Community Gas Fund

Ideas
1

I’d like to see a development gas fund managed by the community multisig which could be funded for now by SAI reserves. There are two current uses for these funds that come to mind:

  1. Subsidizing gas fees for new contract deployments. These deployment fees have really gone up and I can imagine smaller users sometimes being reluctant to spend $200 ETH to deploy a new contract.
  2. I am almost done building up a rest api that will accept delegate and vote sigs and batch relay them (made very easy thanks to Adam B). If the community gas fund could pay for the gas here, all users would be able to participate in governance for free. I strongly believe that voting should be free for the end users.

If the community agrees, we can append a withdraw from reserves to the community multisig on the next proposal.

5 Likes
2

Thank you for opening this topic. I’m not sure it has enough SAI reserves to support both use cases.
it seems that it has 29,300 SAI in reserves. right?

how long we can support these options with the current fund level?
(maybe we can use COMP saved from reducing comp emission rate in the future)

3

Very timely given the the insanely high gas fees right now. I have the same question as @dakeshi - how sustainable would it be to use SAI reserves? If we are going to quickly run through them and will be on the same boat soon after it may not be worth it, otherwise, think this makes sense.

4

New contract deployments sounds like rational usage. but I would strongly suggest AGAINST subsidy for user-voting. AS it will encourage people with like 0,05 COMP to vote. Cause it’s free, isn’t? Well it’s not actually free, somebody actually pay for those “free” transactions and that money could be spend on something ACTUALLY useful for protocol. We better donate to Red Cross or WWF which is better spending of that money than paying fees to miners for transaction which doesn’t even matter if it actually exist or not, as it’s not deciding anything.

And you can’t really expect people to act responsibly on money which isn’t from their pocket. I’d say don’t do that, if some 0,1 COMP minority want to spend their own money to do a vote instead of spending that same money to buy another 0,1 COMP instead they could very well do that. But reserves shouldn’t be wasted in such irresponsible way.

I support your good intentions, but i rather have some simple voting-UI implemented, which just look at user wallet and calculate their votes, rather than using on-chain transaction for every possible voting and putting subsidy on top of it.

At same time it’s possible vector of attack, somebody could split 0,01 COMP amond 1000 addresses, cast a vote from all of them and burn a hole lot of “community fund”. And while it doesn’t look great thing to do, there is always somebody out there who will do, just because they can.

1 Like
5

I believe that using SAI reserves would be a semi temporary solution; however, it will go a long way. We could take around 20k more SAI out of the reserves and be fine which is about $50k worth of ETH. By the time we come anywhere near depleting SAI from gas usage, hopefully we will have a more sustainable solution.

6

Yes, I have thought about this. I’d probably limit free voting to those with at least 1 COMP delegated at the start of the proposal. Additionally, I would limit delegating COMP to those with at least 1 COMP in their wallet and you can only delegate once a week. Governance participation is very important and I believe that it should be subsidized by the protocol.

7

Half of the gas fund should be in gas tokens to account for fluctuations in gas price (since only half of gas can be refunded). The easiest way to attain this is to redeem the sai reserves for eth, and spend half of it on CHI. But we could go further and deposit the ETH+CHI in Mooniswap, which currently compounds at 0.5% daily interest. This high-interest mutual fund could pay all deployment fees indefinitely.

1 Like
8

For governance voting, I’ve seen @pyggie mentioned snapshot solution before in discord:

Snapshot is a cool tool. Off chain voting based on token balance snapshots. Simple web UI for proposals and voting, multiple choice votes, shows results of vote so far.

I think that there are some advantages for snapshot solution:

  • Taking snapshot based on the creation time of the proposal can be used for identifying voting participants.
  • we don’t need to spend fund to support gas fee for voting activity

(I’m not sure what kinds of disadvantages has for this snapshot solution)

hope to see CAP to implement snapshot based voting tool.

2 Likes