Hey all Great to see the coordination behind this proposal! It’s awesome to see the engagement and kudos to @clearloop @all_in_radicle @dhejrdlf1 for championing it. Wanted to hop in and provide some thoughts before this moves to Formal Review.
To start:
I feel that the main message behind this proposal is that the community wants to see a wider distribution of voting power. I completely agree I actually believe it’s necessary for the network to be further decentralized among its community to ensure resilience & long-term sustainability. I don’t, however, agree that the most productive way for the project to distribute more governing power is via an airdrop to LBP participants.
My reasoning:
-
What is the benefit of distributing more RAD to LBP holders vs. other parties? As @burial @onur @jebba @bordumb @imrane and others pointed out — why should governing power be distributed to LBP participants vs. everyone else? LBP participants are definitely a MUCH appreciated segment of the Radicle community as some of the first token holders, but there are many other segments who are currently contributing to the network in other ways. This includes seed node operators, those contributing via the Seeders program, those contributing to Radicle docs and codebases, earliest adopters (in terms of users!), and community members participating in moderation, governance, and development discussions.
I personally want to see governing power distributed to:
- Active governance participants (those who vote and participate in discussions/Snapshots - like those in this thread!)
- Seed node operators (those who improve the reliability and availability of the network)
- Contributors (technical and non-technical)
- Users
I’d argue that investing time into the development of long-term community incentivization programs to reward these parties would benefit the project more than a one-off airdrop to only LBP participants. Additionally, I think it’s important to note that these programs would probably end up rewarding LBP participants as well! It’s clear there’s a strong community of individuals who joined during the LBP that are interested in supporting the project in the long-term. I think these holders should be rewarded, I just don’t think that the airdrop outlined in this proposal is the most strategic, high-impact, or risk-adverse way to do that.
-
How would we ensure that an airdrop to LBP participants wouldn’t “harm” the network more than “help”? Distributing tokens introduces more actors to the system. Since there is no way to determine the “intent” of LBP participants besides if they are still holding (relatively a short term feat, since we are only a couple weeks out from launch), it’s hard to quantify how much this proposal would “help” or “harm” the network. We can all agree that short-term sell-offs instead of long-term holding will negatively impact the price of RAD. This seems like a potential negative side effect that impacts the whole project while only a benefiting a selection of token holders.
-
How would this be implemented in practice? I see a couple issues with implementation because the the details of the distribution are a bit unclear. Many of my initial questions are already being discussed in the thread, but there’s two that remain unanswered:
-
How do we know that all of LBP participants in this airdrop will support the project in the long-term? As mentioned in my previous point, it’s hard to understand the positive vs. negative effects this would have on the project in the long-term.
-
Why reward holders who only interacted with the LBP pool? Let’s remember that the LBP event was only 48hrs long. Trading was only un-paused to provide more liquidity. Therefore, anybody who participated in the LBP after the 48hrs (when the pool’s weights were at 50:50) is technically no different from someone who bought RAD via Uniswap or another decentralized exchange. Why should they be rewarded over those who participated, for example, in the Uniswap pool?
I think this proposal will have a hard time passing because it fails to show why this will benefit all token holders and the project in the long-term.
-
To wrap up, I disagree with the sentiment that “if people don’t support this proposal it means that the project is centralized”. The journey from centralization → decentralization doesn’t happen in a day. Progressive decentralization is a necessary factor to ensure the long-term success and sustainability and it’s the responsibility of current RAD holders to ensure that governing power of the network is being distributed among those who will best support the long-term sustainability & resilience of the network. I don’t see enough proof in this proposal that a one-time airdrop to LBP holders would benefit the growth, success, or sustainability of the network over longer-term incentivization plans that reward community members (including LBP holders!!) for their time, work, contributions, or “loyalty” to the project (I’m thinking we could definitely re-purpose your script to quantify this @clearloop…).
Despite these concerns, there is nothing stopping this proposal from being submitted for Formal Review! Following the guidelines in Governance Guidelines, the proposal’s champions (@all_in_radicle @dhejrdlf1 @clearloop maybe?) can take the feedback from this discussion, iterate on the proposal, create a Snapshot poll (5 days), and create a new thread on Discourse. I’d suggest that in this next iteration, some time is taken to clearly describe what is being proposed (how many tokens, to what/how many people, with what vesting etc…) and reflect on why distributing to LBP holders vs. other parties will benefit all RAD holders and the Radicle project in the long-term.
Happy to support where I can!