[ARFC] A Framework To Avoid Quorum Failure

Governance
1

Simple Summary

Last weekend two necessary, non-contentious votes failed to meet the 320,000 quorum threshold. This proposal explores a framework to avoid more failures in the future.

This is a non-technical proposal to help enforce a better voting structure for the DAO.

Motivation

Aave governance benefits from the transparency of voting on-chain and using Snapshot; a growing number of delegates & voters have left us with valuable data sets and insights.

Using a table of on-chain Aave DAO votes, proposals, and lengths - we identified the optimal time to propose an AIP.

As a data provider and a delegate, we are happy to marry our two expertise to boost participation and ensure quorum is met.

Specification

Mandate that AIP votes can neither start nor end on weekends, unless an emergency. The proposed starting days are as follows:

  • Mondays and Tuesdays for AIPs

These guidelines will ensure stronger predictability, coordination, and participation.

This is the first of a two-part proposal - with Snapshot recommendations coming with more data.

References

The following comments and replies have been used to inspire this proposal:

LDO Emission_Admin for Polygon v3 Liquidity Pool Failure
ARC. Strategy on sunsetting of Aave v1 - #13 by MarcZeller
ARC. Strategy on sunsetting of Aave v1 - #12 by EzR3aL

The following data was used to inform the optimal times:

For AIPs

Votes per day, broken down by block week (legend on the right)

This data shows that by descending order Saturday (3,296), Friday (3,261), and Thursday (2,513) are the most popular days for voters - independent of size.

A recent rise in week-end voting on Saturdays and Fridays.

This data shows, over the past two quarters the DAO has been voting near the end of the week - we hypothesize this is due to last-minute voting and a rise in end dates over the weekend.

The average vote per day is 1724 for the weekdays and 2325 for the weekend - while we don’t want to avoid the weekend altogether, it is best to avoid ending it on Sunday or Monday.

AIPs fail 2x as often when slated to end on the weekend vs. the weekdays, at 22% of the time; when a vote starts on a weekend, failure is even higher, with a 33% likelihood.

Voters’ behavior per day type, segmented by voting power.

This data reveals 84% of votes from Aave Whales (those with 10k+ voting power) have come on a weekday, representing 98% of the total votes.

The largest group of weekend voters are small (0-50) stkAAVE or AAVE holders, voting 36% of the time on Saturdays our Sundays.

Next Steps

We hope to collaborate with other delegates, service organizations, and the broader community to incorporate feedback and establish the best cadence for governance processes.

We will be publishing a follow-up proposal with recommendations / findings for Snapshot.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

12 Likes
2

Hi @fig

I would prefer this proposal to lean towards guidelines rather than mandatory. I believe the root cause is voter apathy and not what day of the week the vote falls upon.

Could you share analysis that shows the distribution of voter participation, top 100 wallets ranked by number of AAVE + stkAAVE holding should suffice?

This will show participation is low which is the real root cause being reflected in the data. Voter participation is largely offset by voter coordination efforts that encourage different entities to participate. A number of delegates are also University clubs and the two most recent fail votes, overlapped with exam periods at the respective universities.

For example, normally voting participation is coordinated with someone following up with various voting entities to ensure participation. With respect to the SD, MaticX, LDO and stMATIC rewards proposal, there was no such voter coordination effort and the vote narrowly failed. When resubmitted, there was an effort made to coordinate voter participation and the vote passed.

I would suggest weekend/weekdays is a distant second order consideration relative to current rates of participation. I would also strongly suggest whether a vote passes or fails is probably more reliant on if someone is coordinating voting efforts. I think this last minute coordination push is reflected in a lot of wallets voting late in the week. If a vote is going to fail, I know I become very active chasing votes late in the week and the data shown above probably is the bi-product of this hustle.

Perhaps a few more active delegates would introduce a more robust and reliable voting base relative to quorum. I’d personally like to see @MarcZeller and @Llamaxyz have a larger voting position within the Aave ecosystem.

4 Likes
3

From the technical contribution side, we think enforcing creation days for proposals can introduce more complexity than what it solves.

On-chain proposals have a voting period of 3 days (Level 1), or 10 days (Level 2). That means that even on the worst-case scenario of creating a proposal at midnight Thursday (1-day delay → voting running Saturday-Sunday-Monday), there is 1 week-day overlap.
That is obviously non-ideal, and contributors should probably avoid it if possible. But in any other scenario, there are 2 or more voting days overlapping, which seems perfectly reasonable, especially for delegates, considering that generally there are multiple communications and steps before a proposal goes on-chain (allowing pre-analysis/decision).

From an operational point of view, we find it fundamental for delegates to follow closely the community on the forum because that is the main objective of the voting delegation feature of the Aave governance.

2 Likes
4

Hey guys @bgdlabs @MatthewGraham - thanks for the input.

We agree that solutions come from the behaviors of delegates themselves, but also want to find frameworks to encourage more participation + attract new, diverse delegates as well.

This statement is true:

Education and lobbying will help the likelihood of a vote passing - however, this still places trust and responsibility on vote proposers, potentially deterring less well-connected token-holders.

In the meantime - we are happy to visualize your request for top 100 voting participation.

I would remind both - this is an informal proposal, hoping to spur discussions on the best way to empower more voters and new delegates.

We agree a fundamental responsibility of delegates is to monitor the community and forum closely, but we believe delegates should also spend time making the governance process more efficient.

Thus our motivation for kicking off this discussion.

5

After several Aave votes have failed to hit quorum, this discussion is coming at a pertinent time; after working in various DAOs, we have learnt from experience that DAOs that line up votes on a specific day every week are more likely to reach quorum than a protocol that does not have a specific day.

An excellent example of this is Balancer’s Governance Schedule which ensures that votes go live on Thursdays, and so far, this has proved successful. Other protocols with a similar system are Optimism and Jet Protocol, amongst others.

Although this amendment will delay proposals from going to vote, it introduces a cadence level within the protocol, enabling governance participants to check votes every Monday or Tuesday.