[DAO:b244caf] Should a grant proposal be revoked if the grant requestor or their personnel listed, vote on their own grant proposal? (Updated version)

Governance
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by 0xd4f1cab694c4424c4796549edbb9b489789f4df5 (TudaMoon)

If you vote yes, this would prohibit grant requestors and initially listed personnel from voting on proposals that they have direct interest in. However, this would NOT revoke the grant if someone gets hired on the team at a later time without prior knowledge. The grant requestor or any of their accounts cannot vote on their proposal. This would not be retroactive. This would be implemented as a policy from now on if approved.

Without this CRITICAL rule, we are doomed to become centralized at some point in the future. If the DAO permits voting in a direct conflict of interest, then it will lead to Centralization. Centralization will kill the brand of Decentraland. Conflict of Interest is one of the most critical rules we must enforce to remain decentralized. Otherwise, it leads to a slippery slope of one grant passed here, one grant passed there, to owning millions of MANA to controlling the full outcome of the Decentraland DAO. It will be the Decentraland’s DAO downfall, if we do NOT stop it now.

I have heard current DAO members say we have a committee that would stop a centralized entity from doing acting outside the best interest of the DAO. However how does it look when Decentraland uses a centralized committee to fight against a centralized power? Right now the committee has to make a determination as a centralized entity, however if this critical rule is enacted by the DAO itself, the committee is then simply enforcing the rules that were made by the DAO. This makes the committee in the position of enforcing the rules of the DAO rather than making their own centralized rules.

Currently, revocation of Grants for conflict of interest is NOT a means for revoking a grant. Therefore, if that committee were to enact those powers of denying the grant for conflict of interest right now, when the committee hasn’t done it before, it would appear like centralized and unfair use of power. If we make the rule forbidding voting of conflict of interest, this would NOT be an issue. It would actually make the committee’s job easier.

As of now, if this proposal were to be enacted, it would give the DCL Grant Squad the power to revoke grants based on conflicts of interest. However, to clarify it is not their job to do any research, it is their job to make the decision from a DAO member’s claim to them. The DAO member who makes the claim to the DCL Grant Squad must provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that there is conflict of interest before the DCL Grant Squad could revoke a grant. The DCL Grant Squad would have a duty to act in a timely manner.

Those who care about decentralization will vote ‘Yes’ in this poll and will enact this critical policy to prevent centralized entities from taking over the outcomes of grant funding.

  • Yes, revoke grants in conflict of interest.
  • No
  • Invalid question/options

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

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as many people said in the last poll you made, community members making proposals are still community members with voting rights. People with enough VP to pass or nearly pass their proposal alone is certainly an issue and it’s something we have been discussing in the whales-votes channel in the DAO discord server.

are you going to just keep making polls until you get the result you want?

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I am not going to let the defeatist mentality drive down something that is so critical to infrastructure for a decentralized platform. Personally, I don’t feel like bringing any content to Decentraland without infrastructure changes that protect me as someone with little voting power. Without this policy change, this can turn into gang warfare.

For those who believe more voting power needs to be distributed, it really wouldn’t make a difference as hierarchies in VP will still exist. It may balance things out temporarily, but it won’t change things in the long term. Conflict of Interest is the issue that we must aim to attack. Redistribution of VP will only change whose hands the power is in, it will NOT change the fact conflict of interest will still exist.

So you been discussing this, but you won’t take on this solution? This literally can be a rule made by the DAO that can be enforced. I am not sure what more you want. It only prohibits voting on a proposal in which the DAO member has direct interest. This is a completely reasonable request. Everyone would be playing by the same rules. So it would not be a disadvantage in anyway for anyone.

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you’re free to join that channel

1 Like
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I voted yes because I believe this concept is worthy of moving to the draft stage, though I have some differences in opinions on enforcement.

I don’t think it should be an outright denial and proving it may be hard to do, but I do think this is at least worth having something in the grant revocation rules that would allow the support squad to revoke or suggest revocation with reason being a conflict of interest.

Maybe we can set specific criteria to determine a clear conflict. For example, we could consider the difference in No vs Yes voters and compare it against the vote count. If the count of individual yes voters are less than 10% of the total voters, but the proposal still has passed threshold this could be a potential red flag.

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Voting Invalid question/options for the following reasons:

  • The person creating the proposal is as member of the community as anyone else, and has the same right to vote on the proposal.
  • The real issue is the inequality in the DAO, with people having too much VP and others too little.

More importantly the largest grant only provides 6.25% of the VP needed to pass another largest grant (assuming that none was used to implement anything), and it takes 7 months to be released! The rest of the community will be able to easily dominate the VP and prevent any malicious actor that wants to get control of the DAO just by repeatedly requesting grants.

I don’t think grants introduce a risk big enough to legitimize the policing of VP, delegation and votes.

If at some time a group attempts to take over the DAO that will not be done trough the grants.

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I respect your opinion. Thank you for sharing!

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I agree with @Eibriel here. I know it’s an issue we are all concerned ab and that’s great.

But as a lot of us have been discussing for some time now (albeit it has slowed) in the DAO Discord working group channels, to extra police something is not my choice in addressing this issue. I think we can benefit more so long term from finding an alternative solution to VP inequity.

edit: I also want to say that as someone who is not a whale that could pass their own proposal, but is a dolphin(as Zesty has named us lol) that can have an impact, I choose to not vote on any proposal that is a conflict of interest that involves me, such as ones that pay me or seek to benefit me. Based on community feedback, the only time I will vote on those proposals is if they have well passed the threshold and are about to end, so my impact is only a count towards the DAO votes, and not one that limits community.

1 Like
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While I personally think people should not be voting yes on their own grants (I never voted yes for my own grant for example because of my morals on this), I think this is a much more complex issue to solve and comes down to too much VP power in general. I don’t think you could really easily police who can and cannot vote on a grant. Someone can just easily place a bunch of VP on a no-name separate account to vote for themselves.

The only time I’d vote yes on a grant project I am involved in would be to get the vote number to 69.

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Should a grant proposal be revoked if the grant requestor or their personnel listed, vote on their own grant proposal? (Updated version)

This proposal is now in status: REJECTED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes, revoke grants in conflict of interest. 33% 665,210 VP (36 votes)
  • No 5% 112,377 VP (4 votes)
  • Invalid question/options 62% 1,200,903 VP (28 votes)