This post is part of The Tally Protocol education series. Each week we dive deep into different aspects of The Protocol’s mechanics, incentive & mechanism design, and hear from ecosystem partners.

Written by Event Horizon for publication on The Tally Mirror

Tally x Event Horizon

Tally is building a much-needed solution for the governance space, the segregation of yield and governance capacity maintained by all DAO tokens. By bifurcating the two, the dilemma of choosing to use one's DAO assets for either yield or governance is eliminated. You may benefit from both concurrently.

However, the question of where Tally should delegate this accrued governance authority remains. Delegating to a public good such as Event Horizon provides one such option. Event Horizon and Tally’s models work synergistically ⬎

Event Horizon receives added delegations and the Tally ecosystem benefits from:

(1) The decentralization and positive productive use of the governance capacity within its protocol and for its DAO partners.

Once the asset is split into yield and governance capacity, the key to this model is the redelegation of the governance capacity of these tokens to allow them to be meaningful and productive in DAO communities. It is imperative that this governance potential does not homogenize amongst a small subset of ecosystem actors to replicate the inequities rampant today. By redelegating to Event Horizon, Tally users and partners can be assured that the underlying governance capacity of their assets is equitably distributed across actual users and communities which they serve.

(2) Added TVL from deposits which come from Event Horizon’s community.

As Event Horizon continues to gain delegations and deposits both through DAO proposals, partnerships, and the direct support of the retail DAO token holder it is beneficial for Event Horizon to deploy those assets in Tally’s product.

Key Problems Solved

(1) Not enough people care to vote.

(2) Those who do care to vote, don’t have enough influence.

Today typical DAO voter and token participation is assumed to be around 1%, meaning 99% of a DAO’s governance engagement potential is not being activated to improve the DAO’s collective cognition. It's all too easy, and incorrect, to blame the citizenry as simply apathetic when we have created structures which actively discourage community members from voting.

When a user has .001% of voting power, participation simply does not make sense, it’s a drop in the bucket. Naturally, sitting out of governance proposals is the rational decision; however, collectively this makes everything worse. Given the strength of the DAO is directly proportional to the number of active & engaged participants, this problem needs to be addressed.

What is Event Horizon?

Event Horizon is a public good, public-access metagovernance pool which enfranchises the long tail distribution of tens of thousands of smaller voters found within the citizenry of every DAO. This is made possible by Event Horizon’s novel metagovernance model, Implicit Delegation which provides non-monetary incentives to show up and vote (more on this below).

Event Horizon is live and currently supports onboarding new voters in 8 DAOs and has mobilized >$50,000,000 of voting power across ~400 proposals on behalf of retail voters at no cost to the user. This is $50,000,000 of voice amplification for the low-capital, high-conviction citizens which would never have been possible prior to Event Horizon. Most recently, Event Horizon officially partnered with the Gitcoin DAO to leverage Gitcoin Passport and received a 150,000 GTC community delegation.

Event Horizon is in the process of conducting a similar proposal that would see Arbitrum DAO delegate 7,000,000 ARB (~$5.3m) to help further empower and onboard low capital but high conviction DAO voters. This proposal is overwhelmingly supported by the community with >$150,000,000 of voter support during the temperature check and involves implementing Gitcoin’s sybil resistance Passport solution as a partner product.

DAO Benefits

From a DAO perspective, Event Horizon is a unique delegation option. It differs from the standard set of options (individual delegates and institutional delegates such as market makers and university organizations) in that it focuses entirely on building and strengthening the size of a DAO’s community while fostering equitable decentralization of governance. Event Horizon’s community voter pools are effective in:

1. Engaging, retaining, and expanding a DAO’s retail citizenry.

2. Promoting governance decentralization which offers benefits from both a community and legal perspective.

3. Surfacing dormant thought capital from the 99% of limited voice users found in nearly every DAO today, distributing cognition, and preventing non-participatory delegations for the benefit of DAO decision-making.

Engaging, Retaining, and Expanding a DAO’s Retail Citizenry and Surfacing Valuable Thought Capital

Event Horizon allows DAO citizens to vote with meaningful authority through its novel governance mechanism: Implicit Delegation. Event Horizon slots into the broader DAO ecosystem in a similar fashion to a standard delegate. However, rather than the pool voting based on the decision of one individual or group, it votes with the collective cognition of hundreds of individual Event Horizon Voter Pass holders. This serves two functions:

1. Enfranchise Community Citizens: It provides a clear and designated voice for smaller, retail voters.

2. Retail Participation: It drives participation through a game theoretic process called Implicit Delegation. Whether 10 people show up to vote, or 10,000 people do, the full retail voter allotment is mobilized in support of the community’s desired outcome:

   1. When participation is low: each voter receives a larger slice of the public access pie. This means the fewer people there are voting, the more incentive there is for someone new to come and participate.

   2. When participation is high: there are more voters splitting the same pie, however, retail participation is high, which is a great win for the ecosystem. This is all done without the need to pay delegates with inflationary token rewards. Event Horizon’s model attracts people who are strictly interested in governance, not payment.

Through the Implicit Delegation model Event Horizon pools bring the many great ideas and voices from the long-tail distribution of low-capital community members to the surface. The best ideas in an ecosystem are often held in the minds of individuals with little tangible governance power. Event Horizon is the first step in getting these people to start participating in DAO governance.

It is often a lazy shortcut that we as a space blame low voter turnout and limited community loyalty on voter apathy and flighty retail allegiances when in reality we should first build infrastructures that, contrary to standard DAO governance today, encourage the community to take ownership and maintain consistent loyalty to our ecosystems. Only then can we truly assess where the baseline desire to participate and loyalty lies.

Promoting Governance Decentralization

The notion that a DAO is truly decentralized becomes much harder to justify when the vast majority of decision-making authority is consolidated amongst a relatively small group of individuals and organizations.

Legal Decentralization:

If a protocol cannot show through its token its decision apparatus it is reasonably distributed the ecosystem begins to look more like a centralized corporation simply wrapped in a tech-forward decision tree.

However, when a meaningful portion of voting power is allocated to a pool provably guided by a large and dynamically changing mass of real community members and users, the case for decentralization grows exponentially stronger

Preventing Governance Vulnerabilities:

Without a broad diversity of actors and thoughts, DAO governance becomes vulnerable. It becomes both more easily captured and exposed to homogeneity of thought.

Surfacing Dormant Thought Capital, Distributing Cognition, and Preventing Non-Participatory Delegations

Surfacing dormant thought capital:

By allowing smaller DAO citizens to dictate how the Event Horizon public good voter pools vote, Event Horizon gives non-monetary incentives for sidelined DAO citizens to finally start participating in DAO governance: the first step in a DAO contributor pipeline.

Distribution of Cognition:

Governance is hard. It is nearly impossible to review, react to, and care about every individual proposal. Event Horizon functions as a hive mind to solve this problem. If there are 3 proposals (ex: Gaming, Lending, and Partnership) 100 citizens may show up to vote for each, but the exact voting body may differ each time: Those who care about gaming vote on the gaming proposal, those interested in lending vote on lending, etc. Event Horizon is working on a solution to leverage self-selection as a mode of driving the identification and magnification of subject matter experts through a process coined sacrificial specialization.

Preventing non-participatory delegations:

One of the most pervasive issues in governance today is the ‘Satoshi Delegate’. Because of the set-and-forget nature of delegating, it is incredibly common that massive sums of voting power were delegated to wallets which are no longer active. It is not uncommon to see as little as 5% of the top 100 most highly delegated wallets participate in governance in the past twelve months. The voting power entrusted to these wallets is now fully non-productive and effectively permanently locked from future productivity. Through Event Horizon voter pools all allocated voting power is and will always be fully productive. While the exact voters who turnout to each proposal are dynamic and always changing from proposal to proposal, the pool will always vote in every proposal. In this regard voters may come and go and the voter body can change and evolve. Experts in one subject may show up to a relevant proposal to their interest and not to others and the pool continues to function while the ecosystem continues to benefit from highly-productive governance power.

How it Works:

| Step 0 — Mint: Any citizen of the DAO ecosystem may mint a free voter pass.

| Step 1 — Duplication: Once a delegation is established, Event Horizon begins automatically duplicating all base DAO proposals within its own metagovernance dashboard.

| Step 2 — Metagovernance: Retail voters may mint a free voter pass and begin voting to decide how the retail enfranchisement pool is mobilized in the base DAO proposal.

| Step 3 — Base DAO Voting: 24 hours prior to the closure of the base DAO proposal, the Event Horizon metagovernance proposal closes. Event Horizon then automatically pushes the consensus decision established by the retail community during the metagovernance proposal into the base DAO proposal.

The end result is that citizens who vote through Event Horizon vote with a significant vote multiple. We’ve often seen multiples upwards of 10,000x and roughly $40k voting power per voter. This provides new users with a strong incentive to show up and vote.

Interested? Reach out to us at hello@tally.xyz or on Twitter @tallyxyz and @eventhorizonDAO