Governance: CEXes, listings & voting power

Hello there.
Some thoughts about CEXes (centralized exchanges), listings, and power.

  1. Listing on tier 1 - tier 2 exchanges is good. More liquidity, easy access for potential participants. For the speculative side - probably pumps. Good and happy.

  2. Are they that good? Back in spring 2020, we had the first wave of quarantine and huge scandal around Steem hard fork.
    TLDR: Tron with help of big exchanges tries to take over steem blockchain through a hard fork.
    It became possible because of users’ coins that vote for fork.

  3. CEXes can overthrow the government.
    Let’s see top-10 CVP holders:


    (according to etherscan)

Yep, only 9 and 10 probably are individuals.
3, 6 and 7 are CEXes with voting rights.

PowerPool growing → CEXes share growing. Now it’s around 0.8% of total supply, not circulating.
Scary thing, because at some point they can say “wow, nice project. It’s mine now”.

As reader, you can say “PowerPool still too small to attract big CEXes to participate in governance”.
And I can agree and disagree.

  1. Agree that PowerPool still at the start of the journey. But hey, CEXes all by themselves list it without listing fees. Worth something.
  2. In Russia we’re saying 'prepare your sled from summer" which basically means “prepare yourself before problems, not after”.

What we can do as a community in the future?
For today I see 3 ways to solve this: easy, medium and hardcore.

Easy:
Lock vote function for flagged wallets.
For: well, it was easy. Lock 'em all and be cool.
Against: can cause some troubles. Especially if PowerPool want collaborations or promotions with CEXes (which is not necessary a bad thing, but it’s worth another article).

Medium:
Make the process of votes minting more complicated. Locks, vestings, etc. The whole field for fantasy.
One of the main reasons for community hate back to STEEM fork was lock. Yep, CEXes lock users’ coins for quite some time.
I believe, it makes them think twice about their next move.
For: smarter way to do things. Also can add value to actual governance.
Against: hard to implement a sustainable model.

Hardcore
Collaborate with CEXes.
In previous proposals, I suggest exchanges as enemies. But they can be also good friends.
Communication is the key to everything.
If someone big like Binance proposes anything in PP governance - well, you can imagine the effect. If it’s also target not only Binance interests? So wow, much good.
For: the healthy way to get things done.
Against: big risks, easy to fuck up everything.

We live in world of centralized everything: it’s our reality.
But with crypto we can change that reality.
And definitely will.

It was my thoughts based on previous cases and fast CEX listing without fees.
Thanks for reading.
Hope you enjoy,
See you next time

7 Likes

Good view, the Team need to read it.

1 Like

wow, thats a great take!

I am for the “hardcore” option. But need to think over on a “poison pill” first (Medium way).

Easy way will not work imo as Alameda Sam can always ask his friend to hold CVPs:). So we will need an entire KYC-like instrument to flag all the wallets

So yeah, great discussion, happy to join right after we sort it out with the index / mainnet

As an interim solution I believe we can

  1. allocate 25% of LOCKED tokens (25% of TTS) to 3 contracts to selected people
  2. In case of an attempt of a hostile takeover we are launching the community vote to “enable this 25% of tokens to vote”
  3. And than this 25% of TTS will just block any kind of hostile take over

Of course we are not insured from Sushi masterchef type of behaviour in this case:), but I think this will work as an interim solution

Very interesting proposal. I think you should also take into consideration the viewpoints of the GT teams and communities. As easy as we can flag exchange wallets for voting, GTs can do the same for PowerPool. Therefore, this should be a discussion with the GT teams on if they want centralized exchanges to vote in their governance.

I’m guessing that Uniswap or Compound would prefer not to have Binance control a large voting block. :sweat_smile:

UPD
Binance 8 staked 1.5 mln 1inch tokens - which is probably users’ tokens - in 1inch governence.

1 Like

@Zero Thanks for the alert!

@powerpoolAdmin doyou think its possible to have a mechanics to at least block knowable (thanks to nansen) exchanges addresses from reward distribution?