Grabber, a tool that incentivizes experts and leaders within the community to boost governance engagement and voter activity.

Dear Polkadot Community!
We are submitting a proposal for a governance incentivization tool, that helps incentivize experts and leaders within the community to boost governance engagement and voter activity.

Get the detailed Proposal here >>

Overview

While the concept of cryptocurrencies can be considered validated, the concept of cryptocurrency governance is still evolving. The objective of “basic” cryptocurrency governance (as a decentralized management system for that particular cryptocurrency ecosystem) is to perform decentralized control over the process, support developments, and manage the ecosystem's existence. The main goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability, security, and adaptability of a network while increasing the wealth locked in the ecosystem and the holdings of its participants, which are directly connected to the ecosystem's overall wealth. “Basic” cryptocurrency governance refers to the “tactical” decision-making processes. It helps address critical issues such as protocol upgrades, funding for development, conflict resolution, and network security. Even at this level, governance encounters numerous issues and opportunistic behavior from users, such as fraud, Sybil attacks, vote borrowing, voting manipulation, and participants' opportunism, among others.

Polkadot's governance model is designed to prioritize the growth and development of the platform's ecosystem, rather than focusing solely on partnerships or marketing. This strategic approach stems from Polkadot's L0 vision as a foundation for future Layer 1 (L1) blockchains and its Substrate framework, which simplifies the process of building and deploying customized blockchains (also platform).
We can refer to Polkadot governance as "builders" governance, which emphasizes the platform's commitment to nurturing and supporting the creation of a robust ecosystem. This type of governance fosters collaboration and innovation within the community by allocating resources from the treasury to projects that contribute to the platform's growth, enhance its functionality, or expand its capabilities. In essence, "builders" governance concentrates on strategic objectives rather than tactical ones, prioritizing the development and evolution of the ecosystem over merely maintaining its current state. This approach ensures that Polkadot continues to evolve and adapt, making it a more resilient and future-proof platform that can support a diverse range of blockchain applications and use cases.

Polkadot's governance requires voters to have deep expertise and take on significantly higher risks, both within the large ecosystem and the market as a whole. Additionally, due to the break in cause-and-effect relationships, voters must make decisions without the possibility of receiving feedback or personal benefits. Furthermore, voters must also lock up their funds in the process. This is an important aspect of the system, as it helps to ensure voters' commitment and alignment with the long-term interests of the ecosystem.
You can learn more about "builder" governance in our proposal >>

However, it can be confidently said that one of the biggest challenges of this type of DAO is the enormous amount of time that needs to be spent collectively on studying community proposals. If we assume that each proposal takes 5.5 hours for adequate study (the average time spent on studying a scientific paper by an expert), then 1000 voters will spend 5,500 hours on a single proposal (excluding those who could not handle it, did not study it, or did not vote).
Then 20 proposals will take up 110,000 hours. That is 68+ full-time experts working on this exclusively.
Hence, an obvious task is to reduce the time it takes for a community member to study one proposal. The organization and simplification, preferably with added interest, can be improved in the scheme of such governance.

There are several ways to lower the barrier to entry for studying proposals and increase the chances of engaging a voter:

Train the required number of voters
Delegate votes to the most motivated members, who are ready to do deep research
Add formal proposal compliance analyses
Provide volunteer analyses and reports.

Each of these solutions has its pros and cons, and you can learn more about them by following the link >>

The ideal concept proposes the following solution

Drawing from existing experience, we can create a decentralized group of competing experts who can generate reviews of proposals. Their work will significantly reduce the need for ordinary voters to deeply engage with proposals, as they will be able to prepare reports that allow for direct insight. Decentralization and competition will facilitate the formation of diverse opinions and prevent an unconstructive approach. Moreover, these experts can become vote delegates who are also in competition. This work should be minimally incentivized, as reviewers provide a public good.

Grabber incentivization challenge concept.

To implement commitment, user reputation, and actual actions and delegation of allocations and payments, have a reputation system within the system. It will be able to collect and analyze experts in the system and commitment. Based on this reputational tool, collective incentivization can work: bounties will be allocated, for which different experts will compete. Users will be able to vote on whose impact was more useful to them, thereby distributing the bounty. The results of their voting will again generate on-chain events that will enrich the participants' reputations.
The general scheme of work will be as follows:

For each proposal, a research budget is allocated, which allows compensation for researchers' expenses (bounty). For this, an event with conditions is created in the system.
Researchers can register in the system and conduct research, uploading links to them in the interface. Research is done within a specific timeframe.
After that, the proposed posts are reviewed, and points are assigned. Together with the relevance of their experience, they receive accruals from the allocated fund. When considering the researcher's relevance, it is visible how often they vote/voted/parachain auctions/funds in the system, etc.
The experience of researchers improves with the number of payments they receive (this is also collected on-chain and displayed).
The result is deep, non-formal research from multiple authors, which significantly reduces the workload for the community.

Grabber: A tool with an experienced team and Polkadot traction.

Team:
Dev: Experienced with RUST, WASM/EVM (DOT) smart-contracts, Polkadot.js, and Polkadot features.
Community: Well-connected in the Polkadot community, with existing DOT/eco communities event traction and a large existing community.

Battle-tested flow

We already have:

User onboarding flow
Community UI
Administration UI
Parachain-ready (EVM/WASM ready)

Interface sketches

Track selection

Project selection

Project Interface

Voting “Back office” and “event” UX

The voting manager creates an event and provides all necessary info to Grabber through our “back office”.

There are many competitions that can be managed

Results control

User UX:

Users apply for the claim. To apply, they bind their source wallet (DOT) and their distribution wallet (Smart-contract based parachain wallet/EVM wallet). Grabber's system aggregates crowdloan and voting activity of the users and proposes to save it on-chain. (in the smart-contract based parachain).

Grabber front-end already supports major Polkadot/EVM wallets, detects extensions and helps these wallets receive new users (check grabber.network). Also additional popups added

Grabber | Algem

Fully qualified (scored) users found to fit all criteria requested by the company: 532
Users registered in Grabber for event: >5100
Verified their wallets in Grabber: >3100 (60.87%)
Event registrations (on-chain): 2735
Impressions for event-related Tweets from @Grabberofficial: >20K
Increase in the number of Algem’s followers after the event: 16.48%
Grabber x Algem smart-contract: https://blockscout.com/astar/address/0xC00ba642fbB807B6e7A45fDAC4D2061d961fd272

Grabber | Astar

Fully qualified (scored) users found to fit all criteria requested by the company: 148
Users registered in Grabber for the event: >2100
Verified their wallets in Grabber: >1420 (67.62%)
Event registrations (on-chain): 957
Impressions for event-related Tweets from @Grabber :>41K
Grabber x Astar smart-contract: https://blockscout.com/astar/address/0x76d46248F66Afb7767BA7C449748550926908DC4

More numbers about this evets available in the Detailed Proposal:

Grabber's Potential Impact

Better communication with the voters
Engaging the audience through the activation of existing KOLs and creating new ones
Significant expansion of the voting audience
Easier onboarding for new voters and reactivation of those who dropped out
A platform for spreading the vote delegation system

Get detailed Proposal here.

All the best, the Grabber team!