What in the World is a Recognized DAO Delegate? with Frank Cruz

hello hello all right let's do this hello everyone and welcome my name is Peyton I go by Pros 11 online and I am one of the governor's facilitators at maker Dao I am joined here by a bunch of awesome governance nerds in the field uh who have worked in lots of cool defy projects uh in the ecosystem and are here today to tell you what is delegation all about uh we have insights from people who have done delegation we have other people who have done governance research we hope this will just be a really cool panel for you to learn both like what delegation is like what are some considerations you should have as a governance mechanism uh as well some hopefully cool stories about uh what it actually looks like in practice so to kick us off here I'm just gonna have us go down one by one and have everybody introduce themselves for my panelists uh can you tell everyone your name what uh projects you work on governance at and uh one thing you think everyone should know about delegation and uh you have to go first Frank so good luck thanks man uh good afternoon everybody my name is Frank I represent flip flop flap delegate loc these are all co-functions in the maker dial smart contract so yes I'm with maker Dao and your question was uh can you name one thing you think the audience should know about delegation political uh feisty uh nerve-wracking stressful but rewarding rewarding because we're trying to build something unique and hopefully we're writing the playbook for many Dows to be able to follow the same lead uh but it's been quite the adventure and we have a lot of work to do so I'll leave it with that uh hi ladies and gentlemen my name is Rafael I'm with Flipside crypto and Flipside governance arm uh that's one one story one quality just one thing you want to tell the audience about delegation just right off the bat what should they know so I think delegation on you know on an abstract level is simply uh representing the wishes of the people who delegate to you um then the the deeper questions how does that communication work or does it work at all but I think we can keep that question for a later time and I'll pass it over to my esteemed colleague colleague just in case thank you very Rafael like you said I go by the handle just in case obviously not my real name I'm an independent delegate I do not represent an organization um and I think the good thing about delegation is that it allows you to bridge that information Gap that you can quite often find in this space because it's really hard to be an expert in every field but delegates can help trying to tie these loose ends together because you have people who are dedicated to actually going into the details of every case and making informed decisions so I think it benefits both token holders and the ecosystem as a whole uh is the audio is really bad here right I can't barely hear anything okay hi my name is Tim I'm with make a doll for I don't know a couple of years I've been running as a solo Delegate for about a year and switched my role recently to just advising and other delegate entities so I'm out of the fire I hope um so what is delegation or what was the original question one thing they should know about delegation well if you wouldn't have voter apathy I think there would be no need for voter delegation uh so uh it's it's fighting gold empathy I think or compensating against it hi I'm Meg I'm actually not a delegate I'm on the other side of the table building governance systems internally at Dows including metric style and rehash down one thing about delegation is I think it's inherently a political system and so designing better delegation systems is like designing better political systems awesome hopefully that gives you a chance to know uh who's talking today and a little bit about their backgrounds um I think we're all familiar with just the vague idea of Delegation right when it's not political the idea that you want something done and you need to have someone else do it for you but it really does take on kind of a different life of its own when you bring in token governance uh Community decisions and all this other things the delegation so I might actually reverse the order and start with you Megan as you governance design and delegation like what should people be considering like what drawbacks and what trade-offs are they making when you go from Ascension from A system that has delegation from one that doesn't have delegation to one that does sorry yeah oh that's such a great question to start off with um I think the major Pro when you go from a system without delegations one with delegation is that you are competing butter apathy a little bit um and most importantly you're bringing in subject matter experts hopefully on the issues that are super relevant and important to your job but you may not have a ton of subject matter experts in those subjects in your community um on the other side a lot of people talk about delegation as a way to prevent voter apathy and we do see ways in which we can combat Federal apathy with delegation but I think that's only when delegates are a incredibly active we have a lot of like seat filler delegates right now and B that they're incredibly communicative with the people that they're representing through their delegation and so that's the major danger I think of Delegation is disconnect between delegates and the people that they are representing uh that's such a cool thread and uh it should be a welcome to you but uh go for it first yeah I'm just not I don't know uh I don't think this this disconnect is a new problem because I think we had this problem before and now we have it I mean we could solve this problem by having a really active conversation between delegators and delegates but at least from my perspective this is not not happening at all because most people delegating actually just don't want to interact um so I don't know if this is really a new problem um I don't I don't have to have any intelligent to add to this question to be honest I'd rather skip over you have something Justin no no no I'll give you a little prompt actually um so what's really interesting to me about delegation is ultimately it's a coordination mechanism right like there's two sides to it so we talked about one side of like okay there's delegates that don't even vote right uh fortunately we have a recognized delegate program maker that has done pretty good with ensuring voter participation uh you guys are obviously delegates that participate a lot but I'm curious on your end what are some of the challenges going back the other way where it's like how much uh feedback do you really get from delegators how much reach do you feel like you can actually get to token holders especially ones that you're not intimately familiar with yeah um I'll I'll grab that shortly because I think that's that's like an excellent point especially when when you touch upon designing delegation systems is so people delegate because they don't want to vote and they don't want to deal with uh like they don't have the bandwidth to interact with the governance system why should they all of a sudden have the bandwidth three Deck with delegates so I think that there's a very interesting Communications design problem there and I don't really know what the solution is my personal Heart Take is that basically token weighted voting was basically slapped onto uh tokens as a utility and giving people the impression that they can steer the protocol going forward but then we see that in practice dangerous isn't that High I mean maybe somebody else wants to pitch in their yeah do you like to jump in here as well because I think there's fundamentally two different ways you can look at delegation you can either look at it as your personal representative from whoever is delegating tokens to you or you can look at it as a broader role where you're trying to make the best for for the protocol on a larger basis right and you ask a delegate try to put your mind to it and make the best kind of decision for the system as a whole um and my personal experience is with how much interaction you have with delegators is is very varied some simply don't want to communicate whatsoever and obviously they are looking for these communal model where they think the delegates will make sensible decisions on their behalf and there are some delegators who have opinions at least on some issues that comes and talk directly to you and say okay this we feel strongly about this and this we would prefer to go in this direction but I do think or my general impression is that that Gators by and large are fairly passive and I'm unsure if that's a good or a bad thing but but at least that's where we're at right now and I think there is room in the future to have delegates more openly tied to a given delegator as a representative and you will get more of a political scene with different delegators representing different interests or different directions maybe we're heading towards that world now in makerdale with the new system I'm very interested to see how that shakes up yeah we'll definitely coming back to some of that uh Frank uh kind of keeping up to you I'm curious how many of your delegates would you say that you know versus don't know and how do you deal with or delegators sorry and how do you deal with the fact that you may not know the intentions or wishes of a large portion of people you represent yeah that's a good question uh I actually only know one I have a decent amount of delegators that delegate to flip-flop flop delegate and I don't make it my business to go searching to see who delegated or what they're thinking or what their opinion is I think they've already given me the vote of confidence to go out there and perform for mkr token owners you know personally I started with the concept that governance tokens are for voting so way way before delegation came into play I was already voting I was one of the top five voters since 2019 or 2018 something like that um so I think we've gotten away from that uh from sending out the message that governance tokens are for voting that's what they're for so there are communities out there who do get a large turnout without delegates some super super happy when I see that but uh yeah I have no communication whatsoever with uh the delegators that delegate to my platform no that's uh super interesting because when you really like break down to it as as a delegate like your role is largely undefined I think I played a large role in bringing the delegation system to maker and we're honestly thinking of people like you when we thought about delegance right people were like listen they're going to show up they're going to be there to vote if other people who don't have time to vote you know why not give them the option to give it to someone who who's there a little more and hopefully that'll get more delegate participation or more voter participation um I'm curious babe do you guys run any metrics on like how uh delegation has been going throughout Protocols are there any sort of metrics you've been tracking for how uh adopted delegation has become or any sort of insight there because uh I've certainly seen systems similar to Makers pop up but it kind of felt like we were taking a stab in the dark a few years ago when we we said about it yeah I've actually gotta send this one back over to Raph because he's done much more research than I have here when we look at governance delegation systems like we're still looking to make her as the leader here for sure um I think it's very early and I'll toss it back to Ralph in case he's got any actual data to back that up thanks Meg so I think it's it's kind of hard to measure because for instance how would you design that that question like if you look at snapshots there's more than 80 000 spaces out of these 80 000 spaces just like less than one percent have delegation enabled but also out of these 80 000 spaces maybe 75 000 are actually spam spaces and that's where we we didn't go the lengths to really clean up that data to see like how much of the space is that are actually valid spaces enabled delegation what we did dive in was voter participation and looking at how much of the active circulating uh how much of the circulating Supply is active in voting in token spaces versus nft spaces and the nft space is actually outperformed token spaces so there seems to be something about nfts that people can identify with and this mode of identification then prompts people to to be more active because there is tied to their identity whereas token holders are like uh yeah I don't care number go up or if number goes I want to sell like in a nutshell basically no that's really interesting and really resonates with a lot of stuff roon has been talking about about creating meta or a sense of purpose within a community um which kind of brings me to chupi right you're a long time Community member you've been through uh decentralization with the Dow now you're seeing roon in proposals for in-game I'm curious how has maker changes throughout the years what what keeps you passionate about the org why do you keep showing up as a as a governance participant so for me it's basically a social experiment that we are running it's not so much about the product or the service that we deliver but more about how we organize ourselves as an organization uh because I think this is really something that's that's different from everything we've seen the last Millennials of uh of humans interacting together um and that's also something that I find especially exciting about the end game push is that it brings us much closer to this um optimal state from my point of view that we have essentially pretty a lot of pretty small autonomous cells that align to probably the same direction but each of them are really really independent in terms of how quickly they move and which direction they move and they just get um yeah constraints handed out by by the core essentially um but yeah it's right now we have a lot of micromanagement and essentially a very Central this organization by the core units and I think what's happening with subdials and yeah moving off a lot of the stuff out of the core into the ecosystem I think it's it's yeah it's bringing us closer to this uh really decentralized approach of the workforce right on that's really great to hear and uh Justin kind of coming from the opposite side I know I remember specifically interviewing you and being really excited feeling like our delegation program was finally taking off because here is someone who actually wanted to get involved because they had a political Viewpoint they wanted to kind of bring to the Dow I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what brought you into maker and how you feel maybe now all this time later as a delegate uh in terms of passion and uh what the job entails well thank you for that question Peyton let's um it's a little bit uh to be the I'm a token new guy right and I've been in this space for about as a delegate for about a year and a half now and I'm also one of the few that kind of came from the outside I came into this space primarily as a token holder so I have a pretty big interest in in token holders position and governance as a whole and less so on the technical aspects and the more nitty-gritty details of the organization but I also want to give there should be a little bit of a pushback here because even though what we're doing is you know on the edge and quite new I think we're also doing a bunch of stuff that is actually quite old because we are in many ways trying to ReDiscover governance in the same way that governments appeared back in the days with like small groupings that's only discovered they need to coordinate somehow you need to get a common idea together you need to get stuff done and you also need to do it in a space where the enforcement mechanisms doesn't necessarily exist so even though we were doing this kind of experience and we're also doing something new I think also harking back to the old days and even as a fairly fresh delegate and fairly fresh participant in this ecosystem I also think we have these dangers all the time right and and the space looks very different right now than it did when I first got into this um and even small subtle changes can have a big effect like the the just the distribution of tokens between different delegates can suddenly change trajectory of of how a dow moves right um so it's been it's been an extremely steep learning curve first of all getting into this is you know the first few months you're barely hanging on you're just trying to you know take everything in uh but even after that it's uh it's so much information you have to sift through because you need to stay on top of everything and even if you're away for like a week just keeping back up with all the foreign posts all the conversation that goes on in different channels uh find out where everyone's at it's a Monumental task uh and it's extremely exciting to be a part of but it's also a very demanding thing thanks Justin uh Frank I kind of want to queue you up with one when I first joined the community I really admired your energy you were the type of person that made me want to show up to calls and I felt like your faith and belief in both Gauss and maker was something that made it a really easy thing to commit to I'm wondering if you could give us like the bullish case for delegation uh going forward in the future why do you think what we're doing here is important um incentives if you can somehow incentivize delegation of governance tokens where they're going to receive some type of incentive for delegating it to delegates like us here um I think that's a benefit because this is a very very risky uh thing that we're doing here all of us and I think that anybody who's going to own a governance token should at least uh put it to work and use it for what it's meant for which is governing and in return they should get some kind of incentive back um myself personally when I was doing it on my own I never was thinking about an incentive I was just so excited about the concept of a decentralized organization that was able to make decisions just by the power of Unchained governance so is it was just so cool right even though like my vote wasn't going to swing the vote in a certain direction uh I was just I just felt so proud it's almost like people that love to go out and vote on November 4th right American elections but yeah I love it thanks fake all right uh and Meg hopefully I'll keep you up a little better with this one um yes bullish delegation awesome collaboration D5 things we can do but the reality as RAF said tons of protocols have voting very few have delegation of the ones that do have delegation uh a lot of those delegates don't participate so from a governance design perspective why is delegation so hard what what's going on I think I'm actually going to Echo Frank here again and say incentives like we don't have the right incentive alignments for voters or delegates yet um and so the only reason for voters to delegate right now is because that they recognize that they're doing a bad job voting and so they're really just doing it out of guilt and if we come up with more powerful incentives which don't have to be monetary like we really do need to think Beyond monetary incentives and make people do it from a place of advancing the protocol building something new together that's where we can really tap into something cool awesome so we got just a few minutes left on our panel here I'm wondering if uh particularly for some of the delegates if you guys have any regrets with how your delegation has gone so far um particularly if you have regrets about how the system was set up I'd love to hear them uh yeah it's kind of a hard one so I don't want to make someone go first but uh if no one volunteers it's you should be so maybe I'll I'll just throw one thing in there and that's I think delegation has been awesome in a lot of ways for us and and helped us learn a lot about how dowels operate on a very high level which is great I think in some place it's it's has become this weird middle manager function where you are also caught between a rock and a hard place because basically on the one side is the the workforce or the the contributors will actually run the Dow and on the other side are your delegators that don't even talk to you but then are also mad if you make the wrong decisions and and this is a a weird dynamic that I like never expected to see in Dallas and reminds me more of corporate life so if we could streamline that process a little bit that would certainly uh make me more bullish of the future for of this particular model what was the question again do you have any regrets regrets becoming a delegate um well I I think the the main point to fix about delegation is not really about the system How We Do delegation it's about attracting delegators because uh I think the every every point of of con you would put on the list for why delegation sucks right now will be solved eventually automatically as soon as we have really lots of delegators in there because then we create basically a free market on delegates and then the best fitting delegates Will Survive and the ones that are just there for the money will not survive um but as long as we don't have a lot of delegators outside and I think we are not a lot better than we have been a year before we essentially we have roon and then nothing yeah and then once more VC or two small VCS and that's it uh but with that we are not going to create a creative market around good delegations or good delegators so yeah well my regret is uh I woke up on a Sunday morning uh and the vote was ending either that Sunday or Monday morning and it was a budget for swag it was uh 800 000 die it's a lot of money for swag and I kind of had like the voting weight to swing the vote a certain way and when I think about it uh I probably shouldn't had allowed the Dow to spend that much money on swag uh but so yeah but I'll take the hit on that you know sometimes you you make the wrong choices so that's probably one of my regrets but um and if you're wondering why we have drinks on stage is because we have this Shameless plug we have this uh little uh Vlog or one day podcast hopefully called drinks with maker delegates where we want to start interviewing everyone in D5 so same company rebranded as maker tube on lens makertube.lens coming soon um and yeah you can have any kind of drink it doesn't have to be alcohol KBT could be Cafe so hopefully you guys will join us but we're running out of time any last parting words I just wanted to thank everyone for coming out to the panel today cheers to our panelists especially um and yeah just a little reflection on how much easier life is in retrospective so don't be too hard on yourself and go back out there to building cool things thanks everybody cheers thank you [Applause] [Music]