OpenSquare off-chain voting enhancement from 12.2021 to 03.2022

Proponent: OpenSquare(ESgz7GLVW7BL5DhRgpVnxSXVwaKt4ytWcrf52TY1GQD1cEb)
Date: 05/03/2022
Requested Allocation: 190.63 KSM (EMA30 price of KSM on subscan is 157.893)

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Product link: https://voting.opensquare.io

This product is originally funded by w3f grant and you can find the proposal here and the delivery PR here. We have done a lot of work to improve it, got some achievements and are requesting fund to support the last 4 monthes work after the grant delivery.

Introduction

In a word, you can see OpenSquare off-chain voting as snapshot implementation in the polkadot ecosystem. Users can create proposal with specified block heights and vote off chain with the user balance as the weight.

Now the assets it supports including:

• substrate based chain native tokens
• Statemine assets and other assets pallet token on other para-chains
• ORML assets
• ERC20 asset on moonriver and moonbeam

Multiple assets supporting make it possible that voting with one asset from different chains. Currently there are no proposals in kusama space, but we can see we support voting with $KSM from Kusama, Statemine, Karura, Bifrost and Moonriver.

Use cases

For substrate chains

Most substrate based chains have onchain governance, but off-chain voting still makes sense with following reasons:

• Voting from multiple chains. It increases the voters' scope.
• Gas free.
• More flexible strategies for voting result. Currently we support balance-of, qudratic-balance-of and biased-voting to calculate the voting result.

All in all though we have the onchain governance, off-chain voting provides a different way to help community engage more in the governance. We can use it for:

• Discussions with polls. Onchain proposals are usually formal ones which make users not so easy to express their opinions. But we can even raise some controversial topics with off-chain voting.
• It can be used as a 'temperature checking' tool before the final onchain proposal.

For non chain assets

There are assets in different forms in the dotsama ecosystem. An asset may exists as a Statemine asset, a ORML token, or even a ERC20 token. This off-chain voting tool can be used as their formal governance tool with which nearly all forms of tokens can be used to vote a proposal.

Examples

Fortunately we've got several users.

• RMRK uses it for the NFT collection curation proposals.
• Kintsugi uses it to pre-vote before the onchain proposal.
• Karura created a proposal to collect community opinions for 'kUSD Upgrade to aUSD'.

Metrics

We've got more users.

Work and budget

Our work include:

• Support statemine assets
• Support multiple chain voting for one asset
• Support ERC20 token voting
• Components polish.

Please check the code diff. We will request about 15 FTE days each month to cover the common structure work. This request doesn't include our customization for the ecosystem projects, and we won't request it from dotsama treasury.

+-----------------------+----------------------+---------+
| Item                  | monthes              | Cost    |
+-----------------------+----------------------+---------+
| Monthly development   | 4(12.2021 - 03.2022) | $30,000 |
| 15 FET day/month      |                      |         |
+-----------------------+----------------------+---------+
| Server(Hetzner cpx41) | 4                    | $99     |
+-----------------------+----------------------+---------+
| Total                 |                      | $30,099 |
+-----------------------+----------------------+---------+

Payment conditions:

1. The work is to improve the governance engagement in the dotsama ecosystem, and we request the fund for the common code structure not the customization for ecosystem projects.
2. We will use the 30 day avg rate from Subscan to calculate the total KSM allocation at the day of submission.