Interest area for Content Guild and for 404 DAO and now Arbitrum.
Professional delegate orgs:
- GFX Labs (funded by Uniswap)
- Stablenode (validator who uses rewards for investments & liquidity provisions. Also a VC)
- StableLabs does professional delegation & creates governance frameworks
- Blockworks
- Layer2DAO - DAO that invests in L2 projects. With bought tokens, they vote
- Plutus DAO
- Flipside Crypto - Analytics company backed by VCs including Dapper. Governance is a separate committee
Butter is a (new-ish) organization that is quickly gaining traction and popularity. It ran a delegate compensation campaign for Aave and paid out (a nominal amount, for now) to delegates this past July (last month).
==Examples==
- MakerDAO
- DAO approved MIP61 in March 2022 to compensate delegates (max 144k/year!)
- https://expenses.makerdao.network/delegates - Interesting to play around with. Of particular interest are university blockchain clubs (penn, michigan, LBS, etc.)
- July 2023 Delegate Compensation: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/july-2023-aligned-delegate-compensation/21632 - Interesting: there are MANY new delegates. Could it be a sign that the delegate incentive program is working?
- Aave
- Rationale: “Helps retain top delegates to foster the growth of the Aave ecosystem. Aave should remain competitive with its peers (e.g., Maker) to attract and retain the best delegate talent. The fundamental cost of being an excellent Aave delegate should not result in a net cost to the delegate due to ever-increasing gas costs.” https://governance.aave.com/t/arfc-gas-rebate-for-recognized-delegates/13290
- Accountability via analytics. Aave reimbursed delegates for gas fees
- https://twitter.com/lemiscate/status/1677973118827085825?s=20 https://governance.aave.com/t/arfc-gas-rebate-for-recognized-delegates/13290/2
- Optimism
- Retroactive Delegate Rewards https://gov.optimism.io/t/retroactive-delegate-rewards-season-3/5871
- 404 DAO received 1500 OP in season 3
- Retroactive Delegate Rewards https://gov.optimism.io/t/retroactive-delegate-rewards-season-3/5871
- Butter (a DeGov protocol) in March ran a campaign where token holders elected a delegate who would receive compensation for a 3 month period of doing governance work. Voting participation increased exponentially. campaign on Aave for delegate compensation (Butter received a 15k grant from Aave grants). TokenLogic https://twitter.com/AaveGrants/status/1686787872626769920?s=20
- Campaign analysis: https://mirror.xyz/butterd.eth/l9y6J2YWoHp-LCIgPHeRqCHfttAMguri38qllPVfxs8
https://twitter.com/0xfrisson/status/1689365117748887552?s=20
https://tally.mirror.xyz/UiRvo1eqmZdAL-_4cUqBgQs9jrVnmJrqRpoFPfmzwLk
There are groups popping up, like the 13 in Buttery’s Aave campaign, that work on initiatives and then get paid. This is a way to get delegates paid.
In bigger DAOs, these same groups, keep popping up and they are delegates who get paid by the organization via rewards or incentives, I’m not quite sure from staking tokens, but it’s not the DAO who pays them.
So what’s the incentive for the DAO to pay if the org already pays? Smaller delegates can participate who don’t work for one of these companies or new orgs can participate and bootstrap themselves. ?