Hey Riders,

following on from our last blog, we are excited to reveal the WingRiders DAO Voting solution. In this blog we will cover both the conceptual and UI side of the portal’s proposal submission and voting as these two key processes are at the heart of any DAOs Governance process.

The WingRiders Voting and Proposal Submission Logic

When looking for a governance system solution, we were guided by two major principles: openness and transparency. The governance should be open for any Rider to propose solutions and to vote. Proposals can be very different in nature: economic, technical, community oriented or even political. The aim was to reduce to a minimum any technological barrier and allow Riders from any background to easily contribute. The same applies for Riders who decide to vote — making it simple to use and understand the flow.

The second most important factor for WingRiders was transparency of the voting process. How can you verify what proposals were created? How easy is it to verify what individual riders voted for? How can anybody verify the results of the proposal? With what guarantees can you answer these questions?

Naturally, we looked at current models and previous governance votes out there to see if they would be a good fit for WingRiders using WRT as a governance token. Even if they wouldn’t be a perfect fit, we wanted to draw inspiration and evaluate the different tradeoffs. Some tradeoffs are necessary to provide hard guarantees while balancing additional utility for WRT and ease of use. Most solutions use a mix of on-chain transactions (visible to anybody to check) and some off-chain parts (on websites, traditional databases), but let’s go through the different stages of a governance vote.

As a first step, there has to be a proposal. The proposals and questions for a vote could be decided by the project, it can become fully open to anybody or be gated behind a collateral. We really liked the solutions where the proposals could be openly discussed before and/or after it was locked in. The proposals themselves in the solutions we saw were mostly stored off-chain, presented on websites or forums. To follow our transparency guideline we thought the best place to store binding solutions would be on-chain as part of transaction metadata. Since proposals could be very detailed and to minimize the data on-chain, for us InterPlanetary File System (IPFS, file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system) seemed like the best solution to store a version that cannot be manipulated with and provide a link to them in the transactions. This is very similar to how NFTs are represented on Cardano.

When a proposal was thoroughly discussed, it would be the Riders’ turn to cast their votes. This is where most of the solutions started to differ even more. For example, during the DripDropz governance vote users needed to send a very specific amount of ADA to a predetermined address and receive back a ballot with metadata including the computed voting power. We drew inspiration from the transparency of this approach that everything can be checked and verified. Anybody can run a blockchain indexer and collect the votes to verify their correctness. Others (e.g. SundaeSwap, NMKR) are using a model, where the votes are cast off-chain and a roll-up proof is published regularly on-chain. In this model we really liked that the users knew their voting power right when casting the vote.

None of the above mentioned solutions required the voters to lock their governance tokens. Some fully on-chain solutions (like agora), however, does enforce this for additional security guarantees. We wanted to have a governance solution where WRT holders could keep their WRTs in farms, boosts, and liquidity pools. WRTs held by Riders anywhere in the WingRiders ecosystem at a given point in time contribute to their voting power.

After the voting period ends for a proposal, the votes need to be counted and verified. For some on-chain solutions (e.g. agora) the counting happens on-chain and the effects of the vote can be executed by anybody. The effects in this case need to be very well defined and audited. This approach fits incredibly well with very high stake proposals, like protocol updates. On the other hand some of the effects in the real world are difficult or impossible to represent on-chain. For example, giving a decision to the community which frontend feature they would like to see implemented first.

For counting the votes, following our transparency principles, giving the option for anybody to verify the results is the path we have chosen. If all the data is available on-chain, anybody could write a piece of code that would collect this data. To ease the adoption and improve transparency, we have also decided on open-sourcing our solution for collecting and verifying votes, which should be available soon. When it comes to fulfilling the wishes of the community, since we wanted a general solution that could represent any kind of proposal, holding the DAO representatives accountable for delivering the effect seemed like a good tradeoff.

And now, as we understand the main principles of our solution in general, we can discuss exact steps on how to create a proposal and vote for it on WingRiders DEX.

Description of the UI

Once you have connected your wallet to the DEX, navigate to the Governance menu along the top of the UI and select “VOTING”.

This will open up the “Voting dashboard”.

Voting dashboard

Starting from the top you will notice on the left your current voting power; which is a reflection of the number of WRTs you hold multiplied by predefined constants based on where you have your WingRiders Governance tokens. You can see the breakdown of this calculation after clicking on the arrow next to the value. You can also see the “CREATE PROPOSAL” button in the top right hand corner of the dashboard, but we will come back to this a little later.

Moving down, you come to see the “Active proposals” section. Here, as the name indicates, you will find all the proposals submitted, which you can, as a member of the WingRiders DAO, actively vote on at the moment. The “VOTING OPEN’’ section indicates the period that these proposals are open for a vote. Next to this you can see the number of days that remain in the voting period under “ENDS IN”. The “VOTE NOW” button is lit green, indicating that you can cast your vote.

Each of the rows below contains the name of the proposal, a link to the “Proposal documentation”, which the proposer would have saved in the IPFS. There are clear benefits using IPFS, the network is built in order to be highly scalable, the network can withstand denial of service attacks among others because it is fully decentralized. In this way, timely access to information is guaranteed at all times. Its use is completely free, and the source code is available under free software licences. It is extensible, which allows anyone to adapt new functions without major problems. For example, privacy modules, connection to TOR, I2P, among others, can be added.

Also, in this section the “Community Link” will take you to the discussion that was conducted in the WingRiders Improvements Portal, around each proposal. It should be noted that there can be one or multiple proposals in this section grouped by the same voting period. Grouping proposals in shared voting periods saves voting users fees and brings more attention to proposals than if they were separate.

The next area in the dashboard is “Upcoming”, which lists the upcoming proposals with voting periods which haven’t started yet. Very similar to the “Active proposals’’ it displays the upcoming voting period dates under “VOTING OPEN, the number days until voting starts, the title of the proposal, a link to the “Proposal documentation” file location stored IPFS and the “Community link” to the discussion in the Improvements Portal.

In the future, once the first voting ends, you’ll be able to see at the bottom of this page the “Closed” section, which as the name suggests includes the proposals that the voting period has elapsed and are therefore closed.

From the Dashboard you can also go to each proposal’s details by clicking on the arrow icon at the far-right side of the proposal’s row. The detailed view of a proposal includes integrated “Community discussion” you can not only see, but can also use for immediate participation in the community discussion around this proposal.

Creating proposals

Let’s go back to the top right side of the “Voting dashboard”, where you can see the “CREATE PROPOSAL” button. By clicking on it, a simple form will be opened where you fill all data needed as proposal metadata, such as a name, a brief description of the proposal (max 192 characters long), the IPFS URL for where the document is stored, the community discussion link on the WingRiders Improvements Portal, proposal options and voting period. In the “Accept choices” and “Reject choices” fields you write the choice of responses you wish to get in favour or against your proposal, respectively. Under the “Voting schedule” you can either set a customised start and end date for voting on your proposal or from the drop down menu select a previously used period, so you may attract more attention to your proposal and these proposals will be grouped together into a bigger poll.

Once you enter all the information, press the “Submit proposal” button and you’ll see a summary of your proposal in a modal window. Note that to submit any proposal you will need a collateral of 7000 WRT, which will be returned to you in case the proposal passes (In case it fails, it will be sent to the treasury). If all data in the summary is correct, confirm the submitting of the proposal and payment using your connected wallet. Once the proposal is saved on blockchain, it will appear in the “Voting dashboard”.

Voting

When you have read the proposal documentation, seen the discussion on the Improvements portal around this proposal and are ready to vote, go to the top of the dashboard to the “Active proposals” section and press the “VOTE NOW” button.

This will take you to the “Voting” section. Here you will see all the proposals with the same voting period you can vote for. On the top of this page the dates of voting and your voting power are displayed, then the list of proposals. For every proposal the name, description, options, current results and important links to documentation, community discussion and author of the proposal are shown. It is important to mention that all votes are being verified, so while voting you’ll be able to see all validated votes (green) and also those being validated (orange) in the Results section on the right side. For voting, select one of the options under the proposals description. Don’t forget to vote for all proposals included in this group. Then press the “SUBMIT YOUR VOTE “button at the bottom of the UI. Again, a modal window with a summary of which option you chose for which proposal, your voting power and transaction details will pop up. After submitting, sign the transaction in your wallet and wait for your vote to be validated. Then you have successfully cast your vote on this proposal. But in the meantime, you’ll be able to see your vote included in those validated ones and with a notification reminding you of it, so you can be always sure of the current status of your vote.

We hope this blog helps highlight the benefits of the system that has been chosen and that you will be able to navigate around the WingRiders DAO Voting in a streamlined manner to generate proposals and cast votes on them that will help improve WingRiders to be the DeFi hub that brings the most value to its users.