The DAO needs a cost efficient and sufficiently secure way to submit and vote on small proposals.
Gas costs are arguably the biggest obstacle limiting governance participation in the DAO. We’ve already addressed this problem for smaller token holders using delegation and voting blocs. See the university group voting bloc as an example. But we haven’t addressed the problem for small proposals.
A proposal costs hundreds to even more than a thousand dollars in gas to propose, vote on, and execute, depending on gas prices. This is fine for large proposals on the order of 50k USDC or more. It’s even justified because there is a lot of money at stake so the security is necessary. But it’s incredibly inefficient for smaller proposals.
For example, if a DAO member wants to make a 10k USDC proposal and it costs $1k in gas from start to finish then the DAO has effectively paid a 10% governance fee on that proposal.
Also worth considering, is whether the same level of security is necessary for a 10k USDC proposal as is for a 100k USDC proposal. Probably not. It still needs to be sufficiently secure but with less at risk it’s reasonable to accept a lighter weight voting solution for a small proposal.
I suggest that the community brainstorm and discuss what the best voting solution might be for smaller proposals. This problem is an opportunity for the community, or a team outside the core technical team, to handle so that we don’t distract the core tech team from working on more important things like Airnode and revenue generating services.
Some potential solutions to consider are:
- Using Snapshot, although exactly how the resulting decision would be executed on the authoritative DAO isn’t obvious
- Using Discourse polls that are built into the forum, although with that approach there is no obvious way to do voting by DAO voting power (staked API3 tokens)
I would love to see these ideas discussed and to hear other creative ideas as well to solve this problem. Smaller proposals means a more active DAO and more stuff gets done for API3. To summarize, it would be beneficial for the DAO, and increase decentralization, if we had a good way for smaller proposal to be done efficiently.