Quorum and Delegation Sentiment Check

Announcements
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In advance of a number of key governance decisions, the Jito Foundation has been continuously working towards enhancing the decentralization and inclusivity of the Jito governance process. In line with this mission, we are excited to present a temperature check to gauge community approval of two upcoming actions.

Action 1: Modifying JTO Quorum

As of today, Jito’s governance requires a quorum of 30 million tokens in order to execute proposals. While this threshold was initially set to ensure the DAO’s 240m JTO token treasury would be protected from governance attacks, such a high bar (over 25% of the current circulating supply) would likely prevent the DAO from reaching quorum going forward.

While the Foundation initially intended to lower quorum to 3m tokens, Realms requires quorum to be set at a whole integer percentage of token supply. As a result, the Foundation is seeking to work with the Jito Security Council to set quorum requirements at 1%, or 10m JTO token voting power.

Action 2: Delegating 12 Million Token Voting Power

The Realms DAO currently has 199 members with 105,000 in JTO in total voting power – well below the proposed 10m quorum limit. With important StakeNet-related votes on the horizon, it’s imperative for the Jito Foundation to foster the governance process.

To begin that initiative, two weeks ago the Foundation put out a public call for delegates, as described in our blog. As of today, 26 individuals have applied for both community delegation as well as Jito Foundation delegation. The Foundation has been delighted with the response, which included participation from top crypto companies, Solana protocols, validators, and community members.

We recognize the importance of community participation in shaping the governance of Jito. Prior to this sentiment check, we hosted a series of Twitter Spaces sessions to introduce the potential delegates to the community and provide a platform for questions and discussions.

Now that we have a strong selection of candidates, the Jito Foundation is seeking to allocate 12m in JTO voting power to upwards of 20 or more applicants, in line with the altered quorum requirements.

Discussion

We encourage all community members to share their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions regarding this sentiment check in this Topic, as well as in community channels. We will also be conducting a formal sentiment check via Realms:

Voting “Yes” on the sentiment check in Realms means that the voter approves of both the new quorum levels, as well as the amount of delegation from the Jito Foundation. While the sentiment check is not a binding governance process, it provides a signal to the Jito Foundation that the community approves of these actions.

Thank you for your continued support and engagement in our vibrant, growing community.

We encourage all community members to share their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions regarding this sentiment check in this Topic, as well as in community channels. We will also be conducting a formal sentiment check via Realms.

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Thanks for posting this. Here are our initial thoughts -

Action 1: Modifying the JTO Quorum

While we understand the logic behind the decision, 1% feels quite low. At the same time, the value of 10m JTO tokens isn’t an insignificant sum.

It sounds like this might increase the risk of governance attacks by a factor of 30 over the initial 30 million decision. However, we recognize it’s hard to gauge this risk in a real world situation.

Action 2: Delegating 12 Million Token Voting Power

Given that only 105,000 JTO are represented on the DAO, getting engagement going and that number up will likely be a primary and initial focus of the governance delegate group.

To confirm, is the intention to delegate 12m among 20 or more applicants? Also, how many delegates will be chosen in this first selection process? The 12m is greater than the 5m originally mentioned in the blog post.

This means the quorum went down, yet the delegation amount is going up. This seems counter-intuitive, admittedly we haven’t thought through the math in detail.

Meta

The post encourages discussion in the governance Discord forum and here. Along the lines of responses some applicants, including us, gave during the X Spaces, we’d suggest trying to funnel and consolidate discussions like this into fewer channels.

The Discord/Discourse balance is a tricky one to strike. People prefer to engage in Discord. However Discourse does a better job driving decisions, as the conversations are persistent. One way we’ve looked to bridge that gap is to have the initial discussions in Discord, then encourage participants to log the responses formed from those discussions in Discourse.

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Discourse (forums) are generally better at organizing and feels more archival. Given the nature of chat applications the conversation can get many one line back and forth communications which I feel makes it untenable for new entrants. I’m in support of pushing for the forum entirely.

Otherwise quorum modification and the low JTO turnout for Realms is likely a balance to strike to get things off the ground. We should expect to increase that in the coming weeks / month as votes go out and behavior is known.

The 12M affords some flexibility for contentious initial deliberation and voting where 2M is free floating to not participate which still seems like a “skin of your teeth” given there’s 20x less than that locked in Realms, but that COULD change and we should be prepared to adjust accordingly.

Overall getting things moving I think is the correct thing to do, and being flexible to ensure we scale response is important. $19M does seem out of the reach of coordinated efforts for JTO holders, but perhaps wallet holdings might shed some light (I think that’d be 190+ validators with their full allocation). So I’m in support with caveat.

Also we’re 25k+ JTO of the deposited JTO in Realms so that gives some sense of voting power and expression in the current Realms makeup. Our vote made up ~1/4 of the current response.

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Correction, this should read “…might increase the risk of governance attacks by a factor of 30”

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