Proposal: Token Listing DAO

Proposals
1

Background

One of the strengths of Perpetual Protocol’s design is the ability to quickly launch new markets. One bottleneck we identified with our historical listing process is that there had to be a governance vote via snapshot for each pair before listing. This usually meant that token listings had to be fairly well structured and the community would have to know in advanced what tokens to list or not to list. What followed then was a relatively slow listing process that was unable to keep up with the demand.

Another learning we had was that over time we would also suffer (as do other protocols like Maker) governance apathy, where fewer and fewer participants participated in this specific type of vote. This proposal aims to take the learnings from listing markets on Perp V1 and proposes an improved process

Proposal

Will propose to form a DAO that is in charge of token listings with the following mandate:

  1. Approve or reject markets that can be listed
  2. Approve co-marketing spends

Market Listing

The foundation’s partnerships team will continue to working hard to secure co-marketing campaigns with different projects and will plan on submitting these to the Token Listing DAO. This DAO will then either approve or reject such market to be listed.

Secondly, the sub-DAO will have the ability to pre-approve a list of markets that can be listed as well.

All markets that are approved by the market listing DAO can then be taken by the foundation team and listed on Perp.exchange.

Funding

There are 2 funding components of this sub-DAO that would need funding:

  1. Marketing expenses for token listing campaigns
  2. Committee member payments

Given historical precedent of campaigns costing ~$10K USD, would propose $150K USD in PERP to be allocated for marketing expenses for the remainder of the year. This would allow for ~15 co-marketing campaigns. Assuming current prices of ~16 this is around 9.3K PERP

Secondly, would propose paying 40 PERP per committee member per month with an additional 120 PERP set aside in Coordinape. This would be 720 PERP in total, if we assume for 2 months of running.

Taking our learnings from the Grants DAO, we would propose having a lead that would be in charge chairing the committee and general administration. This member we propose should be paid 70 PERP per month

Adding in a little bit of buffer, we would then round out this request to be 11K PERP

Name PERP Notes
Listing Campaigns 9300 ~10K USD per listing campaign
DAO Members 400 (40 x 5 x 2) Base for 5 DAO members
DAO Lead 140 (70 x 2) Base for 1 DAO lead
Coordinape 240 (120 x 2) This is additional incentive on top of the base
Buffer 920 If we need for more spend on campaigns

Committee

We propose to have 6 members on the multisig with a quorum requirement of 4. As such, these members will need to be active and readily accessible

  • Removal of signer: if the sub-DAO decides that a member is not active enough then the committee may vote to remove this signer. A similar quorum of 4/6 is required
  • Election: all sub-DAO members will be elected in by the DAO. Candidates will be asked to propose themselves in the forums and a channel in discord will be given for them to answer questions. Voting will be done via Snapshot weighted vote, with the top n number being part of the sub-DAO
  • Voting: all signers will be given a token for them to vote for a per market basis. All snapshot votes must be held at a duration of 72 hours at a minimum

Edit 1

Further clarifications from discussion

  • There will be an election cycle that is held every 3 months for the sub DAO members
  • sub DAO members cannot be part of a different sub DAO

Edit 2

  • Staked Perp holders will be the ones that can vote on this
4 Likes
2

Got a question about new token listings, will the execution of the listing txns be automated with SafeSnap (after Snapshot voting concludes) or will it be executed by the foundation team?

As for the sub-DAO committee members being delegates, I am thinking why not we allow stakers to delegate their sPERP to nominees to decide their individual representative weightage when making listing decisions? Do we have a delegate function within sPERP to do so? If yes, is there any cons of doing so? Thanks!

3

No it won’t be automatic. We’ll still have a bottleneck from the foundation doing deployments

Oh I like the idea, though we can probably meet half way for this? We could do a weighted snapshot vote only for staked perp holders. If we ensure we run monthly/quarterly elections then it should allow for the continuity but allow for change over if it doesn’t work

1 Like
4

Hi everyone, this is Yuan here posting on behalf of Blockchain Capital!

We are generally supportive of the idea of delegating additional responsibilities to subDAOs or Working Groups. Over time, as subDAOs gain more experience, they become increasingly effective, and so in this case helping to reduce governance overhead by delegating this responsibility to a subDAO makes a ton of sense. With that said, here are a few ideas on how the proposal could be made better in our view:

Introduce Explicit Transparency Measures
It would be helpful for the community to understand the rationale behind the decisions the Token Listing DAO comes to. This could mean providing a short write-up after every decision is made. If this proves to create too much overhead, then providing a decision-making framework to the community would be a good substitute if it were combined with some mechanism where the community can ask for rationale on a case-by-case basis.

Election Process
It might be a good idea to enable regular cycling of Token Listing DAO in case new qualified community members become interested in the role and/or old members wish to leave their position. While the proposed framework has a mechanism where subDAO members can be kicked off, it is arguably helpful to have an additional process to establish a regular cadence for which this happens/does not happen so that prospectively interested members of the Token Listing DAO can more easily be aware of when they might be able to join the Token Listing DAO. Additionally, this further helps to incentivize existing members of the Token Listing DAO to do a good job. Election cycles could be every quarter or, perhaps semi-annually.

Moreover, it would also be helpful to understand how the role of the Listing DAO will change once Curie is launched, given Curie will result in permissionless private markets together with public markets operating under a shared insurance fund.

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5

Hey folks, great discussion going on!

I like @yuan-han-li ´s comment about Explicit Transparency Measures. This is important for every type of governance decisions if PERP shall become a true DAO. Which, currently, it is not in my view, as decisions about future developments are made by the team and key investors like Blockchain Capital and Delphi Labs. In principle there is nothing wrong with that but using the term DAO for it is a little misleading. Voting apathy should be no surprise in this context.

While I´m not sure how much attention must be given to the listing process for V1 in the light of the upcoming, permissionless V2, I do have some input on how to perhaps reduce voting apathy in general.

I suggest to steal a concept used in tradFi: Regularity.
Let me guide you through my thought process.

Fixed, regular voting schedule

Let´s assume I´m a responsible investor but want to be more laid back by not actively participating in forum discussions. If I knew that 3 months from now on Sunday there will be a slot for major project-determining governance decisions, I could mark that date red in my calendar and check a week early to see if there is any topic coming up that I need to inform myself about. For example by reading a discussion thread of the proposal that is coming up, so that I can make an informed decision.

Right now, it´s a total blackbox. Any day, a potentially very important topic can come up and be put to vote without me noticing.

My clearly defined proposal to tackle this problem is to create regular intervals of votes with different classification of importance. For example:

  • Profound, direction changing decisions like developing and upgrading to a new protocol design (like perp V2), or assigning a new multi-sig holder: every 3 months
  • Important decisions like adding / removing features that don´t fundamentally change the project (like adding markets), larger marketing campaigns: monthly
  • Minor decisions like grants or marketing actions to a certain $ value, partnerships or some front-end gimmicks: weekly

If there is no proposal for a certain category active, that´s fine and no vote is necessary. But if there is one, everyone knows when the voting starts.

The advantage of such a system is not only a reliable rhythm of governance processes but it also allows investors to select on which level of operations they want to participate.

Now you might ask, why look at anything else than quarterly or maybe monthly votes?

This leads me to the second part of the solution which is:

Voting incentives

Kyber network pioneered this concept by relating cashflow to token holders to your weekly governance voting activity. We should think about ways to financially incentivize DAO members in the future to participate in voting.

I don´t want to discuss the details of such a system here but stay on the high level and argue that we need some sort of incentive. This engages more users on the lower levels of importance and hopefully leads to better results (swarm intelligence).

But what happens if there is a pressing issue (probably important) that needs to changed ASAP, but the regular voting date is still 7 weeks out or so?

Except for bug fixes – which don´t need a governance vote, correct? – I can only see this happening rarely. However, we can still cater for that by making a spontaneous vote like nowadays but with the hardcoded condition that the contract changes back to it´s original state if there is no confirmation by the DAO within 3 months. Or in case it´s a completely new contract that needs to be deployed, it self-destructs without confirmation after 3 months. This way, the DAO keeps the last word but there is more flexibility in the short term if need be.

I´m curious what you guys think, let me know.

CC: @JonathanErlich

6

This is interesting though how much rationale do you think would needed to be done for this? I suspect that there may be some markets that are just to test the waters to see if things work and others where it’s a no brainer with a lot of volume?

Yep this is a really good point. I’d propose potentially quarterly to start with? As we mature maybe then we can move towards a more regular cadence

Yep this is an interesting point. Maker has a fixed schedule for example but still have the voter apathy problem so I don’t think that will be solved here. I do think though that we need to find some form of faster mechanism on voting to allow for the DAO to remain more nimble in how it does things.

Potentially this is something we explore in a different thread though as I do believe there’s a lot more work and understanding before we reach something rigid and inflexible. Given nobody has done decentralisation well yet and there’s no blueprint to use I still believe that constant fast iterations to see what works is still the best way forward

I can understand the thinking behind this but I think it actually creates weird incentives - i.e. people vote because they want to get paid, not because they care about the future of the protocol. Maybe this is just me being cynical though,…

1 Like
7

Thanks for your kind response. I think that´s true and I totally see the upside of being centralized during the heavy development stage. Nonetheless, having some ideas on how to transition to a true DAO is probably a good idea. I guess we should collectively talk about it when you guys reached a product status that will last for a while, like V2.

Yeah, totally get that. A hard nut to be cracked on another day but I´d wanted to throw it in here.

For the OP, as mentioned, having a small task force that judges applications for new market listings sounds fine. The sub-DAO label may not even be necessary, just build a working group of trusted individuals who take over that responsibility until the support for V1 is stopped. There´s not much harm that can be done by that group in any case.

1 Like
8

Thanks everyone for the responses - will be posting up a snapshot vote this Friday to vote on this proposal

9

Hi everyone, voting is now live: Snapshot

1 Like