POOL pool and governance voting

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After listening in on the community call yesterday, I realized there is a lot of nuance to participating in the POOL pool and the voting by the signers of the Gnosis Multi-sig wallet following the results of the snapshot page. I don’t think this has been discussed yet and I want to raise awareness of these nuances before the first proposal is voted on by the multi-sig wallet. I think it is best to open up this topic for discussion so the community can decide what the best course of action is.

As of right now, there are 42k POOL deposited in the POOL pool, so this represents a significant voting power. There are two main issues that I believe should be brought up and discussed:

  1. Not everyone participating in the POOL pool will vote on the snapshot page. As an example, the current vote on the snapshot page only has about 12k POOL voted on it, which is not a lot considering there are 42k POOL in the POOL pool. This naturally leads to the question whether the multi-sig should only participate in voting when a large part of the POOL pool depositors has actually voted on the snapshot proposal linked to the current one up for voting?

  2. Because the multi-sig can only vote yes or no with all votes, it should be discussed how this can skew the result of a governance proposal and how we want the multi-sig to proceed in case of a contested snapshot vote. For the sake of clarity, I’ll show three examples to discuss below where the multi-sig could skew the outcome of a governance poll. Let’s assume they are voting for 100k POOL to simplify the math.

    1. The snapshot yields a 55k/45k split for accept. The multi-sig voting accept clearly ignores 45k votes and, even worse, effectively puts them in the yes-category. Should the multi-sig even vote in this case?

    2. The snapshot yields a 75k/25k split for accept. If the multi-sig votes accept here, it’s significantly less bad than with a less clear split. Should we require a clear, uncontested snapshot vote before the multi-sig is allowed to vote and what would the split need to be?

    3. The multi-sig should never vote if it skews the result of the governance poll to an end-result that would not have happened if it didn’t vote. For this to be possible, the multi-sig voters need to wait until the poll almost expires before voting (granted, this probably poses some practical problems). I’ll again give a couple of examples to showcase where the multi-sig probably should (3) and should not vote (1 and 2):

      1. The governance poll result currently is at 30k/40k. If the multi-sig votes with 100k votes that were 60k/40k split, it effectively skews the result to accept when it would not even have passed if all POOL pool depositors voted.

      2. The governance poll currently is at 40k/70k, but for some reason the snapshot voters are at 60k/40k. If the multi-sig follows the majority snapshot vote voting accept, it skews the governance pool to an accept when it would not have been accepted at all if the POOL depositors voted themselves.

      3. The governance poll is currently at 50k/50k or at 60k/40k. The snapshot vote is at 60k/40k. If the multi-sig votes accept, it helps pass a proposal that would have passed when all POOL pool depositors would have voted themselves.

I’m probably forgetting a ton of corner cases where the multi-sig wallet voting changes the end-result, but I think this is a good start for some discussion.

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Very interesting points…
as I said before, I would rather pay for my votes than having this kind of situation for free

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Very good points. As far as I know, Compound doe the same thing for UNI and just has a minimum quorum required for the multisig to vote (for example 20% of people in the POOL pool need to have voted). It could be worth looking in detail at how Compound decided to do it.
I’ll think some more on this. There’s definitely some nuance to it.

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Here is the thread where the exact same discussion took place when Compound introduced this idea:

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I read the proposal. Basically, a similar issue as I showed above is pointed out, but it does not seem like they arrived at any sort of conclusion on how to handle the multi-sig potentially skewing the results?

The only thing that is pointed out in that post is that a minimum quorum of 10% is needed. That seems low to me, but I guess we’ll have to see what the average snapshot turnout is compared to the POOL pool depositors.

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The initial proposed quorum for the POOL pool was 20% so that is what the current expectation is set at. I’m very open to increasing this though.

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I’m totally fine with a quorum of 20% to start because we don’t know how big the turnout will be and we don’t want to unnecessarily sideline the multi-sig vote. We would definitely need to watch if it is necessary to increase this in the future, depending on how many people vote (through delegators or themselves).

However, I’m more interested on how we handle potentially skewing the proposal because of the yes / no vote ratio being moved all into a yes or no vote? Especially given the very large voting power of the multi-sig, this seems pretty relevant.

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