Expectations for DIP 2.0: accountability, outreach, and measurable outcomes

Delegate Platform
1

I was planning to post my opinion to the proposal thread of DIP 2.0 when it was live as I felt the expectations for DIP changed over its lifetime, but unfortunately didn’t have time back then to properly consolidate my thoughts and put together a structured response. I know the proposal has already been accepted and I am not lobbying against it, but after talking with some people, I still felt it was relevant to share my opinion and start a discussion around it - so we make it clear what is the expected outcome for this program that the DAO is paying for.

Now that DIP 2.0 is moving forward as a standing governance mechanism, I think it makes sense to ensure the expected outcome is still the same we had when we originally started it. The original goal of creating a public delegate platform and a framework to incentivize delegates’ work was to increase active voting participation, improve the quality of discussions and feedback, and activate new tokenholders in governance via delegation. Those are - in my opinion - still the right goals, but I believe only the first of the three is currently actively fulfilled.

  1. Active voting participation should be measured clearly

    There has certainly been growth in delegated stake since the program started, and delegates do play a useful role in governance stability. Votes have more consistently passed since we have the program. At the same time, I think we should be careful about how this is measured and communicated. The ~25M LDO figure cited in the 2025 extension referred to LDO delegated to public delegates, while the 31M LDO figure in the 2.0 proposal refers to LDO delegated on Aragon overall, only part of which is delegated to public delegates. Those are not the same metric, and we should only use the number (and its delta) of LDO delegated to public delegators to evaluate the success of this program.

    So going forward, I would like to see much cleaner reporting on delegation growth: how much LDO is delegated to public delegates specifically, how much of that is net new, how many new meaningful delegators were added, and whether this growth is broad-based or concentrated around a few large holders.

  2. Discussion quality needs to be visible, not assumed

    The original program did not just aim to improve voting participation. It also aimed to improve the quality of discussions and feedback before a vote happened. On that point, I do think it is important to point out that there are public delegates who have visibly contributed to governance discussions and shown what the role can look like when done well. Looking at the public record, delegates such as PolLanski, Leuts, and Polar have provided visible contributions that show the model can produce governance value. The DAO should be able to expect that level of visible contribution more consistently across the program.

    If delegates are being funded on an ongoing basis, tokenholders should be able to point to public examples where delegates materially improved proposals, challenged assumptions, surfaced risks, or raised the level of discussion in a meaningful way. Simply posting voting rationales after the fact is not contributing to discussions. I would expect recurring contributions that improve governance signal quality before decisions are made. If these contributions are not made in public, tokenholders do not have a strong basis to evaluate whether the program is delivering what it was meant to deliver.

  3. Outreach beyond the forum

    The program should also be judged by whether it reaches tokenholders outside the usual forum bubble. I would assume there are plenty of meaningful LDO holders who do not spend their time on the forum every day or already engage in governance voting.

    If the original goals of the program still hold true, I would like to see much stronger outreach and reporting of how new delegators are activated as well. What has been done to reach tokenholders outside the forum? On which channels? How many new meaningful delegators came in through that effort? I personally have not seen evidence that any communication or outreach is done on other channels like e.g on X. The passed proposal emphasizes delegate participation, outreach, and governance support, but the case for new tokenholder activation would benefit from much more concrete reporting.

    To emphasize this again as I am sure this is an unpopular opinion: I am not opposed to public delegates in general and still believe it is a valuable program. I also am very happy about the increased voting stability as I was part of many votes that were on the brink of not reaching treshold in time. But a standing, paid mechanism should be judged by more than quorum support alone. It should demonstrate that it is improving participation, raising the quality of governance discussions, and expanding governance beyond the existing forum audience. If DIP 2.0 is going to continue as a durable DAO mechanism, I would like to see clearer KPIs, cleaner reporting, stronger public accountability, and explicit expectations around delegate growth, visible contribution, and external outreach. If people see this differently or do think expectations of DIP have changed, I would love to hear arguments why.

7 Likes
2

Pushing this thread in hope to see some delegates replies

3

Second push here…Still hoping to get some feedback / response on it

4

We broadly agree with the direction here. Our starting point is simple: we want Lido and LDO to succeed, the products to win, and the token to follow. Governance is how the DAO steers good decisions toward those goals, and we contribute where we can add value to that.

On participation, a lot of the flow is technical or design work that does not need a full governance vote, beyond a sense check that there is no improper use of funds and that the usual checks and balances hold. Those are better streamlined through committees with clear scope and oversight, which keeps the DAO’s attention on the decisions that actually move the protocol. Participation is healthy, and we would not judge the program on vote counts alone.

On measurement, we agree it is worth trying more of what you suggest and the metrics should be fairly easy to compute. Beyond that, we would treat the broader set of measures in a start, stop, continue spirit, tracking them over a few quarters to see what is working, what is not, and what to carry forward. Used that way the data informs the direction of DIP and governance rather than acting as fixed KPIs. Ultimately, the goal is continuous improvement, not perfect measurement. If the program successfully attracts and retains top-tier delegates while maintaining governance quality, overall participation should naturally optimize toward something of a “Pareto optimal”.

Your second point, on discussion quality, is fair, and it should be visible. We would set the bar as quality over quantity. The DAO is better served by the delegates with real insight on a given topic weighing in than by everyone commenting on everything to clear a participation threshold. Depth on the subjects a delegate actually knows is worth more than broad but thin coverage.

Outreach is where it gets interesting and for us it sits across governance, product, and customer. Nansen is a governance delegate, a user of Lido’s products (see our stVault here) and holds stETH for treasury purposes, so we see these decisions from both sides. Where there are critical votes or material changes to Lido or the program, we have and are happy to put our reach and distribution behind getting them in front of a wider audience.

1 Like
5

Hello @katernoir + DAO members,

I thought it might be useful to give my perspective as a somewhat old timer in DAOs and Crypto broadly. I am generally of the view that with DAOs it is best to be conservative. This is because my recent experiences in DAOs has been quite negative. For example, Scroll DAO simply became centralised by its creators not long back, ENS is currently in a tailspin about potential capture and there are many more tales one could tell.

All this is to say that Lido is one of the few DAOs I know that actually functions well. In fact, I sometimes say to people that Lido could probably be considered a DAC, in the original definition of Larimer. There are a number of reasons why I think this is probably the case:

  • Lido’s teams and committees are close-knit, seasoned, and often operate like companies do (but without the stuff HR department slowing them down).
  • These teams are broad support and buy in from the DAO members. Not complete buy-in, which would be weird but by DAO standards it is a relatively peaceful atmosphere.
  • There is Cypherpunk cultural alignment that is also embedded (e.g. dual governance, CSM, etc.). It is extremely difficult to secure this. It is rare and frankly one of the main reasons why I participate in delegation.

Which brings us to the question of delegation. It is a little bit of a mini-miracle, probably attributable to the culture, that Lido is not beset by professional delegates. Whether individual or formalised. There is a fairly varied set of mostly independent folks represented. There are some delegation houses but 8 of the top 10 are individuals. In my own case, Lido is the only DAO that I am an active delegate with in 2026. Bar a couple of smaller projects.

One potential effect of introducing KPIs, metrics, etc. is that you slowly lose the independents. I am myself an academic. So a full-time job. Alongside my own small engagements elsewhere. Nonetheless I quite enjoy the fairly intensive voting process and cadence here. Because we
need to understand the forum post, we need to understand the audits and we need to understand the technical implementation. And this has given me fairly extensive insight into the governance process and Lido’s offerings over time. In the past with DAOs I also enjoyed doing this but basically had to dis-engage when KPIs, etc. became too onerous. What tended to happen to these DAOs is the professional outfits stepped in. These are often teams, a little more industrial and, I suspect, often supportive of these measures because they know independents can’t keep up. So there is some danger here methinks. The somewhat informal nature of governance here is to my mind its strength.

However, I do think we could do a better job of outreach. Perhaps delegate rationales should also appear on some social media. So we’re leveraging our followings to show how active Lido DAO governance is. And can encourage folks to get involved. How to get more delegations is its own issue that involves charming large holders to be less passive.

Overall I suppose I am now of the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ school of DAOs.

3 Likes