BIP-##: Botto's "Stake" of Approval with $RARE

Quasimondo

Given that we already have a working backend for different types of votes I do not quite see the benefits of outsourcing those to jokerace. Maybe someone can lay out the benefits of that approach?

Carter

Quasimondo The goal was not to use VP to vote in this as its better of being used to train Botto.

If there is a way to do it natively on the site, without using VP I would push for that since it would remove the point that voting with jokerace has a cost attached to it and needing to use a Layer2 to do so.

choobie

Overall, the rationale makes sense and I'd be stoked if the DAO put our $RARE to good use. I'd recommend we view this as a pilot to explore participation levels. That said:

thomahawk69 1) since this is a new thing, staking 25 seems like a lot? Why not just the top 10 to start and only use 50% of the RARE tokens - so not to use all at once

I agree with this logic, and I think we should limit it to something like 5-10% of tokens. This is not a significant commitment relative to quantity of RARE we hold as a DAO, but it's a gentle way of testing this as a concept. I have no clue what participation levels may look like if we go through the jokerace method.

quimp Why not vote through Snapshot's rank order?

I agree with this and think it's a more embedded way of moving things forward rather than onboarding to Jokerace. I do however also understand the appeal of Jokerace, so not too picky here should we want to test this concept using their platform.

Carter There may be technical challenges in downloading a large number of artworks from SuperRare's shared smart contract. There are currently around 4000 artist who have minted around 40,000 artworks on the shared contract

I will ask SR for direct access to these via their private API. Hopefully it makes sense for them to help us out here.

Carter The goal was not to use VP to vote in this as its better of being used to train Botto.

I think while this may be important to some, participation is totally optional (agency in spending VPs however you like), and any VP expenditure throughout a Period technically would count towards active rewards. Perhaps something to keep in mind if we want to embed this process into the frontend in the future.

FWIW, I had a brief conversation with Agustin (lead developer) and this sounded like a relatively straightforward implementation. I am also mindful of developer time (VP delegation is actively being worked on atm) and I'm appreciative that this proposal is relatively hands off in terms of technical implementation, which is exactly what we'd want to look towards as a DAO when setting up pilots.

All things considered, great proposal!

quimp

Why not vote through Snapshot's rank order?

Quasimondo

quimp yes, I like that idea.

Carter

quimp

I believe that you can only have up to 12 deferent options on snapshot for ranked voting. Will need to confirm this.

thomahawk69

Good idea for top 10 and only 50%. Will give us an idea on how well using botto's taste model for something like this works, and also mitigating any kind of risk that could potentially come up. Would love to hear others peoples thoughts on this.

hudsonsims

I just posted some rationale for JokeRace in Discord here as it applies to two current BIPs:
https://discord.com/channels/829636834371960842/842273740142018590/1155495344495407104

for $RARE staking specifically, if we limit choices to 12 to fit on snapshot, and all choices are presented by Botto (i.e. no user submissions), then JokeRace is probably not necessary here.

It made more sense if we needed to accommodate a large number of choices due to Snapshot's limit, or if we wanted to allow for user submissions.

choobie I think while this may be important to some, participation is totally optional (agency in spending VPs however you like), and any VP expenditure throughout a Period technically would count towards active rewards. Perhaps something to keep in mind if we want to embed this process into the frontend in the future.

Personally think we should try to limit VP uses to training Botto. For capital allocation like this, should be a governance vote. Using VP introduces opportunity cost of training Botto and curating top choice.

choobie I think we should limit it to something like 5-10% of tokens

thomahawk69 50% of the RARE tokens - so not to use all at once

Not sure why we wouldn't use all of it, there's no downside risk of staking other than some gas? If we don't stake, then we guarantee 0 return.
I propose anything we don't stake on other artists, we stake on Botto.

quimp Why not vote through Snapshot's rank order?

To be precise, the voting set up would be "weighted voting" not ranked order. Can then distribute based on weights. Should consider a minimum cutoff (e.g. equivalent cost of gas) that if a choice doesn't reach it, their proportion is spread to the others.

thomahawk69

Couple of thoughts:

1) since this is a new thing, staking 25 seems like a lot? Why not just the top 10 to start and only use 50% of the RARE tokens - so not to use all at once
2) agree with using snapshot rank voting - if it's just for Botto holders to pick from a list - snapshot will be easy to implement

quimp

If we want to run the process every year for 2-3-4 years, then I'd allocate 25-33-50% of the tokens each time.

If we want to write a meaningful story around Botto's taste model, then I'd suggest 25% as a minimum.

For me, this is about giving a pat on the back of other artists, gaining some exposure, and talking about a lesser known area of Botto.

Lastly, I would definitely keep the voting based on Botto's output. No community submission imo.

hudsonsims

quimp If we want to run the process every year for 2-3-4 years, then I'd allocate 25-33-50% of the tokens each time.

Is the thinking that once staked we don’t reallocate?
I’m advocating for 100% usage because I had thought we would reallocate after a period.

Anyways, think this is where the weighted vote can help by including Botto. We can just run the vote and DAO decides distribution between Botto and other artists by their choice of voting weight.

Would be great to see Botto’s conviction in the top artists it selects.

For timeline, could propose having it locked for 6 months. A year feels soooo long and tbd on how $RARE protocol adopted, but also don’t have change anything after 6 months.

Carbono

Overall, we would love the proposal to go forward. We shouldn’t expect much from the revenue side, since the whole NFT scene is in a journey through the desert. But the possibility of increasing our community outreach while putting our $RARE to work sounds great.

We have some observations and a few questions that hopefully can help the proposal get more specific.

Regarding the selection process, we believe it would be best to avoid any new platforms while also minimizing dev time. We would be in favor of a combination of the taste model + Snapshot as the way of selecting artists, even if this means limiting the number of options where to stake our $RARE.
We think the proposal could use more detail in defining the amount of $RARE and the timeframe for staking. We’d need to understand the conditions of $RARE unstaking a little further, but if things are more or less standard, we don’t see any problem in conducting a pilot with 100% of our $RARE tokens. We should probably discuss if we’re going to set deadlines, though. Do we want to stake indefinitely? Stake according to certain criteria (related to artist output, revenue…? Stake in fixed-time periods? We suggest setting a deadline to evaluate if we should re-stake with other artists, based mainly on artistic and cultural criteria.
We would also like to learn from SuperRare about the current situation and roadmap for the staking program. Things like how many artists and stakers are participating or what can we expect in terms of frontend integrations (to see what the visibility of staking is). Not that it would affect our support of the proposal (we're okay with being early adopters), but to get a deeper understanding.
Also, we wonder it we are considering being subject to $RARE staking as artists ourselves.

Carter

Hi Carbono! Thanks for the questions.

I agree with not wanting to use a new platform. Something that was discussed was maybe using the Botto website natively to vote. I just checked, and it does look like we can run a Snapshot vote with 51 options, so Snapshot might be the way to run this. The goal is to use Botto's already established taste model to look at all the artists on SuperRare (I believe there are ~ 4000 artists with ~ 41,000 artworks on the main SuperRare shared contract) and have it output us with a list of it's top 50. That list, along with Botto, would then be put up to vote by the DAO and the final number of artists would receive stake with their final position in that leaderboard. (Something I would like to also explore is also including the SuperRare Spaces in the initial list of artists that Botto looks at since there is also a lot of talented artists on Space.)
All of the Rare Protocol documentation is here. From quickly looking at the docs, it seems like there is some form of lockup when staking, with them being called 'Rounds.' The rounds are supposes to last around 7 days, but for the Botto pool for example, it doesn't seem like it. I will have to check hoe long exactly it is and I'll report back. I do think maybe we should stake at the beginning of each Botto period as the taste model changes overtime, and it would be beneficial for us to be on our toes when it comes to new and upcoming artists.
Great point. Do you think we should hold like an office hours with someone from the SuperRare Labs team about the staking program? I would be happy to set something up like this if more people would be interested.
I am not fully sure I understand what the question is. Are you referencing Botto, or you an an individual? Full disclosure, I am whitelisted on a SuperRare Space (also why I mentioned including spaces above) and would love the opportunity to be considered. Botto on the other hand, I think that we should have it be the 51st entry in the DAO vote.

Let me know if that clears things up, or if you have any other questions! 🙂

Quasimondo

I would like to propose that Botto stakes a certain amount of the $RARE on itself (something between 10% and 50%) which will relatively probable allow us to repeat the process again after some rewards have accumulated.