors will have 55% of the vote versus 45% from community.

And the top 8 (with actual voting history) delegates control 33% of tokens!

How many of these delegates are in working groups that control millions at this point?

How does governance affect executive control? Or does it actually aid in entrenching executive control? Are there checks and balances between delegates and working group stewards?

Also, that theoretical scenario is highly unlikely due to the fact that token price will be diluted from a market cap perspective.

Not to mention, even with 5.4 million tokens out there, the top 18 delegates control 50% of the vote.

I estimate that scenario to be not just unlikely but “practically” impossible with the delegate vote control.

To state my position; I am not in favour of “free money”. I am in favour of wider participation and a more anti fragile governance structure.

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92

I wear a user-hat, a domainer-hat, a responsability-token-holder hat, a governance-participation-hat, a contributor-hat, and multiple other hats among the ENS broader community & sub communities.
I wear many hats at once, and don’t forget each particular one when exploring that subject matter.

You have the opportunity to address concerns raised in the temp check you put forward.

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93

You did see where I said “I respect that” right. :grin:

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You’re not wrong about Optimism. These are two vastly different projects, as I’m sure you know :slight_smile: But if I’m correct, we have 2 years worth of runway for the core team + fully funded working groups that generally spend less than yearly approved funds, which means they are overfunded and covered, and still have 30k ETH in the treasury that will be managed and grown steadily by Karpatkey.

But again, if DAO making money is the issue here, which I never assumed it was, then maybe we should vote to include a minimum fee for minting subnames? Or maybe have DNS website integrations pay a small fee (which I’m against btw, but just an idea for additional income). Or better yet, let’s discuss any other monetization models. As the leading Naming System in the world, I’m sure we can come up with an additional revenue source that doesn’t ‘hurt’ anyone and brings additional value, but this time not for free.

Not sure why are we trying to fix the issue of ‘DAO not having money potentially in the future’ by restricting a valid opportunity to airdrop 5.4M previously unclaimed, and one can argue deserved tokens to the most active community that is literally responsible for bringing in money to the DAO and wants to participate in onboarding the next generation of ENS users and is already actively doing so.

Again, I’m fine either way. To me, it’s just important that tech continues to develop and as someone who builds on top of ENS, I’m good. I just haven’t seen a concrete argument that this is a bad thing. As always, happy to change my mind.

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95

I want to reinstate what I mentioned previously with a slight edit appends a statistic.

Out of 137,000 eligible Ethereum addresses for the ENS Governance token airdrop…

767 people have been active on the forum for at least one year and made a minimum of 1 post
which is 0.56% of all eligible addresses

197 people have received the role ‘Member’
which is 0.14% of all eligible addresses

26 people have received the role ‘Regular’
which is 0.019% of all eligible addresses

13 people have received the role ’ Leader’
which is 0.009% of all eligible addresses

Looking at the snapshot voting participation:

Out of the previous 42 snapshot votes the average number of participation is 620 unique voters.
total participant count is 26,042 which also includes individuals being counted more than one time for participation in multiple votes.

Out of the 137,000 eligible addresses to receive greater that 0 ENS Governance tokens, there has been a voting participation rate of 0.45% not 45% but 0.45%. Half of one percent of airdrop recipients on average participate in DAO proposal voting. I left out one proposal that had 85,000 participants as it would not accurately reflect participation of token holders on a continuous basis and would greatly effect the results of the sample resulting in ~2,500+ average participants in each vote. An average number of ~2,500+ would be about a 2.25x higher number then all 42 snapshot votes sampled, individually.

There is clearly a case here as to why another airdrop would be an irresponsible distribution of 5.4m ENS Governance tokens.

The ENS Governance Tokens’ one and only function is for voting on proposals put forth by the DAO; as a whole, and its contributors and participants collectively, which are presented on this forum for discussion. It does not make sense to me to distribute ENS governance tokens to non-participants with the likelihood of continued non-participation based on the previously noted statistics.

If there were any distribution of ENS Governance tokens I would strongly suggest using the members statistics page that reflects participation and activity on the official DAO forum (which you are now on) found here. These users are most deserving and reflects a reasonable and accurate reference of metrics for another round of distributed tokens if any at all.

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96

Hello @accessor.eth. I hope all is well. One question. So with all of these historical statistics known (1st airdrop), was there ever a formalized/strategic initiative to increase community DAO participation? I could have totally overlooked this plan if it was/is being implemented.

Thank you.

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Yes, the original airdrop. I would assume.

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So you are not totally sure? You said “Yes”, then you also said you “would assume”. I conclude you don’t recall anything definite. Am I right to say that?

Thanks.

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Use your best judgement. I’m not here to argue contextual semantics.

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Thank you for saying that, because I feel I have being doing exactly that throughout this entire temp check. I appreciate your feedback. :+1:

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These are my opinions and they may or may not reflect the view of the DAO majority.

I’m really not sure what you are referring to. If there is an issue you would like to broadly discuss, my Inbox is open.

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102

Damn, this is beautiful. There are a lot of good things here. This is what I’m talking about. This is very useful, thank you! This moves my thinking in a different direction. Do you happen to have the token eligibility criteria for the first airdrop? I’d actually love to see that.

I agree with this 100%.

I fully support this.

Ok so as you said here:

The only thing that makes sense to airdrop tokens for would be 2 main things, with the bigger focus on the 1st one:

  1. Governance participation – Discussion forum participation, Snapshot voting, On-chain voting, maybe Discord activity, Working group meetings and activities, and so on… and it’s possible and probably ok from the ethical perspective, to exclude anyone who hasn’t participated in any voting or discussions whatsoever. (Huge topic for discussion on ‘how to do the airdrop’).
  2. Rewarding ENS super users (wallets that did not immediately sell ENS but rather delegated their ENS tokens, ENS name owners who experimented with text records, .limo service, the volume of names minted and traded, alpha product early testers and contributors, Goerli NameWrapper contract testers, and so on and so on).

I’m obviously writing things off the top of my head. If we decided to do this, a lot more careful consideration would be needed to figure out how to best conduct this. But I hope you see where I’m going with this.

And as I said before, this is a discussion that would be about ‘how to do the airdrop’ whereas this temp check is ‘is it worth doing it’ if I understand correctly.

At first, I was at 50/50 about doing the airdrop. Then I was 55/45 in favour of doing it. Now I’m at 50/50 again.

One other thing just occurred to me. I’m playing devil’s advocate in my head – the fact that less than 0.5% of all ENS governance tokens in circulation participate in governance is definitely a sign that we should have some type of plan to stimulate and incentivize governance participation. How do we rank compared to other DAOs and their tokens? Does anyone have any info there?

I guess it’s arguable that a carefully thought-out airdrop majorly focused to improve governance participation is definitely one way to go about fixing/improving this while at the same time rewarding the power users of ENS.

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