Governing the Community Treasuries in the EVM Chains

✍ General Governance
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Voting Quorum value

I would like to get more opinions on how we set the Quorum ( = the number of votes that make a decision valid. If fewer than the required votes are collected for either “Yes” or “Abstain”, the result of the vote is invalid, and the smart contract is not executing a transaction).

I laid out the current idea and reasoning to set this to 45 million SMR here Governing the Community Treasuries in the EVM Chains. We had discussed this in the Governance group and agreed that this is likely a suitable number. As it will be possible to change this number through a Governance vote, we can always adjust it through a vote (that reaches enough votes to overcome the current Quorum to be able to set it to a new value).

To remind you how it is currently set for voting on the Tangle via Firefly and Hornet: Quorum is defined as 5% of the Shimmer supply.

Which counts all cast votes that are either “Yes or No”; “Abstain” votes are currently not counted on L1.
Now, the difference between voting on the Tangle with Firefly and voting in the EVM with Metamask and wSMR Tokens is that it requires more “actions” from a voter than just opening the Firefly wallet and pushing 2 buttons.

To be able to vote in the EVM Governance system, you need:

  • Wrapped Shimmer tokens wSMR in the Shimmer EVM in your address at the time the snapshot of voting weight happens (which is at the beginning of the 7-day voting period)

You get those wSMR Tokens by:

  1. sending SMR from Firefly to your EVM Metamask account
  2. converting these SMR Tokens 1:1 to wSMR tokens via the EVM toolkit (wrapping functionality will be added soon) or via a Dex like Shimmersea

Additional steps to use them in voting:

  1. Delegate your voting weight either to yourself or someone else. This happens in the voting application in Tally
  2. SMR tokens that are sitting in Liquidity pools or yield farming must be removed from these pools shortly before the snapshot of voting weight happens and converted into wSMR if the owner of those tokens wants to use them in the governance vote (can be sent back to farming directly after the snapshot)

Given those additional hurdles, some people suggested lowering the quorum below our suggested 45 million SMR (which represents 2.5% of the whole SMR supply), especially for the beginning of our voting experience in the EVM. If we see a good and strong participation in the first votes, we could always adjust it to a higher amount through a governance vote.

Remember: A lower quorum allows a vote with less participation to be executed and could be seen as “less representative”. A too-high quorum could lead to a “Governance freeze” of the voting system because if the quorum is never reached, it can’t even be reduced in a vote (that does not reach the current set quorum.)

Therefore, I would like to get some opinions and am adding a Poll here to understand what the broader community thinks.

Do you think the currently proposed voting quorum of 45 million wSMR is a good value for the system?
  • Yes - I think the suggested value of 45 million wSMR is good.
  • No - I think the quorum should be less than 45 million wSMR.
  • No - I think the quorum should be more than 45 million wSMR.
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