Blockchain voting has always faced a trade-off between participation and security. Optimistic voting attempts to combine the advantages of off-chain and on-chain voting.
Original title: “The holy grail: Off-chain polling with on-chain execution” (The holy grail: Off-chain polling with on-chain execution)
Written by: Jorge Izquierdo
Translation: Typto
Remember that starting from a certain day, the cost of DAO governance suddenly got out of control, and it got worse. Launch a DAO rose from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars, and a proposal process rose from less than 3 dollars to more than 30 dollars. I miss the era of closed eyes operation, but it seems to be gone forever. We began to look for solutions all over the world (as I am implementing the DAO ecosystem, I suffered greatly from it). Snapshot gave us a surprise, but after the surprise, it was more criticized. The separation of decision-making and execution makes us question the authenticity of its requirements. Until one day, the people at Aragon told me an internal message that they were doing a big deal, which is the Optimistic voting that everyone saw today. This is not only the Holy Grail of Aragon’s efforts in DAO governance, but also an important milestone for the DAO.
—— Typto
For some time, Optimistic voting has been a hot topic in the Aragon community. When we started to study this topic, users only needed to spend a few cents to vote on the chain, but now, with the Ethereum network congestion, the cost of users voting may be as high as $30.
Fortunately, our friend Balancer Labs has launched its own product: an off-chain voting solution: Snapshot.
Snapshot allows the community to vote for token holders off-chain. The voting results are verifiable and the voting process is tamper-proof (voting and hierarchical receipts are stored in IPFS).
Since its launch, Snapshot has quickly become the preferred voting solution for well-known communities such as Yearn and Aave. But as far as the current situation is concerned, there is still an obvious centralization component in the voting process. Token holders can signal their own preferences, but this is only a signal. The actual on-chain execution must still be done through other means, such as trusted multi-signature, which usually just checks the voting results and executes the token holders’ wishes.
From the point of view of centralization and security, this method is risky, but it may also cause multi-signature members to face some embarrassing problems, such as possible legal liability for decisions made by the community.
On the other hand, on-chain voting, that is, calculating all votes on the chain, is much safer and completely decentralized. But this method is extremely expensive and very slow.
The trade-off of blockchain voting: You either have scalable off-chain voting for higher participation, or you have secure on-chain voting. until today.
In order to solve this pain point, we conducted a lot of research and built core infrastructure such as Aragon Court, Aragon Agent and aragonOS 5. Based on this, we launched an off-chain polling on-chain execution solution. Yes, the two fit together perfectly, there is no longer a tangled trade-off, fish and bear paw can have both!
The basic concept of optimistic execution is that, unlike performing expensive calculations on the chain, people can submit their results directly with some collateral related to their correctness. If someone sees a wrong result, they can question it, and if the submitted result is indeed incorrect, they can take the publisher’s mortgage.
We adopted the same concept and used Aragon Court as a subjective oracle to assess whether the submitted results are correct.
Solutions using Aragon Court and Aragon Agent will be available in Snapshot soon (it is currently working on Rinkeby!). This means that Year, Aave, Balancer and other communities will be able to use it soon.
“I am very excited about Aragon adding on-chain execution to Snapshot, and I think a large number of communities will benefit from it.”
-Fabien Marino, Balancer
How it works
Usually a multi-signature composed of trusted community members has the right to enforce the agreement or vault. When the community votes on a decision, the multisigner checks the voting results and performs actions on behalf of the community. The social capital and reputation of these people are heavily monitored, but there is actually nothing that prevents multi-signers from doing what they want, or not doing what the community decides.
With Optimistic Snapshot, multi-signature will be replaced by DAO, and DAO Agent has execution authority. Aragon Agent is an on-chain messenger that can perform operations anywhere on Ethereum. Regardless of whether you are an individual or a multi-signature, your Agent can perform operations as a DAO rather than as a personal identity. Such as updating the protocol parameters, managing the fund library, and even splicing DeFi Lego blocks.
Once the vote has produced a result, anyone can submit the expected operation approved by the vote to the DAO on the chain. DAO has a new application called Disputable Delay, which imposes a time lock before the action is executed. During this time, anyone can challenge this behavior and appeal to the Aragon Court.
If someone submits a malicious act that is inconsistent with the voting resolution, the jury of Aragon Court will make a ruling, and the proposer will suffer as a result.
On the contrary, if no one raises an objection to this action, it will continue to the next step and be executed eventually.
Since malicious behaviors are severely punished, they are essentially filtered out by deterrence, leaving only legitimate behaviors in the queue.
This proposal process gives members greater autonomy to act on behalf of the organization when they know their actions are legal. Since any member can raise objections to any behavior, each member does not need to actively monitor or participate in the on-chain formulation of each vote.
This is why we call it optimistic voting.
future
When optimistic voting is officially launched later this month, communities using this feature can easily join the Aragon protocol.
The Aragon protocol allows DAOs to define themselves with simple English keywords, establish rules and habits, and protect themselves from malicious actors without sacrificing their membership. In case of wrongdoing and disputes, Aragon Court can act as an arbitration institution to resolve the disputes.
We are excited about providing off-chain polling for the community while helping them achieve decentralized on-chain execution.
By the way, we just submitted a proposal to the yearn community to help them build their own DAO with Optimistic Snapshot.
Thank you very much Fabien of Balancer for helping us achieve integration in record time! If you are interested in learning more, please come to Discord and chat with us!
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com
