by Doug Petkanics

It has been a little over three weeks since the Livepeer community approved a governance proposal to introduce a community governed onchain treasury to the protocol. It has been populating with LPT round-by-round, and already contains over 29,000 LPT to be used for public goods funding for the ecosystem. Now is a good time for the community to begin establishing the right processes for successfully accessing and deploying this treasury, and this post shares some ideas and suggestions for early steps to make progress.

The basics: How do treasury proposals work?

Any token holder with at least 100 LPT staked can submit a proposal for funding to the Livepeer Treasury using the Livepeer Explorer Treasury Tab.

A user can simply type the text of their proposal, the amount of LPT they seek, and the address for the LPT to be released to. This will initiate a vote that all Orchestrators and staked token holders can participate in.

If the vote achieves a 33% quorum of all active stake, and 50% of the voting stake votes yes, then the funding will be released from the treasury to LPT receiver address.

That’s it. It is simple on the surface. But unfortunately a long history of observing onchain governance also shows us that accessing funding from community treasuries is not quite as easy as it seems. The challenge often lies in getting enough attention on a particular proposal for anyone in the community to take it seriously enough to actually show up and vote. To cross that threshold, it is important that the communities establish a set of social processes to assist credible proposals in getting both attention and support.

The good news is, momentum has already begun around the formation of entities like Livepeer Innovators DAO to collaborate with, and develop practices alongside.

The Livepeer Treasury Social Processes

During the process of establishing the treasury, the community approved a set of social guidelines called “Funding Entity Conventions”, and the short document that describes this is worth a read. It describes two key principles which are good starting points:

1. The treasury should be used to fund public goods in the ecosystem.

2. The treasury is meant to fund Special Purpose Entities (or SPEs) rather than end recipients. An SPE is an entity or individual that is running a focused, theme based program, for which they have expertise and are well suited to succeed at the allocation of funds. These SPEs will use their own discretion, or internal governance, to route funding to end recipients.

A good starting point worth recognizing is that if you’re looking to form or continue funding an SPE, then you’re in the right place in thinking about a treasury proposal. If you’re looking to work on a specific app, feature, idea, research project, marketing contribution, or something else directly, then you’re better off applying to an existing SPE like the Grants program or Livepeer Innovators DAO, than applying to the treasury directly.

How to successfully get to the proposal phase

Successful proposals in Livepeer’s existing governance, and other onchain treasury governance platforms often do two things well:

1. Build community support through discourse and engagement on the proposal prior to the vote going live.

2. Raise awareness of the proposal.

Building community support

Livepeer treasury governance works very similarly to Livepeer protocol governance, and while it doesn’t quite require a heavy process like the LIP process to issue mission-critical protocol upgrades, it still can follow some of the same social processes. A proposed solution here involves:

1. Submit a pre-proposal discussion thread in the Livepeer Forum, and label it in the newly created “treasury” category. A pre-proposal can be as simple as an idea, even if you don’t intend to start the SPE yourself. Offer room for feedback on your proposal, engage with commenters, and be open to updating your proposal ideas based on input. By the end of the engagement process, good proposals should describe:

   1. The SPE’s Mission

   2. The SPE’s approach and strategy

   3. The SPE’s expected impact

   4. Upcoming milestones

   5. Team member or individual backgrounds

   6. Funding ask

   7. Transparency commitments (or non-commitments)

   8. SPE governance (or non-governance)

   9. Future funding needs when the SPE may return to apply for further funding from the treasury

2. Join Community Calls

   1. Treasury Chat. This is a bi-weekly call in the Livepeer Discord for those paying attention to the treasury proposals and governance process. Be prepared to speak about your proposal, answer questions, and receive input.

   2. Water Coolers. These are weekly meetings hosted in Discord for Orchestrators and active community members to discuss activities top of mind and a good place to get early feedback and guidance around your proposal.

3. Consider additional actions and asset creation such as a web site or wiki page for your SPE that shows your plan, progress, and transparent execution.

Any group that takes the above steps, and engages in a couple weeks of community discourse around their concept, is far more likely to build support than one who just goes straight to an onchain proposal.

Raising awareness of the proposal

Even if the forum and Community Calls provide opportunity for engagement around a proposal before it goes live, it’s still important that the team behind the SPE get the word out to the broader Livepeer community to increase the chances of quorum for the vote.

The good news is that Orchestrators on Livepeer carry the weight of their delegated stake by default, and their delegators expect them to pay attention to governance and treasury proposals. And this is an easily reachable group that is very active in the Livepeer Discord.

The best way to raise awareness of a proposal is to surface it in the Discord channel #governance, and to use the @Orchestrator to let them know about big milestones such as a pre-proposal being live, or voting being live.

Beyond that, SPEs are encouraged to raise awareness on social media, and other platforms where Livepeer token holders may be paying attention. There are some obvious opportunities for tools that can assist in the awareness raising process however, and these would be good candidates for Livepeer Open Network Grants.

• An extension of the telegram and Discord governance-bot to report on treasury proposals and ongoing voting.

• An opt-in treasury newsletter, that would notify subscribers of upcoming and active proposals, on a weekly basis.

• Badging and alerting on the Livepeer Explorer to notify users of active votes.

• Better tools that display Orchestrator voting records, and notify Delegators of non-participation of their Orchestrator in active and past votes. O’s are expected to vote (abstaining is an option), and D’s should support O’s who are actively paying attention to help the ecosystem.

As much as it would be ideal if proposals were voted on entirely on merit, the reality is that vote-whipping remains a bit of a political process, and SPEs are advised to do a bit of active campaigning to raise awareness of their proposals.

After the Vote

The best SPEs, stake-attracting Orchestrators, and contributors to Livepeer and other open ecosystems deliver with account against their promises, are transparent, and are strong communicators. For any SPE that is funded via a passed proposal, it’s highly recommended that they continue to provide frequent updates on their progress and outcomes achieved. This can be done through a new forum thread, in responses to their existing forum thread, frequent updates in Discord, and by joining Treasury Chat calls on occasion.

The hope is that SPE’s initially request the funding required to hit a specific milestone, or for a reasonable initial time based run, such as 6-12 months of operations costs, and then come back for further funding when they show how successful and impactful their program is. For the community to continue to have confidence, and continue to vote to release more funds, strong communication and community relationships will remain key.

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In summary, it’s exciting times at Livepeer now that the onchain treasury is being populated. The first SPEs are being formed, and they’re encouraged to begin or continue pre-discussions in the forum and Discord as they work towards their onchain proposals.