Funding an on-chain Decision Deposit Sponsor

Hello everyone,

I wanted to open a discussion about helping disenfranchised individuals in the ecosystem by giving them recourse to submit large decision deposits without coming up with the funds themselves. This obviously has some flaws but I believe we can experiment with something on Kusama to see exactly how it pans out. Worst case, the ecosystem can create referendum killers/ cancellers in the event this decision deposit sponsor abuses its power. Here's the outline:

Problem

There are many well-intentioned individuals in the ecosystem that would like to try bold experiments on Kusama, but lack the necessary funds to place large decision deposits on the more powerful openGov tracks. This bottlenecks experimentation on the network, limiting it to the whims of whales who may not have the creativity or understanding to push innovation on Kusama.

Pushing a powerful referendum into the decision period should be expensive to prevent malicious attacks, but it inherently prevents highly reputable and good users who don't have tens of thousands of dollars from pushing new and exciting ideas without winning the whim of a whale.

Proposed Solution

I propose funding a multisig-managed governance proxy whose signatories consist of a good number of ecosystem agents with super majority threshold. Here are the technical steps:

1. Create a pure proxy account
2. Add the multisig as a governance proxy to the proxied account
3. Remove the pure proxy creator as an any proxy, ensuring only the multisig can only make governance calls.
4. Fund the proxied account with 3,334 KSM from the treasury (or some other amount)

This configuration ensures that only governance actions could be taken with these Treasury funds. The social layer of the signatories ensures that these governance actions should only ever be placing decision deposits.

If the ecosystem approves and funds this initiative, we would test it by placing the decision deposit on a root track referendum that would schedule a balances.forceTransfer of the 3,334 KSM back to the Treasury in 6 months time (or sooner), effectively limiting the timeline of this experiment.

Alternative Solution

One more permanent and decentralized solution would be to develop on-chain capability that would allow users to crowdloan toward a referendum's decision deposit. This is ideal, however there is currently no Fellowship RFC seeking to implement this and is not part of the development direction of the Polkadot SDK afaik. I don't know how difficult it would be to develop something like this but chances are that it would take many months to launch in a Fellowship runtime upgrade.

Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Gives decision deposit recourse to the disenfranchised Leverages ecosystem experts Community focused Experimental in nature, just as Kusama intended	Negates ref killer deterrence Recentralization into a council Users can already, and should, appeal to large holders for DDs Might be a misappropriation of Treasury funds

Feedback Needed

• How much KSM should this decision deposit placer be funded with? I recommend 3,334 to allow only one root referendum at a time
• Who should be the signatories? Here are some potential candidates off the top of my head (not exhaustive by any means):
  • Leemo
  • Jay
  • Will | Paradoxx
  • Tom | Stakeplus
  • 0xTaysama
  • Claudio | Kryptoschain
  • Yung Beef
  • Moonbearer
  • Other Chaos DAO members
  • Shawn Tabrizi
  • Gabriel
  • Tommi/ Alice Und Bob
  • Ryan/ Phunky
  • Tommi/ Hitchhooker
  • Raul Romanutti
• How do we qualify a signatory? Account identity/age/nonce/openGov participation?
• What should the multisig threshold be? 50%? 66%? 75%? 100%?
• Is this a good experiment for Kusama?
• What are the security concerns? Are there any since openGov can vote NAY on anything malicious?
• When should the forceTransfer referendum be scheduled? In 3 months? 6 months? 9 months? Not at all?

Any other feedback would be appreciated.

Let's do some experimenting folks!

Adam