Making Snapshot for Epoch Eligibility into Quadratic Voting

We’ve been having many brainstorming sessions here at the Funding the Commons residency around Octants mechanism, with @revmiller & @artem

Something we were discussing is how epoch rounds are more resilient than the snapshot one, since epochs have quadratic voting while snapshot has one wallet one vote.

Since octant has removed minimum thresholds, projects are scrambling to try and simply clear the eligibility bar to get some money.

In epoch 5 snapshot, just 8 votes are enough to get you into the round. This creates unhealthy dynamics where dishonest projects who farm 5-6 wallets can be assued of entry into the epoch.

Snapshot has a quadratic voting mechanism, so we were wondering why this is not the strategy for eligibility. This would reduce incentive to farm wallets because its not one wallet one wallet, but also weighted by how much glm the wallet has locked into it.

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We’ve been considering this for the upcoming round. Thanks for the note, I’ll respond with more after we discuss it on Wednesday.

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I’ve been thinking about this more. How would QF in snapshot solve for this issue?

Can you share why you think this? The reason we have sybil defense in our rounds in the first place is because there is a direct incentive to farm wallets.

The only thing I think your proposal would change, is that it would give whales more voting power. Am I missing something here?

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Yeah i should rephrase, it would reduce the incentive to farm but not eliminate it.

Right now one eligible wallet one vote is crazy high incentive to farm

Whereas weighing it by amount kept in the wallet would partially reduce the incentive

The prior question we should try answering is: how do we give experts more weight in decision making?

The easiest way is capital: those with more money are more of an expert than those with less. While obviously flawed, it is sometimes better than a direct democracy.

The harder way is reputation based: those who have onchain history get more voting power than those without. This runs into the sybil issue pretty quickly, but imo its not an issue if we weight voting power by amount (quadratic), reputation (onchain history) and diversity of projects (COCM) they support (the new gitcoin approach).

Snapshot is harder obviously to implement this approach, but i do feel like the current approach of 1 wallet 1 vote is horribly broken and favoring projects that are dishonestly trying to get as many eligible wallets as possible. Since even 8 votes is enough to get you into the epoch and receive some amount of funds.