AIP 38: Creation of a Governance circle to reward AIP collaborative authorship

[agriimony]

Summary

• Current approach to allocating AIP rewards tends to disincentivize collaboration
• An AirSwap "Governance" circle will be created on Coordinape.
• All members (authors) of the governance circle participate in collaborative authorship of AIPs by actively discussing and debating upcoming AIPs.
• At the end of each cycle, each author allocates a certain number of GIVE tokens to other authors according to the perceived impact of each person in the authorship process.
• AIP rewards will be split according to how much GIVE tokens each author holds

Rationale

The current AIP reward structure according to AIP 15 allocates 5000 sAST for each successful AIP written and 2000 sAST if unsuccessful. Currently, the AIP rewards are split at the discretion of the main AIP author. This results in reduced community collaboration, as there is no open and fair way to judge the contributions of each community member to the AIP. We believe that an open AIP authorship process which incentivizes community discussion and debate would lead to higher quality AIPs.

Specification

Coordinape governance circle setup

• Coordinape is an open and fair way to distribute resources to members of a DAO.
• A governance circle will be created on Coordinape for AirSwap members who wish to be actively involved in the governance process.
• Members who wish to be part of the governance circle must have at least 1k AST staked and shown to be active in the community.

AIP reward distribution

• AIP rewards will be used to fund the governance circle for each cycle
• AIP reward structure to be changed from "5k (2k) sAST per (un)successful AIP" to "5k (2k) sAST per (un)successful cycle".
• A successful cycle is defined as one in which the total amount of "yes" votes is more than the total amount of "no" votes in a given cycle.
• Each author is allocated 100 GIVE tokens to give to other authors per cycle.
• Authors will allocate GIVE tokens according to the perceived contributions of other authors in the current AIP authorship process
• GIVE tokens which are not given will be burnt
• AIP rewards will be distributed according to the number of GIVE tokens held be each author at the end of the cycle

Up for discussion

• The actual figure for AIP rewards (5k/2k too much? too little?)
• How new authors can be onboarded into the governance circle (based on consensus of current authors?)

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

[agriimony]

greypixel Jun 12

Whilst I do believe payment should be in (s)AST, I think it might be better to peg the value to something more stable, probably a stablecoin.
I am not sure whether reducing the payout for a vote that is not passed by 60% is necessarily fair - the fact it gets to vote suggests it’s a viable and well presented idea, so I would propose scrapping this.

In terms of numbers, sharing $1k worth of AST per AIP sounds like a good amount to me. At today’s prices that’s 6.6k AST, but at the end of March it was more like 1.5k.

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agrimony Jun 12

Stablecoin peg sounds reasonable to me. We could start with 1000 USD and revise the numbers in the future depending on the growth of the platform.
– Currently, rewards are allocated manually so it is doable. But not sure if this could be automated in the future (on Coordinape) to reduce administrative overheads.
– Any thoughts on when the peg should be taken? We could do it either at the start of each cycle, or at the end.

The current spec (according to AIP 15) implements a reduced payout if an AIP fails to be passed. I think having this in place would incentivize authors to align their interests with the community as well. I guess we could potentially think about this more.

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astholder Jun 15

I agree with both @agrimony and @greypixel.

I think the ‘value’ of an AIP should remain stable regardless of the market.

Furthermore, pegging the sAST rewards to stable coin creates in interesting positive engagement mechanism. When there is a bear market one would assume that community participation would decrease as well. However, in the bear market the amount of sAST available for reward increases which I think would act as a driver of community participation.

Likewise, when the markets are bullish the potential amount of sAST is lower - ensuring that community members that are only active in the good times actually get less longterm reward compared with members that are active during less prosperous times. astholder Jun 15

I’m not too fussed about the price. 1,000 USD equivalent at today’s price is 6.6k sAST. I think that’s fine. The reward amount can always be amended via AIP or some other mechanism if the value of the USD or AST deviates significantly from their present values.

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astholder Jun 15

I think it makes sense to try out Coordinape. AirSwap is on a journey towards decentralization. Coordinape could:

Reduce the admin required to run the AIP process - ie. payouts, calling aips to vote, collaboration, transparency etc.

Increase collaboration in the AIPs

Puts but the dev work and the governance work in the same ‘system’.

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agrimony Jun 19

2x raised a point that reducing the AIP reward from per AIP to per cycle might result in fewer AIPs being drafted.

Could this lead to a reduction of AIPs as people are more inclined to collaborate heavily on a single AIP to gain rewards? In my mind working alone on an AIP does not work well with coordinapes system where you are instructed to give to people that you have collaborated with.

I think that this is an intended effect, as we would like to incentivize collaborative authorship among the community rather than solo crafting of AIPs. The ideal outcome would be fewer AIPs but they should have higher impact!

You are essentially disincentivized from creating AIPs on your own as you don’t know wether you will receive a share of the reward. Might also lead to waiting on a proposal to submit them directly after a cycle, so that it becomes the proposal that is mainly worked on.

Ideally, we should shift the AIP authorship mindset away from “this is my idea” towards “this is our idea”