Townhall has been instrumental in developing Astar’s governance structure, from off-chain tools to transitioning toward a fully decentralised on-chain model. This journey includes the research and implementation of Governance V1, an interactive governance UI, and the successful engagement of the Astar community with over 25 proposals, numerous discussions, and votes. Our recent proposal, which received community approval, outlines the scope of upcoming governance initiatives. Moving forward, Townhall will be adopting a community first approach by building as needed. We would be actively participating in astar governance , user feedback and community events to understand needs and ship features. This is to establish direct communication with the community and operate with the DAO.
I find myself in total disagreement with your post, I see many flaws in what you publish here:
First, I don’t feel that Townhall was instrumental in anything regarding the development of our governance model, they simply opened up access to their platform which served us well in seeing what a more robust voting process would look like, but they did NOT contribute directly to the planning effort (beyond the theory in your past post https://forum.astar.network/t/astar-governance-product-development-by-townhall/).
Second, community approval? Are you seriously saying this?
As my colleague here shows, the approval of the proposal came about because of your two whales (who in my opinion are either yourselves or related to you), if you exclude the 24.3M ASTR tokens on behalf of these whales, the voters in favor do not even exceed 30%.
Third, I fail to see Townhall in the future of the Astar DAO.
The effort from the beginning has been in working together with the foundation to research and build FOR astar . The astargov portal has custom features, integrations and support for evm & substrate added to it.
Addressing the issue with last proposal , community is all token holders. The proposal received votes and support from Astar token holders voting majorly in favor of the work and our request for funding a tool extensively used for governance on Astar.
AstarGov Portal has been significant in increasing participation of the community with over 670 members , 1.31k votes across 34 proposals and engagement across 368 discussions in Astar alone.
In context to Shiden , we have implemented treasury proposals with automated requests to sudo multisig as discussed above in the post.
I have no doubt that you have increased the number of users using the AstarGov platform created together with you, the Townhall team, because we, both the Astar team and the ambassador team, have made a huge effort to inform and add more users to your attractive platform.
The problem I keep seeing and you have not given me a commensurate answer, is the issue of your latest proposal. You say that it was “the community who voted in favor”, but I find it very hard to believe that the two whales who voted in favor “are part of the community” and not simple investors or corporate partners.
If you notice, the proposal passed with 24.8 M ASTR tokens, two whale accounts voted (one for 16 M ASTR and the other for 8.3 M ASTR) and adding up the figure gives a total of 24.3 M ASTR, It’s almost the total amount for which you won! Very alarming on my part.
We had in total 34 voters, mostly voted against the proposal and only by two accounts (who have little or no participation in our governance), did your proposal pass. This is my biggest problem so far.
We have no way of knowing who they really are (or maybe we do). I am only stating what makes me uncomfortable and may not receive a response accordingly, but I wanted to weigh in.
While we understand the concern, the current architecture and logic were built to provide decision-making capabilities in proportion to the value at stake. The treasury proposal types and settings are consistent for all proposers.
The concern is understandable, but it doesn’t change the fact that despite six months of co-working and continuous efforts, Townhall was not supported with the retroactive funding initially committed by the foundation. After working without prior funding and delivering everything live and tested on time, retroactive funding was declined on the grounds that someone else might replicate our research and deliver a similar implementation at a lower cost.
We still accepted these risks as first entrants and created a proposal that fully justified our contributions to the community. A great way to solve this could be introducing an option to limit voting to ‘verified identities’ or to ‘weighted average voting’. Townhall’s agile framework enables this.
Hello @0xAthena , I have the following comments for your proposal:
The reference link is not working on your full discussion, for example, I got 404 error when I want to check Reference:Astar Governance Migration : June, and also a few other references, please fix those links
Agree with my colleagues, your claim about the instrumental in developing astar’s governance structure or strong community support is wrong, could you please provide some other evidence for those claims.
For the budget of continued operation, you put more of the fund into the New Feature Development for Community Engagement Tools, could you please share the link of the community and how active they are, also any feedback from the community member showing that they are interested in the new tools you plan to develop, I think those information would be helpful for the community to better understand your goal.
The Townhall team has worked with the foundation and external advisors to come up with a governance plan for Astar’s development. The entire Astargov platform is custom developed as per Astar needs. Phase 1 of the said plan’s implementation is already live and running. While now there maybe alternate participants in implementing on what was worked on over 11 months back , we believe the initial research has played a crucial base in establishing a strong foundation through our expertise and advisors
The budget allocated is towards Development of New Features that enable community engagement. This includes and is not limited to : Follow feature, a social activity feed , tipping mechanism, bounties , community listings, leaderboards, quests & interactive documentation tooling. These are a few things we believe would be beneficial to build , however due to past experiences, we created this discussion to ask the community if they would want us to build it.
As the heading in the discussion above states, the budget is for future work that we would do, if it is supported upfront by the community.
Hi @0xAthena , thanks for opening this proposal, I believe we all understand that having such new features would be helpful, but I do not see any clear explanations in regard to the previously raised questions from other agents.
From the discussion on the TownHall and in the following quote,
If I am not mistaken, it appears that you are requesting $40,000 in USD over a six-month period in advance to develop some features, assuming all will improve governance. If so, it is difficult to move forward without greater transparency.
Making a decision on spending this relatively large budget should also involve a clear agreement with the community in advance.
Yes , that is what we are seeking in this discussion, expectation and milestone setting with the community, suggestions on the agreement to move forward . This discussion is to understand all of those requirements from the community before we create a proposal for it
