Snapshot Voting: Should we only use GIVpower?

Giveth Proposals
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On the Governance call June 24, 2024 @Griff brought up an interesting topic related to how we should handle voting power in our Snapshot.

He proposed we should make 2 changes:

  • Consider only GIVpower, not unstaked GIV tokens to be worth voting power.
  • Remove rGIV from being considered in our voting power calculations.

Let’s breakdown the first proposed change.

Only GIVpower

This change would mean that your GIV tokens will need to be stacked and/or locked in GIVpower in order to be used in our Snapshot as voting power. This would be similar to how the original GIVgarden was designed for voting. However using GIVpower also has an interesting new feature, the longer you lock up your GIV in GIVpower, the more voting power you have!

This change would give GIVernance preference to those who are invested in GIV and Giveth for the long-term and help build upon the utility of GIVpower to not only boost projects but also to govern the Giveth DAO!

Some cons we identified were 2 things:

  • GIV tokens on mainnet will never have voting power, because GIVpower is not available on mainnet, and probably will never be.
  • Potentially we will have a smaller pool of eligible voters on Snapshot proposals since holders are required to stake their tokens.

Despite these minor disadvantages I still believe this would be an interesting change to how we handle voting power.

Remove rGIV from Snapshot

This second proposal would be to remove any voting strategies we use to calculate someone’s rGIV holdings on Optimism. Effectively this would mean that rGIV has no voting power in Snapshot.

The rationale behind this change is that all rGIV holders have received GIV tokens in the form of vesting, and future opportunities to acquire GIV through Equity and hopefully praise rewards will give sufficient opportunity for community members to acquire voting power.

Coupled with only using GIVpower in Snapshot this would simplify our voting calculations, our governance processes, while boosting the utility of GIV and GIVpower.

However, removing this utility of rGIV means rGIV has no real utility and likely as a result we will halt any distribution process of rGIV for the foreseeable future.

Next Steps

I’d like to open this conversation up to the Giveth community. What are some pros and cons that were not discussed here? Do you agree or disagree with this proposal? Now is the time to have your voice heard! This post will remain up for advice process for minimum 5 days and will move to a Snapshot vote for final voting & ratification.

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I think an interesting thing to mention that makes this GIVpower voting power different from the original GIVgarden staking voting is that your GIVpower is the sum of staked & lock tokens on all eligible chains. Right now that includes Gnosis & OP Mainnet, and in the near future it will also consider GIV staked & locked on Polygon zkEVM.

In general I think that using GIVpower is the central governance power is a great idea, as it potentially increases TVL in Giveth conrracts, and rewards our active users (stakers) instead of just speculators or wallet hodlers with governance power.

I think most people who vote now anyway are staking at least some of their GIV!

Wrt to rGIV - do we still have a pot of funds in a multisig that is supposed to be controlled by nrGIV holders? Perhaps we should consider building a secondary snapshot strategy that allows rep token holders to control the use of those funds… As it was kind of designed this way from the onset of the GIVeconomy.

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I like the idea. we can try it and see how it goes. (i was (am?) on another that does stake voting, i think its smart, and theirs has no other use, while givpower has meaning)

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^^^ I agree with this, we have a few GIVstreams that are still going to the rGIV DAO, if we want to stop using the rGIV DAO to manage those streams, that would take an rGIV DAO vote to give up that power.

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Yes! Agree with this. I voted on the “keep rGIV and change GIV to GIVpower” in the snapshot… but only because I disagree that we can just have this vote and say “no more rGIV distributions” as a subtext.

It’s ok imo to remove rGIV from the snapshot strategy that controls the GIVgarden multisig GIV, but we need to separately handle the “rGIV” allocation bucket set at-launch of the GIVeconomy.

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Vote Update

Voting passed on this proposal July 10th with an outcome of YES TO EVERYTHING. As a result I’ve setup the strategies and made a test vote in our testing snapshot instance, you can check it out here:

https://snapshot.org/#/divinecomedian.eth/proposal/0xd5db197b786353cafdea59a13f46f0feb28e5f6c330438eb68b40e3a6d2f15bd

I tested it out and it appears to be working correctly, if we find any issues we can rectify it before going ahead and changing the main snapshot instance.

If it all goes well, I will make the changes to our main snapshot voting strategies.

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