Karma

Problem:

A number of DAOs have started utilizing delegation to improve governance and solve the problem of voter apathy. There are a number of teams including us at Karma who have built interfaces to make it easy for token holders to find a suitable delegate based on various criteria and delegate their tokens. However, after working on this for over a year, we have seen a number of challenges with how the delegation systems work today.

1. When a delegate wants to move on, there is no way for them to withdraw their nomination. None of the contracts support withdrawal functionality.

2. There is no good place to look up a delegate’s interests and skills, it’s either non-existent or locked in centralized databases.

3. Today, delegates post their commitment message on the forum and everyone has to scrape that info and display it in their systems. There is no global shared place where this data is stored.

4. Delegates can receive attestations from other delegates and DAO core teams but these are not stored in a centralized place for all the UIs to interpret and display.

5. There is no way for delegates to broadcast a message and for all the frontend interfaces to listen to their message.

Solution:

‍We would like to build a DAO delegate registry on Optimism network to store the followingabout each Delegate mapped to the DAO they belong to

1. Delegate address

2. Delegate interests

3. Delegate statement (not on IPFS but store the entire blob of text on-chain possibly)

4. Delegate status (active, withdrawn, recognized etc.)

All of this information would be written to the chain by delegates themselves. We are exploring two ways to accomplish this.

Gasless execution: The user simply signs a message and we store it on-chain on behalf of them. This will be low friction and the user doesn’t need to have OP tokens to interact.

Standard execution: This user has to execute transactions themselves and will need OP tokens.

By building a global registry, various teams in the ecosystem can utilize this data on a decentralized store and display it in their interfaces. By putting the registry on blockchain, it will always be accessible, will become a single source of truth, make delegations efficient and will open up more innovation. The registry can be used for discovering delegates, integrate with different types of on-chain voting systems and so on.