Context
There are many conversations happening around how to make voting “more fair” or how to dampen the influence of larger voters, perhaps through quadratic voting or some other complicated voting structure. Instead of making the game harder for “whales,” I wanted to bring attention to delegate.apecoin.com and AIP-89:
I am not confident we will be able to implement any voting mechanism that is both fair, and cannot be gamed or exploited to a lesser extent than the current 1 APE 1 VOTE system. Instead, we need to be striving for a more liquid democracy, where we “signal” support for individuals (delegates) to vote and represent our interests in the day-to-day work at the ApeCoin DAO.
Our problems are not unique or new to the Web3 landscape. The concept of 1 token, 1 vote has been around for as long as DAO’s have, and after many years of experimentation the forgone conclusion is that instead of trying to change the way the system works, just try to encourage more active participation from key contributors. The logic being that we want this DAO to be operating efficiently and in a semi-cohesive direction. It becomes very difficult to do that when you have 1 or 2 very large voters with a specific mindset, and the rest of us are scattered, unable or unwilling to spend the required 2-3 hrs / week to review and vote on every AIP.
MakerDAO is one of the longest running and largest DAOs in the space and because they are building a “better currency” through a distributed world bank, it’s important that their voters are extremely active and aware to keep watch over the ecosystem. They pay their delegates to do this work, reviewing and voting on MIPs. We’re not there yet, because we don’t have a global currency to keep watch of.
ENS is another very large DAO that earns on-chain revenue and did a high profile airdrop like ApeCoin. What they did properly though, was required every token claimer to also immediately delegate their tokens to an active contributor.
Uniswap, Aave, Maker, ENS, Synthetix, Gnosis, Compound, Yearn, Gitcoin, Curve, Optimism, Nouns, Bankless, (I could go on) all have powerful voter delegation systems to encourage a liquid democracy. I should point out that Optimism IS doing something a little different with some of the decision making at their DAO. Read more about the Optimism Collective and the Token House vs. Citizen’s house for more info.
Key Terms
- Liquid Democracy: “Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy, whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy; voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy.” - From Wikipedia
Thank you for reading this. While its very simple in practice I believe this is the first step towards creating a more representative democracy where we can enable real change and direction within the DAO.
My own Delegation Statement and motivation for wanting to become a recognized delegate can be found here:
https://delegate.apecoin.com/delegate/0x10cCD4136471c7c266a9Fc4569622989Fb4caB99
If you resonate with my experience and the ideas I’ve championed so far, it would mean a lot if you would consider delegating your votes to me. If you’re on the fence, or unsure why this is important, I would love the opportunity to earn your delegation! 
Feel free to schedule some time with me here:
(Reminder that while delegating, you are in full control of your tokens at all times! Delegating your votes does not move your tokens, and you can still vote on AIPs on your own!)
if no system in place that can monitor how we do and complete the given assignments (Job). “Fair pay for fair job get done!” I will vote “ in favor “
Thank you!