TL;DR: Introducing a new framework for Sismo governance: Sismo Contributor ZK badge holders get voting power according to their contribution. First use case: the community will curate which badges can be deployed on the main curated environment.
Sismo has now been live for a few months and the list of ZK Badges on the playground has started to grow since the release of our Factory — where non developers can create ZK Badges for their users in 5 minutes.
The playground is a permissionless environment where anyone can create their own ZK Badges. Only the best Badges from the playground environment make it to the main Sismo curated environment.
Today we are opening the curation process to the Sismo community through an open governance system, based on contributions.
We will of course dog-food our own protocol and ZK Badges to track contributions :)
Community-based Badge Curation
The Sismo Playground environment is an open sandbox for anyone to create, test and imagine new ways to benefit from Sismo’s protocol privacy-preserving attestation system. This openness means that a lot of different types of badges are created and that some of the highest quality ones are drowned in a mass of other badges that could be deemed low-quality or less aligned with Sismo’s vision.
On the other side, the Sismo Curated environment core value is to provide a more curated experience for users and applications looking for carefully selected ZK Badges that they can trust. The objective is for the Sismo community to progressively take charge of vetting which ZK Badge will be able to be migrated to the Curated environment from the Playground environment.
To help in this endeavour, a set of Badge Curation Guidelines have been proposed to the community to support them in their decision process. It has the aim to ensure that the Sismo Curated environment only hosts ZK Badges that have been proven to hold a sufficient level of quality, transparency, fairness, and alignment to Sismo’s manifesto.
The need for a new governance model
Straightforward token voting is flawed
The issues with solely coin-driven governance are known:
- It empowers token holders and their interests more than the other type of stakeholders in a project community.
- It is susceptible to governance attacks through vote buying or borrowing.
- It gives oversized power to wealthy participants compared to small holders and these “whales” can often have conflicting interests in other projects
Lack of private voting
The lack of privacy in the current voting system opens the way to bribing or intimidation attacks against specific actors and can prevent some stakeholders from expressing their honest opinions.
Exploring the potential of Proof of Contribution
An additional metric that should be taken into account in governance systems is the amount of value each voter brought to the system. It seems natural to give more power in the governance to those who contributed the most to the underlying project.
Proof of ContributionVerifying the fact that an account corresponds to a person that has used a protocol, passed some educational training, funded an initiative, contributed to building a system, or performed some useful work in the project ecosystem.
Sismo ZK Badges as membership & weighted voting credentials
Sismo ZK Badges provide a valuable set of attributes for contribution-based governance models:
- They are tokenized attestations of history/activity/reputation packaged as a standard ERC-1155 NFT a.k.a Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)
- They preserve the privacy of their owners. They can be minted on a new address that is not linked to the addresses that fulfilled the requirements to get the badge. (more)
- (Soon) They will allow users to aggregate their reputation by gathering their badges on a single or several pseudonymized address(es) in the future.
- They are non-transferable.
This last property allows ZK badges to be less concentrated (no sale/transfer to the rich) and to remain owned by active participants. The non-transferability of badges also limits trustless vote-buying in the sense that any vote-buying will require the seller to hand over his private keys.
A new framework for Sismo Governance
Check out the new governance process at https://governance.sismo.io
“Sismo Contributor” badge as core voting power denominator
The core voting power denominator is represented by the “Sismo Contributor” ZK badge (on Polygon mainnet).
The “Sismo Contributor” ZK badge can be minted by different types of contributors from the Sismo community (check Governance Overview for details) and is comprised of 3 levels assigned according to the significance of the minter contribution:
Level 1 contributors (Users): 1 voting point per proposal
Level 2 contributors (Community Members): 50 voting points per the proposal
Level 3 contributors (Builders): 500 voting points per proposal
Anyone having minted at least one badge on Sismo Curated App (not the playground) is at least eligible for Level 1. Community member can easily get to Level 2 by attending a Sismo event or minting a “Proof of Humanity” ZK Badge, and to Level 3 by contributing actively to Sismo’s ecosystem initiatives or open source development.
The voting power assignment to the “Sismo Contributor” ZK badge, the badge group generation rules, and the level allocation are all susceptible to being modified through governance in the future.
This badge will attest that its minter has already interacted at least once with Sismo protocol, community, or ecosystem and will act as a first basic Sybil resistance lever.
Conclusion
The early stages of Sismo Governance are a perfect time to experiment with alternative governance models that could prove themselves to be valuable. Because it uses Sismo protocol at its heart, this experiment can be reused as a template and improved on by other communities, incentivizing more usage of Sismo ZK Badges.
Reference
- Moving beyond coin voting governance -https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html
