GIP-48: Should GnosisDAO implement the Praise reward system around the Gnosis Chain Validator program?

Governance GIPs
1

GIP-48: Should GnosisDAO implement the Praise reward system around the Gnosis Chain Validator program?

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GIP: 48

title:Should GnosisDAO implement the Praise reward system for the Gnosis Chain Validator program?

author:Tex Boonjue, John Szczepaniak, Kristofer Lund, Liviade Deschermayer

status:Phase-3

type:Funding

created:2022-05-25

updated to Phase 3: 2022-06-03

Snapshot: https://snapshot.org/#/gnosis.eth/proposal/0x012d04c8351991da79e92f4088527c76b6139b9aa0b71772b704b587d2c9c0e3

Phase 3 Snapshot vote here.

Phase 1 of this proposal can be viewed here.

Phase 2 of this proposal can be viewed here.

The Praise reward system evolved out of the Giveth communities’ experiments with Reward DAO and the Commons Stack’s iteration on the system. TEC currently employs Praise and it has become an important component of maintaining the overall health of their community.

It was developed as a way to value the contributions of community members. When a community member notices that someone has done something to help the community, they can “dish praise” to that community member by sending a message that starts with “!praise” or “/praise” in discord or “!dish praise to/for” in Telegram acknowledging who made what contribution.

We believe that the Praise system can benefit and grow the Gnosis Chain validator community. Verified validators in the Gnosis Chain and GnosisDAO Discord can earn small amounts of GNO for helping community members and for onboarding those interested in running a validator. The criteria for what is helpful is broad.

The rules for the GnosisDAO Praise system will be a modified version of the original Commons Stack bot. Only verified members of the Gnosis Chain validator community will have the ability to award and receive praise. Additionally, a small working group will quantify and evaluate praise data (“quantifier”) to gain insights into validator community sentiment and to decrease the likelihood of any foul play. Praise data (and the insights contained therein) will be published monthly. Quantifiers will be rewarded in GNO for each quant pool they successfully participate in.

This proposal was inspired by the Avado community, which helps to secure the Gnosis Chain with their plug and play validators. The Avado community currently uses Praise in their Telegram with great success. You can visit Avado here.

For more detailed information about the rules of Praise and quantification, please visit this TEC forum post on the topic. There was a significant amount of groundwork that went into making this proposal. Additionally, this Dune Analytics Dashboard tracks the number of validators and validator deposits on the GBC.

Abstract

At the time of this writing, there are approximately 100K GBC Validators, which is second only to the number of Ethereum validators. Nurturing a positive validator community will encourage more participants to become validators. This will increase diversity and decentralization of the GBC consensus layer in addition to furthering the GnosisDAO brand.

Motivation

Community participation rates could be improved by encouraging positive member interactions between and among the Gnosis Chain validator community. An incentivized system that recognizes and rewards those who do good - who embody the values and ethos of Web3 - will encourage more participants to become validators.

Specification

The total budget for the GIP is 22,000 USD paid mostly in GNO. Rewarding members of the validator community in GNO will help to distribute governance rights for GnosisDAO. Additionally, as 1 GNO is required to spin up a validator, receiving GNO as a reward may encourage the community member to run more validators. Funds will be allocated as follows:

7,000 USD (paid in xDAI) to Commons Stack for the following:

  • Server setup (Digital Ocean)
  • Discord bot setup
  • Development of custom features
    • Option to restrict praising to discord channel of choice (bot currently run on all channels)
    • Option to make quantifier assignment manual (it is currently always randomized)
  • Praise admin / quantifier training
  • Setting up of RAD Dashboard (for displaying Praise data)
    • Minor adjustments if needed to produce the insights you need
    • Analysis session after first quant
  • Full support, 2 months
    • Server maintenance
    • Praise and quantification support
    • Advisory as needed
  • Project management / coordination

$10,000 USD worth of GNO will be allocated to the Praise bot and rewarded to the validator community for their contributions. Praise receivers will receive between $1 - $10 worth of GNO per praise. The amount received will be based on the quality of the contribution, which will be determined by the quantifier working group.

$5,000 USD worth of GNO will be allocated to the quantifier working group. The exact amount of GNO quantifiers will receive per quantification round is TBD but will be in proportion to the amount of Praise quantified and will not exceed $10 worth of GNO per round.

GnosisDAO Snapshot

Phase 3 Snapshot vote here: Snapshot

UPDATE: October 3, 2022 – Breakdown and Distribution of Funds (Audit Purposes)

  • 7,000 USD (paid in xDAI) to Commons Stack for the below services and which is to be sent to their wallet address: 0xfa4EE6B523fC1E8B53015D7D81331d568CDb5906

    • Server setup (Digital Ocean)
    • Discord bot setup
    • Development of custom features
      • Option to restrict praising to discord channel of choice (bot currently run on all channels)
      • Option to make quantifier assignment manual (it is currently always randomized)
    • Praise admin / quantifier training
    • Setting up of RAD Dashboard (for displaying Praise data)
      • Minor adjustments if needed to produce the insights you need
      • Analysis session after first quant
    • Full support, 4 months
      • Server maintenance
      • Praise and quantification support
      • Advisory as needed
    • Project management / coordination

  • $10,000 USD worth of GNO (at market prices on date of distribution) to the Praise bot and sent to the GIP-48 Praise Safe. This amount is allocated to the validator community for their contributions. Praise receivers will receive between $1 - $10 worth of GNO per praise. The amount received will be based on the quality of the contribution, which will be determined by the quantifier working group.

    • Address: 0x96CB77D7d06D69cA161c3c144281F6EC5812Ac9C

  • $5,000 USD worth of GNO (at current market prices) to the quantifier working group sent to the GIP-48 Praise Safe. This amount will be allocated to the quantifier working group. The exact amount of GNO quantifiers will receive per quantification round is TBD but will be in proportion to the amount of Praise quantified and will not exceed $10 worth of GNO per round.

    • Address: 0x96CB77D7d06D69cA161c3c144281F6EC5812Ac9C
7 Likes
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Looks great. Im in to help in this channel however posssible

4 Likes
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Help in channels is welcome ofc, and community has a large impact on success. And I would appreciate to reward helpful advice, but I am not convinced that these formalized kind of reward structure is helpful in long term. Some kind of tipping bot, where every user can gift some of his own funds for valuable help seems more appropriate to me.

2 Likes
4

In my opinion, the main goals of this proposal are 1) to grow the number of GBC validators. The more validators, the more decentralized the GBC becomes. This is a real issue and one that was recently echoed in this twitter post by Martin, which touches on Lido staking as a centralizing force for Ethereum;

  1. Praise rewards would be paid in GNO. As a mechanism to distribute the governance token for the GnosisDAO, it would be a step towards achieving the goal of putting governance power in the hands of more people. More specifically, validators are a key and critical part of the GBC. Should the Praise reward system result in elevating their voice with regards to governance, even if it’s small, I believe that would benefit the overall health of the GnosisDAO.

Those are two important goals that require intention and effort. There is also a time cost associated with providing high-quality assistance, a comment mentioned in the original post. People should be compensated for that. We shouldn’t rely on the supposed goodwill of others to potentially tip them for their help.

4 Likes
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For sure it’s welcome to have as much participation in validating gbc as possible and if this proposal will help doing this it’s clearly worth the effort.

And I completely agree that that there is a time cost associated with high quality assistance. But the praise rewards, although a nice to have feature, will never compensate for this, it will still require much enthusiasm of participants that most likely do this in their free time from not so bad payed jobs.

Moreover, if I get the numbers right, only 10k are paid as rewards to contributors, while a little more than half of the funds seems to be necessary for setup and administration.

But anyway, I don’t mind to give it a try, curious to see if support will be changed by this.

Would this work only at the #gc-validator channel in the gnosisDAO Discord or also in the different other channels (especially gnosis-chain and dappnode Discords as these have also dedicated gbc channels) that provide help for validators?

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It would be implemented in both the Gnosis Chain and GnosisDAO Discord server.

Commons Stack is requesting 7K in xDai to implement Praise. The rest of the funds would go towards rewards for contributors. We wanted to keep the requested amount modest as a first step. As a comparison, the AVADO community, which uses Praise, has around 150 active members. Right now, the Gnosis Chain and GnosisDAO Discord servers are fairly quiet with regards to participation around running a validator.

1 Like
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maybe it’s quiet there due to the high quality support. I used to be there more often till I got my validators running…no issues since January;-).
And just had a look at the gbc channel at dappnode discord (seems more comparable to avado), it’s not so quiet there.

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I lead the development of Praise over at Commons Stack and am happy to answer any questions. To begin with I’d like to add som context.

The sole purpose of Praise is not only that of distributing rewards in a fair way. It is also about building culture by acknowledging the contributions other community members make. It serves as a rich source of information about what goes on in the community. All in all, we believe Praise contributes to strengthening the social fabric within the community. And… we have … not the numbers … but the reasonably happy communities to prove it. :joy: Praise is currently in use in Token Engineering Commons, Giveth and Commons Stack.

Best way to feel the Praise is to do like @boonjue.eth and join the TEC discord. Have a look in the praise channel, join in on a post quantification analysis session.

Discord, Token Engineering Commons :point_right: Token Engineering Commons

The Praise web is still quite bare bones but has a reasonable summary of the Praise process and goals with the system.

:pray:

3 Likes
9

Hey refri, I only have anecdotal evidence to support my position that a reward system like Praise is beneficial to the community at large. Since joining the Avado community last year, I have witnessed a seemingly exponential growth in users on their platform. Surely this is due to many factors but it’s hard for me to discount the impact Praise has had. Subjectively, it is a great feeling to receive high-quality, thoughtful, speedy and patient support. Similarly, it’s nice to feel appreciated for providing such support. It’s win-win all around. I think the Praise system can serve as a means to jump start this “culture of gratitude” that @kristofer spoke to above. If you jump into the Token Engineering Commons Token Engineering Commons Discord, I’m sure you will at the very least get a taste of it.

Like @john_szczepaniak mentioned, compensation from GnosisDAO in GNO tokens seems appropriate here. The mutual support from Gnosis’s members directly benefits GnosisDAO via furthering decentralization. Thus, compensation from GnosisDAO seems appropriate. Also, rewards in GNO will increase the likelihood of recipients setting up more validators.

As far as the cost-benefit analysis of high quality help goes, people tend to help as much as they can and in accordance with their expertise level. As more people join the platform, the chances of someone not receiving appropriate help will go down. These positive network effects are seen in swarm support models as opposed to tiered support models. So the more people actively engaged on the platform (for now Discord), the better the support.

3 Likes
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Thanks for the explanation, also to @kristofer an @john_szczepaniak. For sure it’s an interesting system and worth to have a look at. But as this looking also has a time cost;-) I will wait to see it implemented in the Gnosis channels to see how it will work, also this will enable me to see a ‘before’ and ‘after’ which seems more relevant to me as to look in some other channels I haven’t been before. As I said before, I don’t mind to give it a try, will clearly support this for an appropriate testing phase.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the constructive feedback!

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@Viszla @refri @john_szczepaniak @ernst and everyone else who voted for (or against) the forum poll – there are only 3 days left for the Snapshot vote and we still need ~31k GNO votes to meet quorum so please go vote – even if it’s against the proposal.

Allow your voice to be heard. Have a say in the direction of this DAO. Be a part of something. Whether you agree or disagree with this proposal, let it be known!

3 Likes
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Done ser. Godspeed and good luck

1 Like