AIP-28: Updating Governance Voting Structure

Background:

The Alpaca team is always looking for ways to improve our Governance process. A useful framework / concept we don’t currently have for Alpaca’s Governance voting is Quorum and the ability for users to vote abstain. Quorum refers to the minimum % of voters turn out required for the voting result to be valid.

Implementation:

• All the future votes would have a quorum requirement. If the votes don’t meet the quorum requirement, then the result is not valid and would require new voting.

• “Abstain” voting option will be added , so xALPACA holders can still contribute to the quorum on a topic that they don’t have a strong opinion or preference.

Quorum Requirement:

1.) Minimum of 10% of xALPACA voted in order for the result to be valid. (rounded to the nearest 100,000s) For example, if the total xALPACA balance was 47million, we would require 4.7 million votes.

Note: When it is used, the Quorum required in DeFi projects are around 10% - 20% of eligible voters. For the case of Alpaca, since there is around 23 million xALPACA, around 2.0 - 4.5 million xALPACA votes would be required on a proposal to meet the quorum (based on the old Governance vault's stats). A quick review of previous proposals on Snapshot would show that all the previous ones would have met the quorum requirement. This is a good sign and show that we have an active community as compared to our peers in the industry.

New Voting Structure:

1.) At least 72 hours of voting time for each proposal.

2.) Shielded voting for all proposals

3.) All voting choices shall be put on equal footing. For example, if the proposal is on changing a protocol’s parameter and there are multiple possible parameter values to select from, we will conduct a series of votes with the first vote being a YES or NO on whether to change the parameter.

4.) There will be an option for users to vote Abstain. This way, xALPACA holders can still contribute to the quorum on a topic that they don’t have a strong opinion or preference.

5.) For a “simple voting” topics where there are only two choices (i.e., YES or NO), the YES vote just need to be greater than the NO vote for the proposal to pass. There is no need for YES vote to be > 50%

6.) In the case where the number of voting choices > 2, we WILL NOT require the winning result to receive > 50% of the votes, unless specified prior to the vote. The rationale behind this is to save time / energy from too many votes. Moreover, if the voting structured is well thought out (as in point#3 above) the multiple choices (>2) would be the final vote in a series of votes.

Voting:

This AIP will be a single-choice voting,

• A YES vote would implement the new voting structure as proposed in this AIP

• A NO vote would keep the voting structure the same

Resolution:

• The community voted to implement the new voting structure as proposed in this AIP.

References:

• Snapshot Voting
• Forum Thread