Governance Workshop 8.3.22

In today’s Governance Workshop, Jason proposed a hypothetical scenario involving edge cases in which Sophons and tokenholders/voters disagree, and are unable to reach consensus through the normal process of reconciliation. Participants discussed trade-offs across four options.

Key Takeaways

• Kleros offers a solution for arbitration-as-a-service. See the summary from yesterday’s exploratory call between the Rook team and Kleros (with more material to come).
• Jason presented a hypothetical with multiple reconciliation scenarios, and the community discussed various paths out of reconciliation in the event that the Sophons and objecting tokenholders/voters are unable to reach consensus. Participants worked through the benefits and vulnerabilities offered by each path, and identified questions.

Scenario 1: Sophons decide the final outcome.

• In a situation for which reconciliation is decided by Sophons, the benefits of clarity and mission alignment could potentially be outweighed by the concentration of power and the potential for loss of trust, depending on the nature of the decision. Joe mentioned that the ability of the community to offboard Sophons would be a key risk mitigation factor for this option.

Scenario 2: External arbitration (e.g. Kleros, Celeste, Aragon Court).

• Having external experts decide these cases could offer benefits of objectivity and expertise, although participants had concerns about the level of protocol-specific knowledge required to opine on Rook proposals.

Scenario 3: Tokenholders decide through a simple majority vote.

• This path could increase ROOK “stickiness” by motivating investors to hold tokens due to tie-breaking power. However, it also opens the possibility that tokenholders could vote against the best interests of the protocol, whereas this is less likely with the protocol-aligned Sophons.
• Certain classes of improvement proposals could be excluded to prevent attacks.

Scenario 4: “Super Sophons” – an elected subset of the community, Labs and other experts – convene solely to make these decisions.

• It is possible to ensure their alignment to protocol-enforced rules by constraining their decision-making ability to constitutional-type methods. That said, a smaller set of individuals increases the potential for vote buying, and infrequently needed Super Sophons may lose interest during down-time.