Incentivizing Governance

TLDR; We should have a mechanism to reward users who actively participate in Tornado Cash governance

Few ideas:

• reward TORN addresses that Vote (yes or no) on past proposals with TORN
• reward addresses that lock TORN in the governance contract with a small amount of TORN accumulated per block

The goal would be to encourage people to vote even during periods of high gas prices.

The way things currently are, TORN holders are only voting “yes” if the strongly believe in the proposal, or not voting at all.

It is important that people still pay gas to vote “NO” on proposals they don’t want for several reasons. It gives the community better signal on sentiment around proposed changes, and it prevents unhealthy changes from being passed by a handful of whales (the top 8 community wallets currently sum >25k TORN).

Thoughts?

I agree that voting is too expensive currently. Someone needs to research ways to move voting part of governance to L2, it could be better than doing torn refunds.

I personally wouldn’t mind a one-off small reward to any address who voted in any past proposal but only in order to set a precedent which would in turn incentivize future pro-social behaviour, however the problem with incentivizing governance participation on an ongoing basis through token bribes resides in paying a dear price down the track in terms of float dynamics, which then decreases token price and potentially diminishes security within a POS context.