August 13, 2021: Hock the Vote 🗳️🗽
Curve gauge vote lobbying moves on-chain with bribe.crv.finance
veCRV is truly the gift that keeps on giving for holders. Thanks to Cronje’s cheekily titled new site, anybody can directly post bounties for voting in the Curve DAO.
This unlocks one of the final pieces of $CRV’s value. The $CRV token doesn’t trade at lofty multiples for unknown reasons, so its price tends to cling to a floor of expected cash flows. To date this had mostly consisted of trading fees accruing to veCRV holders. Curve voting rights was another theoretical value the token could provide. This form of on-chain lobbying looks to be the first move toward unlocking this value.
The community reaction was nothing short of jubilant.
The fakelaki immediately began flowing, with Fantom, Spell, Cream, and Lido immediately tossing rewards into the pile.
Possibly even more tokens are available, the current version requires hunting for rewards by address. A future release of the interface promises to display all available incentives directly on the homepage. Until then, one can track the influence flowing through Etherscan.
Early exit polls show that the service is already rocking the vote.
With this service catching on, future improvements are surely inevitable.
The implications for Convex are also apparent, as they develop Votium:
The main blowback was ethical hand-wringing over the negative connotations of “bribery”
So boldly embracing the term “bribery” made me LOL. It also ripped the band-aid off any uncomfortable implications by quite effectively recentering the Overton Window.
Of course, the concept of “bribery” is silly in a blockchain world where every transaction is expensive. Voting in every DAO costs money to write the transaction, but nobody derides this as a regressive “poll tax.”
The blockchain world is heavily plutocratic. Most also feature heavily lopsided Gini coefficients, which make even the wealthiest users feel poor compared with Satoshi’s untapped genesis block. The innovative feature of blockchains is to make the transfer of wealth more public and more efficient.
Compare / contrast this system with the real-world, which is primarily ruled by a kakistocracy. In meatspace, “bribery” gets euphemized as “lobbying,” where rewards only flow to a handful of powerful pockets. Historical attempts to directly reward voters were less efficient, brokered through intermediaries or given out indirectly as jobs instead of cash. One can recall the patronage systems of Tammany Hall during the gilded age, where the entire roster of civil servant jobs would be replaced entirely by the machine in power. More recently funds might flow as block grants to red or blue states depending on the power structure in DC, ensuring the local politicians could connive to keep the funds out of the hands of poor people.
Blockchain systems shine sunlight on these systems, moving funds and influence directly to the people. A system where bribes flow not to a powerful elite but to the masses is far superior to one where it flows only to connected insiders. This system not only democratizes the receipt of bribes, it also allows smaller players to participate in bribing.
On-chain organization allows funds to move far more efficiently and directly. We could only hope real-world governance could be improved by such efficiency. We’re already seeing attempts like PacMan DAO to bring this level of transparency to the corrupted process in place in much of the physical world.
In a just system, the people hold the power. When money has to bribe the masses directly, you can be confident the power structure is oriented correctly. Democratized bribery is another way of saying everybody wins.
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist and has a stake in 3pool.