PIP-23: Switch governance to an Optimistic Council

Paladin Improvement Protocol (PIP)
1

TL-DR: Move governance to an optimistic council governance structure

Context:
The current setup for managing the protocol, scaling it efficiently, incentivizing contribution and enforcing responsibility on decision makers is untenable as has been discussed in the previous research post. This was corroborated by a 92% turnout in the designated poll.

Proposed changes:
The idea is to give more free reins to councilors (new designation for signers) on daily operations while raising the barriers on high strategic impact tasks. In practice this means lowering the multisig to 7 signers and migrating the PAL behind a governor contract. Effectively this means the 52% of the supply still controlled by the DAO and yet to be allocated will be unruggable without a full-blown governance vote (which is ~80% of the total treasury).

Changes for signers:

  • Signers will now be expected to have a much more active role in the management of Paladin as a DAO, and will be in charge of vote incentives, PoL management, collecting and swapping fees, giving out grants, respecting predefined budget, and writing PGMs to always have the necessary amount of incentives for our daily operations. In exchange for these extra actions, there will be retribution 1000$ in PAL (30 day TWAP) for simple councilors, and 1500$ in PAL (30 day TWAP) for specialized councilors.

  • There is no pre-defined specialization but any candidate during the election can mention they intend to participate in a specific fashion. Specialization elections will be done by the council during their first call.

  • Councilors are expected to be elected with a program that they will push in order for Paladin to strive over the 6 months of their mandate.

  • A report of all transactions with justifications is to be submitted on the forums on a monthly basis.

Changes for delegates:

  • Delegate pay is expected to be maintained and renewed until the end of the year.

  • Delegates can but are not expected to write PGMs (ie: this is not and will not be retro-actively awarded unless a service provider deal is voted beforehand).

  • You can cumulate a delegate and councilor position, but one of the two pays will have to be relinquished.

Changes for all stakeholders:

$hPAL stakeholders have the right to create a PIP to call for the removal of a signer (and his replacement) if they are able to justify incompetence, toxicity or malevolence from a councilor.

Governance Process changes:

  • PGMs, PIPs and PEPs are maintained for now, and will evolve if needed.

  • Vote will still happen on Snapshot for now, with a new module enabling to execute on-chain actions. This will be necessary as all of the DAO’s PAL will be under a governor contract. As time passes, we will push more and more assets and contract management into this governor, with the goal of making Paladin a fully decentralized organization.

Means:

  • Implement oSnap or SafeSnap (the best for our specific use-case);
  • Enable dynamic quorum on our snapshot space;
  • Move 0x1Ae6DCBc88d6f81A7BCFcCC7198397D776F3592E under a governor contract and migrate all assets outside of PAL to 0xb95A4779CceDc53010EF0df8Bf8Ed6aEB0E8c2B2;
  • Reduce signer number from 9 to 7 on the following multi-sigs:
    • 0xb95A4779CceDc53010EF0df8Bf8Ed6aEB0E8c2B2
    • 0x8E4aD455225Dae1A78AB375FCb9eD9d94A4BE859
  • Implement Gnosis Guild on all the above multi-sigs;
  • Run a new full councilor election for the seven genesis members;

Voting Options:
For / Against / Abstain / Rework proposal

  • For
  • Against
  • Abstain
  • Rework
0 voters
3 Likes
2

These seems to be no other comments on top of the research post. Vote will be pushed in 24 hours if no other issues arise

3

Hello, sorry for the late reply.

While some minor changes have been made compared to the initial post, there are still several topics for which I’m against this proposal in its current form and would like to see it reworked.

One of the feedback on the last proposal was to work on an onboarding & compensation framework for anyone that wants to participate in the DAO, and increase signers compensation which has been less than 50$/month for a long time .

However, you’re proposing that in addition of the full scope of signers (which is already really heavy and will only increase as Paladin will deploy on more chains), they should also take the role of a grant committee (supposed to receive, analyze & distribute grants requests), and the role of service provider (writing proposals on governance Ops & treasury management) + the monthly report so a lot more work.

Moreover, this will mostly centralize decisions between a small group (for which we don’t even know who will be the members yet since you want to cancel PIP-22 approving the auto renewal of the best & known signers).

This also ensures that no one (outside of the councils & core team) has incentives to get involved & propose new improvements/strategies (proposals which might go against core team plans as seen a few times on this forum).

The worst part is proposing the community to do 3 jobs (or 4 if you include delegates) but only get paid for one, especially in a volatile asset & for a value way below the actual worth for this scope of work.

This is also additional work which seems unnecessary considering transactions are already labeled on Den. All it requires is making the signers channels public (still don’t understand why they are not already tbh) and anyone on discord will be able to verify transactions in real time, with a description & link.

Delegates are the most active governance contributors and should be compensated if they work on writing new proposals.

In practice, considering I’m the only delegate who also writes proposals & who is part of the signers, and with the reactions/reflexions you had on my retroactive grant request, it looks like you wanna make sure I have no interest in staying as much involved as now.

“Toxicity or malevolence” wtf

As you behaved in an aggressive way, saying to me multiple times over the past weeks that I’m “toxic” because I disagree with you, despite that I’m one of the most involved contributors of your project, hard to think it’s not aiming at me.

Even if you say it’s not, saying anyone can make a proposal based on its personal judgment about a councilor independently of his performance is not appropriate.

According to the feedback we got from the UMA team member on the previous post, implementing this will only be useful in very small cases, since time sensitive transactions (which represent the majority of transactions for Paladin DAO) are not possible, meaning we’ll have to use a Safe for most txs anyway

You already proposed to regroup multisigs in the past & several community members answered they wanted to keep assets locked & liquid separated…

Also we can’t move everything as there are LIT & SAFE vestings for approx 2/3 years left

Maybe we can add the main multisig as admin of the governor contract so PAL tokens are not on the multisig anymore but it allows us to keep some flexibility & doesn’t force us to implement SafeSnap from my understanding ?

Not sure why you insist on bypassing the signers rotation framework recently approved, especially if you want to increase the scope that much, we’re already struggling to find a few new members just for transactions. Also, as said last time, I don’t really like reducing the multisig treshold too.

Yes we’re struggling to get txs signed lately, but it’s mostly because some have left (not active anymore) & there are nearly no incentives for others signers to be available all the time (especially as you launched txs at random times lately)

Before proposing to change everything & raise signers/councilors’ jobs by a lot, we should just try to reward signers with fair compensation for the responsibility, availability & skills it requires and see if it improves the situation.

We should also find ways to attract more participants in the governance, not the opposite.

I hope this proposal will be reworked.

4

Indeed, proposal has been up for 11 days and is going for vote tomorrow…
There is a lot of hidden accusations but let’s try to use facts to answer them:

1. This is an act of centralization by the core team
Over the past 18 months of governance Paladin has not advanced one single bit towards more decentralization, nor technically, nor socially. This proposal aims to solve this. Don’t you find it paradoxical to accuse us of centralizing the project while refusing any new initiative?
Additionally, challenge periods are recommended to be 1-3 day. Knowing that this would be exclusively used to access PAL budget and, later on, parameters, this seems entirely reasonable.

2. This gives much more work for signers
Yes, this is the foundation of the proposal: empower a select number of contributors to be much more active. It would effectively 20x their pay and become a real spending line for the DAO. I think it is however important to highlight that the amount of expected work isn’t as high as you make. In 18 months we have distributed one grant (reviewed 5), writing a proposal per week + reports.
Now, you just said the reports could be automated on Den (and thank you for the recommendation of making it public, we’ll enable this), so that would mean that seven people would have to collectively write 4 proposals, sign a few transactions and review a grant quarter. Is 1000-1500$ honestly insufficient? If so, I am sorry but we live in different worlds financially speaking

Councilors will become the most active ones, but delegates are more than welcome to participate, they just won’t be paid for it.

3. On toxicity

Just to be clear, are you saying we should tolerate unacceptable behaviours in the DAO’s workspace? Insulting, diminishing or harassing in unacceptable and we should strive to make collaboration as healthy as possible between contributors. We can modify this to simply implement a very traditional Code of Conduct. And even then the proposal has to actually pass for the councilor to be kicked, would why anyone support a proposal kicking a perfectly good contributor if it isn’t well founded?

Sure, we can do this, but the goal is to reduce risk over the PAL supply.

Considering treasury under management is going down by 6x and we’re adding a timelock on some functions, it should be a no brainer. We do not need 9 signers, it is too much considering both the amount in the treasury without PAL and the size of our community.

The interpretation of this vote is entirely wrong. We are not changing everything, just adding a timelock and empowering signers into a new role with fair compensation. Everything else still stands. Additionally, 7 active councilors will be better than the current situation.

Feel free to keep giving suggestions, but the proposal will be pushed as planned, we are not waiting another 11 days for them.

5

https://signal.paladin.vote/#/proposal/0x0d7d05bb57dc803d05230e5e61cf2eb363c9b8de440ce31e2e8af30d3c2c3826

6

Quorum PIP-23: 1 091 392 votes.

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