This proposal aims to introduce a way to do quadratic funding(QF) in the polkadot ecosystem which brings an alternative mechanism for the polkadot treasury spending. In a QF funding round, projects will share a fixed public fund pool and the final distribution will be decided by the community votes which are calculated by weighted square root of voters' donation.
Treasury spending is one of the biggest topics in polkadot governance and there are dramas about it. Main problems about current OpenGov treasury spend model include:
So it turns out:
Following are several tips about how quadratic funding works:
Here is an example. Projects A, B and C will share 10,000 DOT in total. Finally All of these 3 projects received 1,000 DOT donations, but A has 5 donors(200 DOT each), B has 2 donors(500 DOT each), and C has 20 donors(50 DOT each). Obviously C has broader support, so C shares the most of the pool.
We can learn more from gitcoin which is the biggest quadratic funding platform in the ethereum ecosystem.
There are mainly 2 challenges we’ve seen.
For the first challenge, we will introduce voter weights. Each voter(donor) will have a weight calculated by history on chain behaviors and off chain data bindings. So if a voter has more on chain contributions and more off chain proof which can prove it is a real person, he/she will get a higher weight. Attackers’ weight value will be 0, no affection to the final result.
Some ideas can be used for donation(vote) Incentivisation. For example, if a voter donated 50 DOT, there will be a 50% possibility he/she can get 100 DOT as reward. Of course we can set a cap to each voter’s reward to encourage small donations.
Every address will have a voting weight in a funding round which will affect the final votes. An address' voting weight is decided by 2 groups of factors.
Many tags will be defined according to upper factors, and each tag will have a score in a funding round. An address' score will be calculated based on how many tags this address has, and its final weight depends on this score.
Following info will be provided in case the community's audit:
Almost all actions or info can be verified by on chain data except the binded off chain social info, but in most cases these data can be verified by public social media links.
No. QF provides an alternative way for the polkadot treasury spending which can bring benefits the OpenGov way lacks.
Yes. QF works in parallel with OpenGov, but all the data is transparent and the community will take into account the funds obtained by QF in a OpenGov proposal review process. At the same time, QF will show the community's preference to a project by the donations.
A whale benefit most from QF because:
All in all, QF improves the rationalization of the polkadot treasury spending, restores the community’s confidence, and finally increases the value of polkadot.