Optimizing Lido On-chain Voting Timelines for Inclusive Governance

Proposals
15

Let me summarize the options currently on the table:

1. Extend Voting Duration (Multiple options)

  • 120 hours main phase + 72 hours objection phase:
    • Pros: Increases participation, reduces missed quorum
    • Cons: Slows decision-making, requires infrastructure changes​
  • 96 hours main phase + 48 hours objection phase:
    • Pros: Extends participation while being faster than 120+72
    • Cons: Less inclusive than the longer option.
  • 120 hours main phase + 96 hours objection phase:
    • Pros: Provides more time for stakeholders to react during the objection phase​
    • Cons: Further delays final decisions, reducing agility​

Big-big drawback for all these options: slow response in the case of emergency

2. Keep Current Duration

  • Pros: Fast decisions, minimal complexity, and no additional changes or redeployments are necessary
  • Cons: difficulties in gathering a quorum

With the introduction of on-chain delegation and advance voting announcements, reaching quorum may become easier, but this remains to be seen as more data accumulates

3. Merge with Dual Governance Upgrade

Voting timings will change with the Dual Governance release, so it makes sense to discuss duration during that upgrade to avoid making changes twice. Discussions about voting phase lengths can and should happen in the Dual Governance thread

  • Pros: ​no additional changes or redeployments are necessary
  • Cons: Delays the change until the Dual Governance release, which is optimistically expected in Q1​

Conclusion:

My personal opinion:

  1. I don’t see the value in changing the duration of the main phase right now. I would wait to observe progress on quorum collection after the on-chain delegation release. We are currently seeing the first vote with delegation in progress, and so far, it seems to be going better than before. I would review the results from this vote and two further before making a decision on the main phase duration.
    The biggest downside of extending the overall voting duration is that in case of an emergency, the DAO would be forced to wait through the entire vote duration to make an on-chain decision.
  2. Regardless of the decision on the first point, I see value in extending the objection phase. Token holders only have 24 hours to object in the event of a governance attack, so I would extend this phase. And at the same time the release of Dual Governance will bring new measures and mitigations against governance attacks.

Thus, the only immediate change I would suggest is to extend the objection phase (e.g., to 3 days) to mitigate governance attacks before the release of Dual Governance. I would defer the decision on extending the main phase until December when we have data from 2-3 completed votes.

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