[PROPOSAL #917][VOTING][CORRECTED] DoraHacks: AEZ Quadratic Funding Program
Changelog • 2024-April-05: Posted initial draft • 2024-April-24: Added additional paragraph further describing the QF mechanism • 2024-May-01: Prop has been submitted on-chain as #917 . Voting period commenced DoraHacks and Dora Factory are requesting 80,000 ATOM for 24 months of Quadratic Funding prize pool for public goods, new teams building on the Hub and ATOM Economic Zone TLDR: As seen in its rich history, the Cosmos Hub, which birthed and bootstrapped the most open source and decentralized developer community seen thus far in the web3 industry, has one of the most active and robust governance mechanisms and participants. In a similar vein, Public Goods funding has also always been of crucial importance to the Hub’s stakeholders. To further this mission, Dora Factory and Atom Accelerator DAO hope to run 10 Quadratic Funding (QF) rounds over the next 24 months, with a total prize pool of 100,000 ATOMs. This will equate to a prize pool of approximately 10,000 ATOMs each round, to fund public goods and developer teams bringing value to the Atom Economic Zone. These public goods will be of utmost importance as the AEZ enters its parabolic growth phase with the…
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The intention is good, but it would be nice to be able to build a stack within the hub after the smart contract proposal.
Think we can definitely look into deploying some CW QF infra directly on the cosmos hub as well, but regardless the spend proposal to fund the QF matching pool is still required.
Furthermore, I do think it’s worth noting that the whole point of QF rounds powered by $ATOM token on Dora Vota, is to better align public goods and early stage ideas that can power the growth of AEZ, which encompasses more than just the Cosmos Hub. We QF rounds on a credibly neutral Dora Vota appchain is uniquely set up to achieve this goal.
Permissioned nature of cw on hub will also likely make our qf rounds less flexible and reactive, so we think at this point it’s still best to operate them on Dora Vota, as we did with the very first AEZ QF round.
Agree with GOJWH. Little can be built on CosmosHub so why bother? Let’s wait for permissioned wasm
in our opinion, a lot can be built for the AEZ today, which will ultimately benefit Cosmos Hub. Quadratic Funding will benefit all atom economic zone builders, many of whom will not be building directly on the hub
We as a community still need to define the “permissioned” part ofc, but I imagine we will probably only deploy infra-related CW on the Hub - regular contracts/dapps will live on Neutron. So the scope of what QF could fund - vis-a-vis what developers could deploy on the Hub - would be very narrow.
The QF rounds envisaged here are for anything and everything that would fall into the scope of public goods or tools/dapps that contribute to the AEZ in some way.
This is a little buried in the proposal, but here is the “trial run” that Dorahacks ran by themselves, which funded:
- ICS721 / Interchain NFT gateway
- A CW Interchain Account Controller
- Packet Forward Middleware
(obviously, not full funding for those projects, but funding nonetheless)
I personally like the idea of QF - it’s us putting “skin in the game” - high-conviction votes on what should get funded (cause we are each individually contributing to the funding)
Also worth mentioning AADAO would be directly involved in the various QF rounds and will be able to provide detailed reporting to the Cosmos Hub community via transparency reports and other forms of communications. This would be treated as a regular grant that would be overseen by AADAO the same way we oversee & support all our grantees.
We endorse this program and want to provide constructive feedback. This initiative could potentially be overlooked due to its complexity, particularly for typical Cosmos users. We suggest reevaluating the proposal’s structure prior to launching it. Currently, the Cosmos community sentiment is quite low, as we’ve discussed in this post as well as this one . Our concern is that users might scrutinize every community pool expenditure given the current climate. Thus, we advise extra care in presenting this proposal to on-chain governance. While we believe this proposal is beneficial for the community, we’re concerned that the current format might be too intricate for the average user. Even with our in-depth knowledge of blockchain technology and the Cosmos ecosystem, we found the proposition’s scope challenging to understand. We believe a general Cosmos user might find it even more challenging. We noted a lack of clarity regarding QF mechanisms and community involvement in the process. We recommend adding a dedicated paragraph to explain the process in detail, with practical examples. This is why we would like to see a revised version of the draft before considering an on-chain…
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We think that this is important for the development of AEZ, and we will support this proposal!
Thank you for the support and feedback. We’ve revised the forum post based on your comment, and included a change log and a additional paragraph further describing the QF mechanism. I will post below here as well for clarity:
“Quadratic funding is a democratic mechanism that directs funding based on community participation. It prioritizes projects with broad support rather than those with deep pockets, making funding decisions more fair and inclusive. Community members will be able to vote on prospective public goods projects with their ATOM, and the more individual voters a project attracts, the more funding it gets from the prize pool, potentially empowering smaller ATOM holders to have a much larger impact. To deter whales, quadratic voting uses an exponential curve to make casting multiple votes costly: For example, a QF round cant be structured so that 1 vote costs 1 token, 2 votes costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 cost 16, and so on. This unique voting mechanism prioritizes broad community support over a few large votes, with anti-Sybil measures in-place to prevent gaming the system.”
Thanks for this update. We hope you won’t mind us asking further questions. Regarding the general design, wouldn’t it be easier to roll this feature with a wasm contract directly on the Hub ? Now that the proposal #895 has passed with plans to grant the hub with permission-ed smart contract capabilities in the future. This kind of quadratic curve voting could be perfectly suited for these functionalities. We assume you have reasons necessitating to process these votes in a separate chain (even though you plan to launch PSS), we would be pleased to see you elaborate on this.
Nevertheless, we are really interested to see QF coming to the Hub one way or the other. One other aspect we would like to see more details about is regarding the sibyl protection mechanism you envision for the project. We have seen small accounts vote manipulations in the past, therefore we are very curious to learn more about your findings on this domain to counter such phenomenon.
Hello, all good questions! One of the main goals of QF rounds powered by $ATOM token on Dora Vota, is to better align public goods and early stage ideas that can power the growth of AEZ. The AEZ encompasses more than just the Cosmos Hub, so we feel QF rounds on a credibly neutral Dora Vota appchain is uniquely set up to achieve this goal. Dora Vota also creates dedicated blockspace for voting circuits such as QF, which we believe will enhance UX and streamline governance, which will further incentivize the robustness and decentralization of AEZ QF rounds. The permissioned nature of cw on hub will also likely make our qf rounds less flexible and reactive, so we think at this point it’s still best to operate them on Dora Vota, as we did with the very first AEZ QF round. As far as the anti-sybil mechanism go, we use a combination of methods to protect the system. These include a grace period after conclusion of the round for on-chain voter tally (it can easily be seen if many wallets were funded from a single address), and we have also developed aMACI (which stands for anonymous minimal anti-collusion infrastructure), which is a form of zk technology that can be integrated…
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I recommend deferring this proposal until consensus and governance are no longer distorted by staked pol.
Currently, every block is about 1% inaccurate, containing zero cost about power obtained by lobbying, instead of work or purchase .
Since governance proposals are decided by the exact same vote power, were this proposal to pass, The legitimacy of its passage would be in question.
Probably I do support this proposal.
I just think that we should prioritize ensuring that only stakers voices are heard in governance.
Currently, due to POL arrangements with Stride and Persistence, the cosmos hub’s governance and consensus mechanisms are broken. Individual users pay for atom to access consensus and governance vote power. Investment funds pay for Adam to access consensus and governance vote power. Validators work to earn atom in commissions and grow their consensus and governance vote power. The founding organizations, interchain.io and AllInbits, worked for years to earn consensus and governance vo…
doraintern:You can read more on aMACI development here: Pioneering Decentralized Governance: A Retrospective on DoraHacks’ MACI/aMACI Study and Implementation | by DoraHacks | Mar, 2024 | Medium
Definitely loved what we read out there. This greatly comfort us in supporting your team’s participation in this voting system. This is interestingly similar to some of the designs we had in mind for a “Govmos” chain we envisioned a couple of years ago. It’s fun to see that good ideas always find their way to the market. We’ll be happy to collaborate and share ideas with you regarding Dora Vota. Please reach out to us via [email protected] to set a meeting.
Also thank you for the clarifications. Even though we still think the community should further debate on CW versus DoraVota PSS deployment, we are now more in-line with your proposition.